I absolutely love to visit historical places on the east coast. I love the antiques. I love the crafts. I love old brick, old rock walls, old glass, and old wood. I love getting inspired by different colors and textures. I leave these places with a desire to create things! Here’s a few inspirational photos I took during some of my past visits to the east coast. Maybe they will inspire you too!
I grew up during a time when girls were taught Home Economics. I was taught how to be a stay at home mom and manage a home and family. Kind of like that movie Pleasantville. It was never my desire to be a working professional, juggling a job and family. How could I??? I wasn’t even taught how to juggle home, family with a full time job.
Today, we live in a double income world. Most families juggle home and work life. Single parent families typically struggle to make ends meet. While a double income household is advantageous; it also has it’s disadvantages, like less quality time at home. Grocery shopping is the last thing I want to do after working all week. As a result, we have a tendency to go out to eat too often.
The idea of having meal kits delivered to our home seemed intriguing to me, but was it really worth it? After trying a few, I’ve concluded it is! Since we started to use meal kit services, we’ve enjoyed more home cooked meals and increased our quality time at home. We’ve seen less left over food waste at our house. We cook restaurant quality food at home. Time permitting, we can prepare the meals together. We don’t have to spend time shopping for ingredients. We don’t have to buy extra ingredients that end up spoiling. I get to review the proposed meals in advance and make changes based on what we might like to eat. I can skip a delivery week, which works well if we are going to be traveling. I can even change the delivery day if needed. All we need to provide is a few pantry items (IE: salt, pepper, oil) and kitchen tools (IE: pans, utinsels).
I recently cooked Sun Basket’s Braised chicken with carrots potatoes and thyme recipe. Cook time was 20-35 minutes. I was waiting for my husband to get home from work, so I extended the cooking time by reducing the heat. I chose to add Vermouth instead of white wine or water. We really enjoyed this meal, had plenty of food to eat and there was a small amount of leftovers.
Click this link If you’d like to read more about our Sun Basket Meal Kit Experience.
Inspiring Home Life,
Sometimes you just gotta do what you envision you wanna do.
I had wanted to change the look of our old, country dining room table, chairs and hutch instead of buying new furniture. I was tired of the dated look. I envisioned that the table, chairs and hutch could use some new color. Our current house has a lot of stainless steel and gray accents which inspired my new color choice.
I bought some charcoal gray chalk paint to update the set for a fraction of the price of buying a new dining set. I decided not to distress the chalk paint because the old white paint already had a natural aged look, and I loved how the charcoal looked next to the old white paint.
I decided the old, wood knobs on the hutch had to go, so I visited one of my favorite stores, Hobby Lobby. I found some antiqued silver/glass knobs to add to the hutch. The new look took our old dining set to a whole new level.
Inspiring home life,
We bought a new construction house in 2016. We didn’t get to pick fixtures, colors, or other touches. We were only allowed to pick the exterior colors based on 3 choices offered by the builder, and we were able to pick the finish on the fixtures.
Turns out the house had a bathroom faucet design problem we didn’t notice until after we closed. The water flow ran too close to the sink rim. This made it hard to wash your hands so close to the sink bowl and if the water was running slow, it would flow onto the countertop. This was a big problem when the grandchildren came to visit, we would end up with water on the floor!
We shopped for a faucet with a longer reach, and replaced the faucet.
Now the water flows into the middle of the sink bowl and doesn’t hit the countertop!
And I really like the new faucet look better than the original. Win! Win!
The Relentless Redecorator
