03/27 Food

10 Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipes Everyone Should Try + How to Get the Best Results

My chocolate chip cookie making obsession started not only because who doesn’t like a good chocolate chip cookie, but because I got fed up with how every time I made cookies at home they all turned out the same no matter what the recipe: hard, a little dry, and they never spread. Was it me or was it the recipe? In almost 2 years now of trying all kinds of cc cookie recipes, some multiple times to make recipe tweaks and adjust my technique, I found out the problem was both. There are some not so great recipes out there and some incredible + foolproof ones, and I was making some technical mistakes that were sabotaging my cookies. Through this exploration, I learned what my favorite cc cookie recipes are and what to do to make sure I get the best results every time. This post is finally here to share all of that with you.

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03/09 Our House

Home Office Reveal

The long term plan still is to make the garage my workspace/studio, but as we’ve seen over the months since the move, the garage for a while is going to be a holding area for all our extra stuff we aren’t sure yet where to put, items from the initial work on our house that we still need to dump, and a few last boxes we have yet to open up and unpack. On top of that, organizing and designing that space to both provide the storage we need and look beautiful to be an environment I enjoy working in will understandably take time to make happen. So in the meantime, we have this bedroom that had also turned into a dumping ground for stuff we haven’t designated homes for yet, and all of that got moved to (yup) the garage so I could make this a temporary office and man… I love it so so much and kind of wish this wasn’t a temporary situation!

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02/10 Tips

How to Choose Pieces for Your Home + Tips for Figuring Out Your Style

This is a dilemma I hear from you a lot about, and one that I still sometimes have my struggles with, but it’s not nearly as bad as when I first started getting into decorating our home years ago, so I’ve got a lot to say about it!  Regardless of being generally indecisive (stemming from stressing over whether I’m making the best decision possible for anything in any area of my life because if I don’t then I’ll die), choosing those investment pieces for your home and the things you’ll live with presumably for years is a big undertaking that most of us find impossible not to take lightly.  That pressure can be paralyzing, especially if you’re not really sure what you love, or you feel like you love everything, or what you love is constantly changing.  So, how do you know when you’ve found the one?  When is it right to pull the trigger on that amazing table or expensive sofa?

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01/29 DIY

How to Paint a Dresser: IKEA Tarva Makeover

As you know from following along with the progress on our house, we decided to repurpose the master suite into a family room, meaning we’d take one of the smaller bedrooms for ourselves. This was only going to work comfortably if we could fit a dresser in here, because despite the closet in this room being a decent size, it’s a tad tight for two people’s wardrobes. After measuring out the rug and bed placement, we concluded that the ideal dresser depth for this room would be 16″ or less. With most standard dressers hovering around 20-22″ and dipping to 18″ at best, this was a challenging quest.

I searched for months looking not only for that shallow depth, but something that had enough width and number of drawers to still be useful for the amount of storage it could provide while also not being ugly. We landed on the IKEA TARVA, coming in at a svelte 15 3/4″ depth with great bones similar to our previous MALM dresser that I still love so much but it’s too big for this room. The reason I didn’t initially end my search here was because the TARVA only comes in an untreated wood intended for DIY customization and truthfully, with the stress of the move and work going on in our house the thought of spending days working on this felt like it was going to kill me. Being unable to find an alternative with these perfect dimensions or resist the affordable price however, I called off the search and accepted the task to make the TARVA our own. Here’s how I gave it a makeover.

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