It’s been a little over a year since me and my fiance bought our first home together! Before buying my first house, I had lived with my parents, college housing, and then an apartment for a brief time. I jumped into home ownership exactly how i’ve jumped into things most of my life..head first and eyes closed! Not the best idea. I’ve made some mistakes, and a year later i’m here to tell you them. A few of these may surprise you, some may have you nod your head in agreeance and hopefully some will spare you from making the same mistake! Overestimated how much space I need When we started our house search, I was dead set on buying a house with at least 3 bedrooms..for some reason I believed that I should buy the biggest house my money could afford. I believe this is a total downfall of American culture..we equate success with big home, new things, the bigger the better! When in fact I didn’t need a house this size. Brian and I moved from a 900 sq. ft. apartment into a 2,000 sq foot home. We didn’t have any furniture, and for months rooms sat vacant. A year later 2 rooms still have nothing in them..and our two extra bedrooms are just furnished enough to make them seem not empty but they serve no real purpose. After a year of living in this house, I wish daily we could shrink it. We don’t plan on having […]

Okay, so doubling an email list doesn’t sound fun, nor does it sound simple. A few months ago, my email list was growing steadily, but very slowly. I was gaining only a few new subscribers a week, and really thought this is the best it could be for a small blog like mine. WRONG. Why is an email list even important? If you don’t know why an email list is important, or you don’t care about yours, you probably wouldn’t have clicked on the link to read this blog post. But hey, I’ll fill you in real quick on why it’s sooo important to have an email list. Regardless if you have a blog just for fun, or you are running a business, email is the only true and safe way to contact or market to your potential customers/readers. You (and everyone else) don’t own their social media accounts. Instagram could be gone tomorrow, you could get shadow-banned for a week, hacked and have to start over, or all of your customers could leave the app – you literally can’t control it. Then what? You can’t rely on something you have no control over. If I stopped using Facebook and Instagram, I’d still be able to connect to many of my followers because so many of them signed up for my email list. Make sense? How I doubled it. First off, I will not sit here and type out a lie. I did not have a huge email list to […]

If you didn’t know me better, what you’re about to read may seem like a rant. That is not the case. In fact, I wrote this as a liberation for all my fellow 20-somethings out there to stop putting rules on their life. Let me explain. It seemed that as soon as I hit my 20’s I was inundated by articles popping up everywhere that were titled What you should be doing by 25, What I wish I had done in my 20’s, If you don’t do this in your 20’s you’re going to regret x,y,z.. and so on and so forth. I use to read them and soak them all in. I mean I was in my early 20’s and reading them felt like I was getting some much needed direction in my directionless world, right? Wrong. You could argue that if I just had direction and knew what I was doing, or even simply stopped reading these articles that this issue wouldn’t even be an issue. The thing is, it’s deeper than that. It’s not the fact that I couldn’t stop reading them or that Chrome knew I read them so they kept flooding my browser with more daily..it’s bigger than that. Most 20 something’s don’t know what they are doing. They don’t have a clear direction, and for some reason the world acts like this is a crisis, when it’s just human nature. At 18 you are forced to make a decision about what you want to […]

When I got my macrame hanging chair, I was so excited! But I immediately knew I didn’t want a big clunky chain seen above the chair so I knew I had to figure out how to hang my chair with rope. It was simpler and cheaper than I thought and I wanted to share my easy tutorial with you! Supplies needed: Two heavy duty eye hooks (or one depending on your chair) Two heavy duty spring hooks heavy rated rope (probably at least 20′) drill stud finder dry wall saw electric drill A few simple steps… We used the stud finder to find the ceiling joists – when we found two of the near each other (one for each hook) we marked them. Using the stud finder again – find the edges of each joists (you want to hang the hook as centered on the wood joist as possible for safety) Next we cut small holes in the drywall until we saw the joist. We drilled into it just enough for the eye hook to catch. We manually screwed the eye hooks in. You could tie the rope directly on the eye hook – however I realized I may want to move this chair for cleaning or painting the walls, so I put mine on clips. We tied the rope directly on the clip using a noose knot. This knot gets tighter when pressure is applied so it is perfect for a swing or chair. We then tied the other […]