Ten whole years

Justin and I met ten years ago today! I feel old even saying that, but it's true. Check out my post on My Greatest Hits to see how the last ten years have gone.

Roundup of my Favorite 2012 Posts

A front door in Charleston, South Carolina, welcomes the new year. 

I chose to feature these posts based on how helpful they would be to you if you have a home for sale. Is that you?

Let's start with getting it organized. In January I wrote about the dozen rules that help organize your home.

In February, just in time for Valentine's Day, the blog featured a post on capturing the hearts of buyers -- how to win buyers, seduce them, appeal to their senses, and not let them forget you.

One of my March posts had to do with window treatments -- curtains and drapes that require no sewing, all designed especially for home staging. I wrote a $5 eBook of 15 tutorials for No-Sew Window Treatments. Why let your windows go bare when it's time to stage, and why give your valuable window coverings away to the buyer?

During the following month, April, I wrote about the most important things you can do to help sell your home. This story is packed with helpful statistics, experts' advice, and shortcuts. You're bound to get some new ideas for simple home improvements.

Since I get more questions about furniture arrangement than any other topic,  May's winning piece has to be Handy Formulas that Make DIY Home Staging Easy. You'll find measurements, ratios, formulas and other space and sizing tips to make rooms look and feel more comfortable. Bookmark it!

Painting furniture is another hot button topic around here. I collected my favorite tips in a post for one week in June, and I concentrated on the most common mistakes made when DIYers paint furniture. I'm a professional painter, so I gave you all the insider secrets to get the job done quickly but expertly. The DIY Adventurers Blog liked this post so much they featured it on their site.

Although it may not be an option for you, many people are considering the pros and cons of renting their homes until they can sell them. I researched and opined about this topic in July. There's lots to weigh before making a decision.

I could have called my August article, The Five Tricks Professional Stagers Use, something like All You Really Need to Do to Sell You Home. It's that succinct and helpful.

The white-on-white color scheme, done by Sarah Richardson. One blog post I didn't feature
here but that I suspect may help many DIY stagers decide on
paint colors, is my advice on an all-white color palette. 

In September, I attacked another common problem -- mantel staging, and I listed my smartest steps for staging a mantel that actually helps sell your home.

Does your home have some Wow Factors? That's the question I asked in an October post. Wondering what wow factors are and which ones might be do-able for your home, your market and your budget? See my advice and illustrations.

My favorite post from November is called Ten Tips to Improve Your Autumn Curb Appeal, but no matter what the season, you'll find pointers here to improve the way your home looks all year long.

This past month I concentrated on decorating and protecting your home for the holidays. I so enjoyed making the tabletop Christmas trees I wrote about, that I am going to call that one my favorite December post. In a home on the market that needs to look festive but not crowded, these adorable tabletop trees fill the bill.

Is selling your home and moving on to your next adventure part of your plans for 2013? Then take a moment to download my $5 eBook, DIY Home Staging Tips to Sell Your Home Fast and for Top Dollar. It's over 150 pdf pages of illustrated tips and techniques, checklists and formulas, to take the work out of staging your own home. Kick off the New Year with staging that works!

Ikea Hack - How to make a cookbook shelf

The cookbook shelf is one of my favourite elements of the kitchen. I really do think that it it is one of the main details that makes our ikea kitchen look custom. Up until now I haven't had an chance to describe how you can recreate this look - but thanks to some vacation time and Aubrey helping me with some "how to" details, I have put together this post just in time to end 2012. This post is long with diagrams ... I'm really hoping that it is clear and helps you design your own Ikea kitchen in the future. xo Lindsay

If we had gone with a custom kitchen this kind of element would have been easy. But when you're working with big box cabinets, something like this takes a wee bit of "hacking". The easy way to create a shelf would be to put up an Ikea cabinet in that space above the sink and just leave the doors off. The problem with this method is that you would see all of the fronts of the cabinet`s walls and also all the holes on sides that are supposed to allow for adjustable shelves. In our case this way defeated our hope of making our Ikea kitchen look custom. So although it was the easy route, it wasn't the right route for us.

Before diving into the instructions, I wanted to show you a diagram that shows the basic measurements that we were working with. This will hopefully help you with understanding the instructions that follow. Keep in mind that your measurements will differ as each home has different ceiling heights.

You need two larger cabinets [Fig A and C shown below] on either side of a shorter upper cabinet [Fig B]. We used the tallest cabinets possible for our main cabinetry [A and C], as our ceiling height allowed for it. You don't order any additional cabinetry for beneath the middle (shorter) cabinet [Fig B].

The shelf itself is nothing other than an Ikea cover panel. Cover panels are sold for the purpose of adding to the end of cabinets. The cover panels were the perfect colour - they are made to match the colour of your cabinetry (so no extra painting required) In addition to being the right colour, they were the right depth as they are already designed to fit the depth of cabinetry.

We cut both panels to the right width which was 30 inches in our case (the width of the cabinet in figure B above). One panel was attached to the bottom of the upper cabinet to hide some of those fasteners that are exposed on Ikea cabinets. This was done by screwing down from inside the top cabinet with the right length screws (too long and they`d show and ruin your custom look, so be careful there.) The other panel became our shelf.

To support the shelf we installed supports along the back wall (small `L` bracket`s) and along the sides (neatly cut strips of scrap cover panels) so that the shelf sits 5-6 inches higher than the bottom of the high cabinets to the left of right of the sink area. [Picture below shows a view from under the shelf]

One thing we didn't account for was that these cover panels are not very sturdy because they aren't very thick. In order to make sure the shelf didn't sag in the middle because of the weight of the cookbooks we used a solid piece of wood (1x2 inches that was not finger-jointed) as our valance.

Since we had chosen a valance profile that was more traditional and not from Ikea it worked very well and added to the overall custom look. If we had chosen an Ikea valance (that also wouldn't be too sturdy) we would have had to add in a supporting beam behind it.

Aubrey and I held up books that were the size we needed the shelf to hold and made sure they`d fit and that there was enough space above them.The space that we ended up with (the height of the inside of the shelf, ended up being 15 inches. 

As for the back of the shelf, you have a few options. You could extend your backsplash up so it becomes the backdrop for whatever you put on your shelf. However we elected to go with another cover panel that was a bit larger that we cut to the right size and glued to the wall with PL. Although you can hardly see it, it`s that little detail that makes it seem like custom built cabinetry.

There you go. I hope this helps! xo Lindsay

The Best of 2012

2012 has been a damn good year. So much so that I wanted to relive it with all of you. Here are the Best of 2012 Awards.

Best New Hobby: DIY'ing. Moving back into our house means lots of DIY projects and decorating around the house. So I've scoured tons of amazing home blogs for new ideas on what to do and have started making our house a home.

Best DIY Project of the Year: My favorite DIY is our new pink chandelier. I LOVE it. I love how the color pops against our mint walls and how trendy it is! I still can't believe that I almost gave this chandelier away.

Best Home Rennovation Project: Tearing down the walls!!! Big thanks to Justin for being such a handy guy and tearing down a couple of walls in our house to make it more livable.

Now, since this blog has only been around for a matter of months, I've decided to share a few of The Best Of's from My Greatest Hits so you can see how my whole year looked. Check em out!

Most Eye Opening Moment that lead to the Best Life Changing Moment: If you've followed this blog for long, you'll know that Hubby and I were struggling with our life in Virginia. So this Most Eye Opening Moment lead to this Change of View which lead to this Best Life Changing Moment. Needless to say, we're in a much better place now that we've put ourselves first.

Oh, and this was a pretty important moment that was closely related!

Best Husband of the Year: He cooks. He cleans. He moves across the country (a couple of times) for me. And he even rips down walls. I mean, you can't get much better than this guy.

Biggest Crybaby: I don't cry often, but when I got this letter in the mail I went hysterical.

Award for Finishing What You Started: This award goes to me (and my friend KFields!) who stuck it out and finished the Virginia Beach half marathon in September. 99 degrees with 90% numidity made this race the hardest thing I've ever done, hands down. I almost quit, but didn't. I walked though....oh boy, did I walk. Image source.

Weirdest Vacation Ever: Hubster and my trip to the Dominican Republic was the weirdest vacation we've ever taken. But we don't need to relieve this again.

Best Work Trip: One of the things I love about my job is the fact that I get to see the world. Well, maybe not the world, but the country. This year I got to visit NYC for the first time ever (and three times after that!). My favorite trips were in the winter before Thanksgiving and before Christmas. NYC is so pretty in the winter! Runner up: Vancouver Canada!

Best Way to Spend the Weekends: While living on the East Coast, hubby and I had some amazing weekend trips spent with friends. We had a few trips to DC, two to Baltimore, a dozen or so to Virginia Beach and one to Charlotte!

Most Artistic: One thing Richmond did right was having local artists paint murals on the sides of buildings, and boy are they gorgeous. And they sure worked great as backdrops for my photos!

Most Terrible Luck: I get the award for this one! If you remember back a few months before we left Richmond, I got hit by a car....WHILE WALKING TO WORK!. Now, this may be a combination of my own bad luck and Richmond's terrible drivers, but I've given Richmond a lot of flack in the last year, so I'll chalk this up to my own bad luck.

Best Concert: The best concert we went to this year was definately AWOLNATION. The show was at The National in Richmond, VA which is a small and intimate venue with the beauty of being a historical building. There were maybe a hundred of us there, so Hubby and I were able to stand close to the stage yet feel comfortable enough to move and dance around. And AWOL was amazing!

Best Surprise: After a stressful few months of work, I decided to surprise Justin with a cake to show him how much I appreciated his putting up with my shit. He thought it was hilarious and I got to enjoy some of the cake too!

Best Book I've Read This Year: I've read tons of books in 2012 that I've shared with you through my Sunday Storytime posts, and 11/22/63 by Stephen King is by far my favorite. I gave it five stars in my review here.

Money best spent: I can't believe it had taken me so long, but in September I finally hired a designer to update the design of my blogs. They look SO much better and I couldn't be happier. If only I knew how to code....

What are some of your favorite parts of 2012?

DIY weekend projects

I've had a pretty fun week so far. Even though I've had to work the past few days, they are total sluff off days filled with clearance shopping, browsing new design blogs I've found and having lunch with friends. So let's keep the fun going into the weekend!

Here are a couple of small (yet awesome!) DIY projects that could be done in a weekend. I'm not sure which I'll do yet, but I've got some pretty great options.

Patterned jeans are all the rage right now, so why not make polka dot ones yourself with a pair of old jeans you don't wear anymore? I know I have a few of them laying around. Breanna outlines simple step-by-step instructions on how to do them yourself!

And DIY doesn't have to just be arts & crafts, baking is included! I'm a sugar fiend, so these Sugar Cookie Bars look to die for.

Enjoy DIY'ing this weekend!

bits + pieces

With orders wrapped up, I closed down the shop at the end of last week and totally unplugged. No e-mails to my phone, no checking twitter, no reading blogs. I needed a little break from it all. Over the last week we've celebrated my Brother's birthday, my half birthday, Christmas Eve dinner, Christmas, and our Boxing Day dinner. I pretty much moved into my Mom's house. I'm taking the next week to continue this - just relaxing and trying to stay away from the office/computer and finish up on some craft projects. Here are some shots of the holidays in our house. Hope you all had a wonderful time with those you love. xo Linds

shots above/ my brother's birthday balloons / totally forgot to mail our christmas cards - it was one of those years / craft project in the works / note by my Mom on the dishwasher...she has the best outlook / my little guy / snow!

Tis the season for clearance

With Christmas gifting behind us, retailers across the board are trying to get rid of their product with clearance sales. I think I've found my new favorite shopping day - the day after Christmas! Who needs Black Friday when there are 50-70% off deals on the same product, just one month later.

Working for Target made it really easy for me to swing by the store yesterday and stock up on five bags (yes, five bags) of clearance holiday and clothes items for the hubby and I.

Here are a few of the clearance things I found while wandering downtown Minneapolis (most being from Target...)

I also got quite a stack of awesome presents this year too! My family sure knows the way to my heart! Clothes, books & sugar!!!

Love that my family and friends know me so well and I get such great gifts from them every year. I think I gave some pretty great presents too, so hopefully the receipients like their presents just as much as I like mine.

How was everyone's Christmas gifting? Did you give or receive any great ones?

And who's participating in the end-of-year clearance with me?!

Is it Christmas 2013 yet?

Well, I just got back from the Target store on my Holiday clearance excursion. And no, I did not come back with five bags worth of holiday things..... I'm ready for Christmas next year!

I hope everyone had a great holiday with their friends and family. Next up, New Years! Any big plans?

Joyeux Noël!

Le blog prend maintenant quelques jours de repos, mais la boutique reste ouverte pendant toutes les fêtes (aucune expédition les 24-25/12 et le 31/12-1/1). Et vous pouvez bien sur continuer à jouer au calendrier de l'Avent.

En vous remerciant pour toutes vos visites ici et dans la boutique, je vous souhaite un très bon Noël!

The blog now takes a few days break, but the shop stays open during all the holidays (no shipping on Dec 24-25 and Dec 31-Jan 1). And you can of course continue to play in the Advent Calendar.

Thank you so much for all your visits here and to the shop, and I wish you all a very Merry Christmas!

Calendrier de l'Avent n°4... et une gagnante

Désolée d'être si en retard avec le Calendrier de l'Avent, mais j'étais un peu prise par les préparations de Noël... Félicitations à Morgane, tu es la gagnante du 3ème jeu concours du calendrier! J'espère que la main en bois aidera ta nièce à intégrer une école d'art :) Merci d'envoyer tes coordonnées à contact@lamaisondannag.com et le prix arrivera bientôt dans ta boite aux lettres.

Merci à vous tous d'avoir participé, comme d'habitude c'était très difficile de faire un choix!

Et voilà, la dernière partie de notre Calendrier "4 dimanches - 4 coups de coeur" ou vous pouvez gagner l'un des 4 produits les plus aimés de la boutique! Cette fois ci, dites bonjour à Hugo et Betty, cet adorable couple de teckels sur les posters créé par Lisa Bengtsson. 

Qui sont-ils, Hugo et Betty? Imaginez leur histoire et dites le moi dans un commentaire ci-dessous (pas besoin d'être long, une phrase peut suffire). L'heureux gagnant qui remportera les deux posters sera annoncé dimanche prochain.

En attendant, je vous souhaite de passer un très joyeux Noël et je vous reverrai ici dans quelques jours! ♥

Sorry for being so late with the Advent Calendar, but I was a bit busy with the Christmas preparations.... Congratulations to Morgane, you are the winner of the 3rd giveaway! I hope the wooden hand will help your nice getting in to art school :) Please send an e-mail with you postal address to contact@lamaisondannag.com and the prize will soon arrive in your mailbox.

Thank you all for your participation, as usual it was very difficult to make a choice!

And here comes the last part of our "4 Sundays - 4 favourites" Advent Calendar, where you can win one of the four most popular articles in the shop! This time, please say hi to Hugo and Betty, the adorable couple of dachshund on the posters designed by Lisa Bengtsson. One lucky winner will get the two posters.

Who are they, Hugo and Betty? Imagine their story and let me know in a comment here below (it doesn't need to be long, one sentence could do). The winner will be announced next Sunday.

Meanwhile, I wish you all a wonderful Christmas and I see you again here in a few days! ♥

Tradition. The Hudson's Bay Co. Christmas Windows

Aubrey, Oscar, my sister and I drove down to see The Hudson's Bay Christmas Windows this week. It was my sisters idea to go down - she e-mailed me a link to this article in the Toronto Star and I realized we just had to visit with Oscar. Although we used to do this as kids, it has been years since I had made a trek on a wintery night to see the windows. Big hugs to my sister for encouraging this tradition to continue for Oscar. xo

Ps., Oscar didn't really know what to make of the windows and stayed on Aubrey's shoulders for the visit.  It is definitely worth a visit - with or without kids. :)

Green Christmas

Normalement, nous partons en Suède pour Noël et/ou Nouvel An, mais cette année on reste en France... alors Noël sera vert, aussi bien à l'extérieur qu'à l'intérieur!
Plus d'inspirations de Noël ici.

Normally we go to Sweden for Christmas and/or New Year, but this year we're staying in France... so it will be a green Christmas, outside as well as inside!
More Christmas inspiration here.

Source 1-3 Hus & hem / styling Lotta Hogrell / photo Peter Carlsson, 4. IKEA Livet hemma, 5-8. Alt for damerne, 9. unknown, 10-11. Annaleena, 12. Stylizimo, 13. unknown