Cable Rails – a DIY Inexpensive Upgrade for our Deck!

Putting new cable wire deck rails in! Teaming up in our DIY Blog Hop this month with deck projects! (We’d love for you to join us by linking up below or click here for more info!) I made the conduit railings for the deck a few years ago even though I knew I would need to replace them eventually because: DOGS! The new cable rails moved to the top of the list this spring because Annie is now a permanent resident and she was very good at sneaking off to the treasure trove of a pasture full of horse poop. I can’t even express how annoyed we became of yelling at (and bathing) the damn dog. Not that I really blamed her… But having all of our doors to the deck open is mandatory for my happiness as long as the weather makes it possible! So, it was time for a solution that Annie could not get through… Read More »

Basement Before Pics – Planning the renovation of my forgotten space!

When I wrote my Winter To-Do-List last fall my poor basement was literally the LAST thing on my mind. In fact I had totally put my basement out of my head! But that certainly was not always the case: After I threw my ex out two years ago I moved my workshop out of here with the plan to put in a rental suite ASAP for the extra income. Read More »

Furniture Layout – Continuing the Guest Bedroom Redesign

In my last post about redesigning the guest bedroom to be more unisex we got the room painted out and ready for furniture. This room has some real problems when it comes to being a bedroom. What makes it unique is also what makes the layout so challenging. There is no wall to put the bed on. Every single wall has a window. Every time I’ve moved furniture around in here I get annoyed. My OCD goes crazy because nothing balances! Read More »

Spring Tablescape and some Updates to the Dining Room

Some updates in our dining room and a simple spring tablescape. Teaming up in our DIY Blog Hop this month with dining room projects! (We’d love for you to join us by linking up below or click here for more info!) One of my favorite parts about spring here in MN is how the local grocery stores all stock up on flowers as soon as the weather turns. Lodi has learned that my coming home with an armful is no longer a unique or strange sight. Until my own flowers show their faces I simply can’t help myself! Read More »

Windows: Upcycling to make Farmhouse artwork for the living room!

I just knew some day keeping all of those old windows would pay off! After painting out the room and getting some things complete one glaring issue was my one totally empty wall above my sofa. I have a confession to make, I literally STOLE the prints out of almost every single room in my entire house to complete the gallery walls of my new entryway when I redid it last year. No regrets at all but it literally left me with nothing on the walls of my living room! Read More »

Unisex Guest Bedroom – Picking out a Grown up Paint Color

Teaming up with Chas in our DIY blog hop this month with projects for bedrooms! (Make sure and check out all of our bedroom projects following this post and feel free to join in!) Redesigning my guest bedroom in a more unisex design aesthetic. I was so totally in love with my guest bedroom when I redid it after throwing my ex out three years ago. (It was the beginning of the reclaiming of all of my spaces after my divorce.) It looked like me when I was a tom boy, country girl because that’s exactly how I designed it to be! One room that said ME and absolutely NO ONE else. Read More »

Adding Tufted Upholstery to an old Coffee Table

Adding a tufted top and a new paint job to an old coffee table. I’ve been working on the refresh of my living room for awhile now. It started when I decided I hated my sofa and was ready for a new one! That worked out perfect because I really needed my old sofa to complete my seating area out in my garage. Following my old sofa to the garage was my coffee table and one of my end tables too! That left my living room pretty barren: the perfect time to do a makeover! Read More »

Three Legged Stool Makeover: Paint and stain combo with dipped legs

Teaming up with Chas in our DIY blog hop this month with projects for our bathrooms! (Make sure and check out all of the bathroom projects following this post and feel free to join in!) This little stool has a fun story behind it. My Grandparents’ were wood workers and made and sold lots of these along with many other pieces of furniture. One of my neighbors is an avid follower of my blog and felt she simply had to return it to me so this milking stool came home after being gone for over 30 years! Read More »

Lace Doily Upcycling on my Radio Stand Kitchen Island

Lace doily upcycling across the front of my kitchen island that I made out of my great grandpa’s radio stand. This piece remains one of my ALL TIME favorite transformations that I’ve created. Some projects just work! It was like this old radio stand had been waiting 100 years to be made into a kitchen island. It looks great from the front and the shelves in the back house all my recipe books too. During my recent kitchen remodel I did some surgery on it to work even better for me. Read More »

Thrift Store Lamp gets a Country Makeover with the Farmhouse Hens

So, a few months ago, I went to my local thrift store to get myself a sweater to make mug koozies for my Christmas in a Jar post. I left the thrift store with two sweaters, some shop rags, a mirror tray and a lamp! To be fair I still only spent $8 and no one really believed I was just gonna be able to get one sweater right? Read More »

Lamp gets a country girl makeover using license plates! Before and After!

My new guest bedroom and library needed a reading lamp for the bedside table so, of course, I went thrifting! I found this little dude for only $6 and then went directly to walmart and found what I decided was the perfect burlap lamp shade. From there it was time to decide just how I was going to transform this little lamp into something country and fun! Using two old MN license plates I got to work! Read More »

A little end table gets a full on adult country girl redo!

There are a lot of changes taking place here at my Grandma’s old farmhouse. You guys know now that I got divorced and that means new and very different plans for the whole house. My old office is now going to become my guest bedroom and library and it felt really important to refinish all of the furniture that will be going in there. So, I got to work! Read More »

2020 June Gardens – For the Love of Dirt and the Spring Photo Gallery!

2020 Gardens – June blog post. One of my favorite moments of every year is when I open the windows in the master bedroom and know I probably won’t have to close them again for several months. After closed doors, no fresh air, cooped up and freezing outside its absolute Heaven to me. Fortunately Lodi is a lot like me and opens all our doors if he gets home before I do. I hate air conditioning. This house stays really cool most of the time but this June pushed us to our limit! Read More »

May 2020 – Flowers to be Planted, Spring is Here, Life Goes On

May 2020 was a far less freaky month for me than April was – I guess I “adapted” to the pace of quarantine. Disinfecting my entire day job became thoughtless habit, avoiding people at the store became second nature (not that it wasn’t already for this introvert…) and emotionally freaking out about the craziness became impossible to keep up. Saying we “got used” to living in a world in the midst of a global pandemic sounds insane but bills still needed to be paid. Gardens still needed to be planted. Life still deserved to be lived. Life does always, somehow, keep going on. Read More »

2020 Summer To Do List and Plans for Next Fall and Winter too

At the end of 2019 I tackled my Winter to do list and completed a total overhaul of my living room and a makeover for my guest bedroom too. (More about the bedroom coming soon!) Those two spaces were my two biggest items so I’m happy with what I completed – but its time to start thinking about summer already! Which means its time to make some new lists and put a couple of things on the back burner for next winter. Read More »

April 2020, Finding Silver Linings and Ways to Keep our Sanity

I rewrote my last blog post about a thousand times because of Covid-19 changing our lives by the minute. I really regret that now because I deleted a lot of what had been going on with us before everything went to hell. These little updates I put out once a month have become a bit of a journal for me that I’ve really liked to have. So I’m going to start writing in more past tense about the whole month – so this was our month of April 2020 at Grandma’s House. Read More »

Almost Spring 2020 – Uncertain times

Almost Spring 2020 – So, as most of you know, I generally have projects/posts complete and scheduled for publication a couple of months ahead of time. I don’t mean for you guys to not see what I’m working on as its happening but deadlines kill me. It is what is. However, this doesn’t totally ring true of my personal updates/blog posts like this one. Generally I write these a couple of weeks (maybe a month) before they come out here. (That’s about as close to a deadline as my anxiety will let me get.) However… Read More »

Interrupting my regularly scheduled programming – COVID-19

As Bloggers, Influencers, etc. I feel we have at least some moral obligation to stop what we’re doing for a second and acknowledge what’s going on in the world. I also believe we absolutely have the obligation to spread this right now: DON’T PANIC! Currently, in my state of MN, schools are closed by tomorrow (or already are) and it seems pretty much everything else that is not mandatory is already closed or not far behind. Its time to go home and stay there (if you possibly can) and binge watch Netflix for a bit. Read More »

Bedroom Reveal – Completing the New Guest Bedroom Unisex Redesign!

I’m so excited to finish the new guest bedroom reveal! My old country girl design and library just wasn’t right anymore and this room needed attention badly. It needed to grow up, become more unisex and also become a lot more comfortable for any guests or friends that might stay. It all started with a new far more grown up paint color called Flannel Gray by Valspar. From there I tackled the challenging furniture layout and now moved on to the final touches, design and completion. Read More »

Living Room Reveal – Farm Houses can be Classy, Fun & Practical!

Farmhouse living room reveal! OMG you guys this room took me over 5 months to finish – UGH Finally though, we have arrived at the new living room. It probably seems strange and even silly but buying a new sofa meant something to me. Throughout the entire home almost every single piece of furniture here I’ve either inherited or I built. The few other pieces besides I picked up at either thrift stores or garage sales. I literally only have one “new” thing and its my dining room chairs which my mom bought for me as a gift MANY years ago! Read More »

DIY Farmhouse Kitchen Reveal! A Bigger Closet and a Bigger Kitchen!

DIY Farmhouse Kitchen Reveal, somehow I took space AWAY from my kitchen and yet I ended up with MORE storage and a bigger feeling space! In this kitchen I will always think of my amazing Grandma Charlotte who lived in this home for over fifty years before me. I was thrilled that this old farmhouse could become mine and ecstatic at the notion of creating my very own farmhouse kitchen. This space was a VERY long time coming for me. I had no idea it would take me from early spring of 2014 until right now, to finally create and finish the kitchen of my dreams. But, ya know what? It was worth it! Read More »

A Farmhouse Entryway, Office and Dining Room Reveal

I should have posted a reveal of my entry way back when I first “completed” it in 2016. But, honestly, it never felt truly “done” until now. The wood stove happened and the entire room needed to be repainted because of smoke damage and then, because I had it cleared out I went ahead and gave my floors some TLC too. Finally though I was able to take my time and put it all back together again! Read More »

My Laundry Room Reveal – How one gorgeous table cloth started it all!

Finally we have come to the reveal of my new laundry room! Yep, I am no longer calling it a closet – I believe this space deserves to be labeled a real room now. First I tackled the heavy lifting, recycling my old kitchen pantry here in several places, building custom shelves, trimming it all out and painting the whole room. From there I added some color and then, finally, I was able to put it all together with some serious organization. Read More »

My New Workshop Reveal – Fancy, Fun and Organized!

Well I finally made it – here is my finished brand new workshop reveal! This was a LONG time coming: My first post about moving my workshop out of my basement came out in MAY OF LAST YEAR. I lived in a constant state of digging through boxes, looking for one tool or another, and going absolutely bat shit crazy lol. Read More »

To Grandma’s House we go! (Wednesday Link Party #200)

Welcome to the To Grandma’s House We Go link party #200. OMG you guys I’ve been doing this link party for 200 weeks in a row! WOW! Thank all of you for joining us every week, sharing the party and getting on board! Well, Lodi and I put the air conditioner in one of our windows…. with absolutely no hope for rain and after being missed by storm after storm and suffocating trying to sleep in a 90 degree bedroom for WEEKS. I broke. First time in all the years I lived here that my stubborn butt was beat by the heat! Of course this is 2020 after all and not six hours later we finally got hit by a thunderstorm that appeared out of nowhere and broke our drought and heat streak… *facepalm* Read More »

To Grandma’s House we go! (Wednesday Link Party #199)

Welcome to the To Grandma’s House We Go link party #199. I hope you all had a wonderful holiday weekend! With all that’s going on in this crazy world anymore we tried hard to have a chill weekend and some serious R&R. Of course I still did some work on the house but that’s nothing new lol. Around here we need rain DESPERATELY and have seen some serious heat. Our whole yard has become crunchy – getting everything watered is starting to feel like a full time job! Now, on to the Party! Read More »

To Grandma’s House we go! (Wednesday Link Party #198)

Welcome to the To Grandma’s House We Go link party #198. Wow, as weird as this year has been I didn’t think I’d say this but where did June go? I can’t believe this weekend is the fourth of July already OMG we haven’t got near enough done on the yard lol time to crack the whip on MYSELF. I love this time of the year and I also hate it because we just stored the hay for the horses for this winter and Lodi and I just talked about ordering pellets for the pellet stove also for this winter… Can’t we pretend summer isn’t going to end for even ONE minute!? Now, on to the Party! Read More »

To Grandma’s House we go! (Wednesday Link Party #197)

Welcome to the To Grandma’s House We Go link party #197. Wow did we swelter for a couple of days here! Whew! Back to regular temps now after a couple of INSANE thunderstorms. Not sure what I expect… This is 2020 after all and asking for anything normal (even the weather) does seem like asking a lot… Somehow, even with covid, we inadvertently entertained family and friends for the last FIVE weekends in a row. I’ve been counting the days to next weekend that we finally get to ourselves! Even my very-extroverted-people-loving Lodi said last night, “I love them all so much… Let’s never do that again.” Isn’t family great?! Now, on to the Party! Read More »

To Grandma’s House we go! (Wednesday Link Party #196)

Welcome to the To Grandma’s House We Go link party #196. Well I don’t know what’s going on with the crazy amount of wind that we have anymore but we have at least been able to enjoy some hot summery weather! I’m very excited that our vegetable garden is filling in great and everything we planted came up and is doing well. I am so ready for some fresh veggies. My Mom only has a week left of radiation – so excited for her to get a break and be home for good! I hope everyone’s spring has been going smoothly so far. Now, on to the Party! Read More »

To Grandma’s House we go! (Wednesday Link Party #195)

Welcome to the To Grandma’s House We Go link party #195. MMMMMMMM I really need to not check out this link party when I’m hungry lol I was absolutely starving by the time I finished choosing my features last week! You guys are some amazing chefs! We’ve had some glorious weather lately and its just about killed me to have to go inside every night. My body is like: “But its light out and beautiful outside… it can’t possibly be time for bed!” We really all should be able to put our jobs on hold the first month of summer every year… Read More »

OMG Pumpkins everywhere! Hometalk Fall Decor Inspiration board

Hometalk Fall Decor Inspiration board! Summer is absolutely my favorite time of the year – you will NEVER hear me complaining about the heat lol But I honestly think that’s a fact simply because fall and spring are such short seasons here in northern MN. Fall for us could truly last all of three weeks like our spring did this year! And that’s just depressing lol because that means we’re settling into at least four months of some serious cold and snow. Read More »

Hometalk’s Outdoor Projects I Can’t Wait to Build! Do it Yourself!

Inspiration Board of the Outdoor projects on Hometalk that I’ve been drooling over! I received a comment on my outdoor bench saying, “You’re SO crafty, that’s amazing!” And I admittedly got a bit offended, eventually I just laughed about it but I’m not sure how I can build a wrap around bench for my deck and still be called “crafty”. I could’t help but think that if I was a guy she certainly wouldn’t have looked at that bench and called him crafty! I am a builder at heart and I spend most of my time building things in my head or drooling over outdoor projects like these: Read More »

Let’s build some swings! Pinterest Do It Yourself Inspiration Board!

Well now that spring has FINALLY arrived, my dreaming has turned to swings! Let’s build some! These are some of my favorites I’ve found on Pinterest and stashed away for a later time because, seriously, who doesn’t want to swing away a beautiful summer day? Contrary to popular belief, I do NOT feel that swings are for kids in any way. Many of these are very grown up swings for us “adults” lol Read More »

Nooks and Getaway Places: Pinterest Inspiration Board

Nooks, crannies, special getaway places, some of my favorite escapes via Pinterest Inspiration board. It has been a very difficult few weeks here at Grandma’s House, tailing the end of a very, very hard year. I will tell you guys why and what’s been going on when I’m able to get my feet back under me again. To say the least though I have found myself on Pinterest, looking longingly at getaway places and nooks that promise quiet and PEACE. Read More »

Inspiration Board: Six more Summer Projects I can’t wait to build!

Six more summer projects I can’t wait to build for us outside and out on our deck! Some DIYs and things just have to wait for some nice weather not only for us to enjoy them but for us to build them as well. Currently I’m sitting here in late October and we have a winter storm warning 🙁 So, hears to dreaming about next summer and all the things to look forward to building. I posted earlier this year a few summer projects I just can’t wait to build but I’ve seen so many build projects on Pinterest I had to share a few more that I can’t wait to build next summer! Read More »

Inspiration Board: Gorgeous Bedrooms to swoon over!

I spend a certain amount of time on Pinterest gazing with my mouth open at some of the gorgeous bedrooms people have. As far as Inspiration Boards go I’ve published quite a few over the years but I think this one might take the cake. I am absolutely in awe of a few of these. Considering how much time we spend in our bedrooms (albeit it is with our eyes closed) I am a firm believer that they are a VERY important part of our homes. So, without further adieu here’s some gorgeous bedrooms via Pinterest!! Read More »

Gifts For The Year Ahead – Preparing Your Friends For The New Normal

Our “new normal” is becoming just normal though the way it feels like a Walking Dead episode going into Walmart now I may never get used to it. Honestly I never liked Walmart (or shopping at all) anyway and now I just avoid it – its just so weird. But, on a general basis, I think we are all beginning to just accept how things are and are continuing to live our lives again. Gifts for friends and family is such a great idea – especially for people we can’t see because of what’s going on this world! Read More »

10 Tips On Preparing To Move Home

The last time I moved I swore I would never do it again lol. What a TON of work! Isn’t it just so true that none of us have any idea how much crap we have until we have to move it? The last time we moved it was just down the street but we made what turned out to be an awesome decision and rented a large Uhaul truck anyway. What was going to be countless trips in trucks and cars turned into only TWO trips. Totally worth it when we moved!
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Restoration Tips: Handling Insurance Claims for Storm Damaged Roofing

Restoration Tips: Handling Insurance Claims for Storm Damaged Roofing & Siding. It is ironic this post is coming through to Grandma’s House DIY this morning as this afternoon we have some SEVERE weather coming through. I guess we made the news all the way down in Oklahoma for having so many tornadoes touch down last week. Its been pretty crazy! I know this is 2020 but our weather has been INSANE. Hopefully I won’t have to follow the advice in this article and our roofing and everything will get through this undamaged. Read More »

Which Kitchen Elements Create The Biggest Effect?

Deciding on where to put a budget in a kitchen can really depend on the effect you’re going for. Paint can go SO FAR in updating cabinets, new appliances can go a long way in making a space feel new and modern, and even adding open shelves in the place of a cabinet can really help open up a space. Our budgets are always finite but so much can be done to create a huge effect in a space!

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The Best Guidance For Young, First Time Homeowners

The Best Guidance For Young, First Time Homeowners. Buying a home for the first time is both incredibly exciting and scary as heck. Its a huge step into adulthood and responsibility but its also the opportunity to finally be truly independent. It takes awhile to really sink in but, eventually, the awesomeness of your own home and being able to do with it what we want, when we want to, is pretty much the greatest moment ever. It deserves some time off to really appreciate it for sure! Read More »

Should You Keep or Ditch That Chimney?

As far as chimneys go, and whether or not to ditch or keep, the answer for us will, eventually be, to ditch it. We won’t be using it again and really its just taking up valuable real estate. I did paint ours to make it a little less painful to look at but I really look forward to getting rid of it! For other homes though that might not be the case. Homes where the chimney isn’t in the direct center of the home but on an outside wall may not find a very good reason to get rid of it unless, of course, it needs to be repaired or is somehow causing structure damage to the wall. Read More »