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Homespun by Laura

DIY-ing our beige house into a home one room at a time

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DIY Mud Room with vertical shiplap planks, hooks, 2x6 counters, and storage bench Reveal

Homespun House 2.0

Coming soon!

In the meantime…read more about a few projects that are making our second house feel like home:

DIY Old World Mud Room Reveal | One Room Challenge | Week 7

DIY Nursery Closet Shelving System

Fun, Colorful Laundry Room | One Room Challenge Reveal

Vintage Toy Nursery Reveal

Hello! I'm Laura. I use antiques, thrift store finds, and a heavy dose of elbow grease to make our house a home, and I write about it here at Homespun by Laura. From DIY to sewing, you'll find DIY ideas to solve your home decor dilemmas. Pull up a seat and stay awhile!

homespunbylaura

Jack of all trades; master of none.
DIY. Sewing. Travel. Drawing and fabric design. Mama to two 🎀. Learning to enjoy the process.

Laura
The days are short but the years are long. Isn’t The days are short but the years are long. Isn’t that how the saying goes? No? Well, it should be. Things seem to move and change so fast around here (babies growing so quickly) that there’s no time to prioritize looking at my phone, much less create an Instagram post, which is why I’ve only shared 4 or 5 weekly updates for this year’s spring #oneroomchallenge instead of 8! 🤪 So here’s the reveal of our backyard space, incomplete though it may be. Since the beginning of April, we’ve made tremendous progress in creating a fun and inviting space for our little family to enjoy, and we love it! We’ll keep plugging along at the few additional projects bit by bit as time goes by. Since it’s a garden and gardens change with the seasons, there are a few additions/changes we’ll make when the fall rolls around (primarily transplanting some existing plants and adding some seeds and bulbs for springtime flowers), and probably more in the spring next year, too. In the meantime, you’ll find us hanging out here any day it’s below 95 degrees - downright pleasant for summertime in the south ☀️ (and yes, the sky really was that pretty!)
The iPhone really is pretty amazing. I took some p The iPhone really is pretty amazing. I took some photos of our yard with my ‘big’ camera, but it just couldn’t do this scene justice. The iPhone’s camera grabbed the vibrant colors of the lavender, the green summer grass, the new reddish-brown stain on the fence, the colorful pillows from @kohls, the cute little cottage playhouse I made over with paint last summer, the hint of pink in the dusky sky, and especially our bright, shiny, and new twinkly lights! They add just the right amount of warmth and sparkle to our backyard. We used lights I found on @amazon thanks to @younghouselove’s recommendations and set them up on a @kasasmarthome timer that I can access from my phone, which is great because the outlet they plug into is in a weird and inconvenient place on the side of our house. The lighting was a splurge; the cost came in higher than some entire room makeovers I’ve done in the past, but it was definitely worth the roughly $250 it cost for 5 strands of lights + an extension cord (and later today I’ll share in my stories how I saved $25 per strand!). We’ve been enjoying the ambience in the evenings as we watch tv on the patio after the big kid’s asleep and we get a little bonus snuggle with the baby 👶. There’s more work to do in the last 3 weeks of the @oneroomchallenge sponsored by @betterhomesandgardens, including purchasing and assembling a couple more items of patio furniture, painting the Adirondack chairs you see here, and creating a trellis on the back of our chimney for a pretty climbing vine to grow on. 🌸
I’m going off of disrupted sleep for the past 11 I’m going off of disrupted sleep for the past 11 weeks (though to be honest, I didn’t sleep much for the last 11 weeks of pregnancy and could possibly be getting more now with a newborn than I was before she arrived!), and I’m realizing that the progress and plans for I’ve shared for our backyard #oneroomchallenge project so far have been a little disorganized. Basically, we started on our backyard vitalization project (you can’t REvitalize something that was never in good shape to begin with) back in early April. Since the One Room Challenge typically begins around that time and I knew the to-do list would take several months, I decided to share it as our ORC project. So here we are at week four of the challenge (but 8 weeks in in real time) and I’ve forgotten to link my post all 3 weeks and neglected to even post until a day late last week 😎 But we’re doing this project for ourselves, not the internet so 🤪 Anyway! At this point in the process, we had gotten some new patio furniture, extended the rock patio, stained the fence, replaced the gross patio ceiling fan, put new plants in the ground, spread pine needles over half of the garden, and installed the cutest little playhouse picket fence (for just 26 bucks!). We involved the 2-year-old as much as possible and the baby has taken quite a few naps out here in the stroller while we work, too. It’s been fun putting this space together as a family since we’ll enjoy it that way, too. 👨‍👩‍👧‍👧
Week 3 of the @oneroomchallenge came and went with Week 3 of the @oneroomchallenge came and went without my posting an update, so here it is. Better late than never...? Over the final week of April and first week of May, we worked hard to prep and stain the fence and extend the rock patio we started last year. And when I say ‘we’... I mean one of us (the one that can grow a beard). I’ve been contributing where I can but this is for sure the house project that I’ve done the least physical work on, ever. We also had an electrician here to install some light fixtures, including replacing the small, gross looking builder-grade ceiling fan on our porch; a sprinkler company also came to repair and move a few sprinkler heads so we can water all the new plants we bought this week but didn’t get planted yet. 😬 My main contribution this week was to order a raised bed kit for out strawberry plants. I’d have loved to build one - and it would have been cheaper, which is usually our goal with house projects - but it would have been a little too much DIY to take on right now. Next week we plan to stain the fence and get those plants in the ground before they die.🤞they do ok in their pots this week.
This clock stopped working recently (yes, I tried This clock stopped working recently (yes, I tried changing the battery, and no it still didn’t work). So I found a clock to replace it with and moved it into the mud room for the time being. It’s not a perfect fit for this space but it’s certainly better than the snowman ⛄️ art that I just realized was still on display in here – in May! – so I swapped them out. I really love it and intend to buy a kit and fix it one day...but until then, it’s 3:00 somewhere! 😂 This mud room was our One Room Challenge project back in the fall of 2019 and we still love it. The diy bench is especially handy now that we need a place to ‘park’ a car seat again.
Three years ago while we were expecting our first Three years ago while we were expecting our first child, we took a trip to England and Germany. During that trip we spent a weekend in a village in the English countryside and experienced a magical ‘summer’ day (felt like a perfect spring day to us: sunny, low humidity, and about 70 degrees). The week we began work on our backyard, that’s what it felt like - if I closed my eyes I could imagine being back in the lush green yard of the secluded 1800s English farmhouse we visited instead of on a cement patio behind a 2014 suburban American house, in a fishbowl where I can see parts of 19 (or maybe it’s 22) other houses. 😂 We remedied that fishbowl feeling just a tad in the second week of this project with roller shades, and it already feels so much cozier back here, thanks to the privacy they provide. The acacia wood furniture (from Ikea) is a step up visually from our cheap old table, and it was very affordable. We’re still on the hunt for new chairs (our old chairs were incompatible with climbing toddlers because they easily tipped over); the ones that match the table have been out of stock for weeks. Pillows are from @Walmart - a steal at $13 each! - bench cushion from @target. Click @oneroomchallenge to find others working on their spring One Room Challenge projects.
It’s time for the spring #oneroomchallenge! This It’s time for the spring #oneroomchallenge! This year, we’re taking things outside and focusing on the backyard. It’s been a work in progress for three years since we moved in, but we’re tackling some bigger projects this spring. We don’t do well sitting still (even with a new baby in the house) so we spent the weekends in April getting started on this year’s backyard project list. It’s been tough for me to actually contribute with any hands-on work; as soon as one kid is asleep, the other wakes up! But my cheap labor is carrying out most of the to-dos relatively happily 😃 so that’s a plus and I’ve been able to chip in a bit while he rests and holds the baby. Occasionally, we have an additional ‘helper’, which makes things interesting! 👧 We’ll continue the work as the eight-week diy/design challenge progresses, and we’re hoping to have a completed backyard just in time for the beautiful triple-digit humidity and temperatures that June brings! 😂 Click @oneroomchallenge or take a peek at the link in my profile to look at all the other cool projects happening across the globe over the next 2 months!
The setting sun streaming through this window stop The setting sun streaming through this window stops me in my tracks every night as I leave the big girl’s room after bedtime. Of course, the photo can’t quite capture it! This sewing/craft/guest room was last fall’s One Room Challenge project, but I haven’t been spending much time creating in it since mid-March, for obvious reasons (or one 8 lb reason 😃)! Speaking of the One Room Challenge, it starts again on Thursday, and I’ll be sharing ours then. While it’s an eight-week challenge, with final reveals set for the week of June 24, we turned it into a 12-week project by getting started the first week in April. Because with two kids under 3... it takes twice as long to do everything so we need all the time we can get! 😃
For the first time in six weeks, I left the baby a For the first time in six weeks, I left the baby at home (of course not alone!) and took the big girl on an outing, just the two of us. We went to pick strawberries! I have so many memories of picking strawberries as a child every year with my family, and now it’s something I’m excited about doing with our girls every spring. This time was slightly different than the last time I took her (two years ago; thanks to the pandemic we didn’t get to pick last year, see 4th picture!), and we both had a lot of fun! Later, we used our fresh berries to make strawberry hand pies as this week’s baking activity. My little sous chef helped with every step: cutting the berries (with her plastic kids’ knife, of course!), cracking the eggs, ‘painting’ the egg onto the pastry, and assembling and closing the pies. If I play my cards right, she’ll be making dinner within a year or two 😂
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Homespun by Laura | Art + Crafts
Homespun by Laura | DIY
Homespun by Laura | Home Decor
Homespun by Laura | Sewing

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