The Homebody House

I wouldn’t say our house is clean all the time but we do keep it pretty tidy and picked up most days considering my Mom watches both my daughter and my niece at our house during the week and babies are messy! We’re lucky enough that while my Mom is there she does everyone’s laundry, the dishes, and pretty much anything else I ask for her help with, so I’m grateful for the extra help! Thanks Mom!

So, while the deep cleaning is usually a bi-weekly chore around here, it can be hard to keep up with all the household duties on any given day but the tasks below are ones I do, do every day or are key factors in keeping our house in relatively cleanish shape all the time.

Choose Washable/Wipeable Furniture

I love the look of a light colored sofa but when it comes to kids and even adults, messes are inevitable so keeping it clean is important to me. One of the many reasons I love our sofa (more about that here) is because whenever those messy life moments occur, it’s as simple as stripping all the covers off the couch and throwing them in the wash! Our sofa has taken a beating – from blueberries, blood, and bottles – so after a quick wash in the washer and it’s as good as new.

Our dark indigo wool rug and molded plastic dining chairs are also clutch when it comes to keeping things looking clean and tidy. Any spills or grape smashing is easily cleaned up with a quick scrub of a baby wipe. Easy peasy!

Nightly Quick Pick-Up

After the baby goes to bed I usually do a quick 15 min pick-up of toys, clothes, shoes, returning approx 45 balls back to the ball pit, etc. I’ll fold throw blankets and put them away, fluff the couch, sort the mail, but it’s usually just a general put things where they belong session that I tackle nightly. Some nights I get distracted and take on a bigger task but most nights its just a quick sweep through the house to get it ready to be destroyed all over again the next day.

Make Toy Clean-Up Easy

We have a cabinet full of toys in the living room built-ins but we keep one large basket of toys out in the open. We rotate the toys in and out of the cabinet into the basket in the living room but having the basket out not only promotes self play but it makes for easy clean-up too. When I’m doing my quick pick-up, I literally toss the toys into the basket and I’m done.

Same for books in the nursery…we opted out of book shelves or book ledges in favor of 2 large baskets filled with books which makes putting the books away a breeze. Making toy clean-up easy and uncomplicated also allows our daughter in on the action. She’s now at an age where she can participate in the clean-up before she goes to bed and it teaches her about cleaning up after herself.

Vacuum Frequently or Go Automated

I try to vacuum the rugs and around / under the dinner table every other night and this is my go-to vacuum of choice. It holds a 20 min charge which is just enough time to get the most trafficked areas vacuumed without having to drag out the big guns. When it comes to whole house vacuuming, I enlist our robot vacuum for that! I usually run our Neato, Flo, on Saturday & Monday – usually right before we head out the door for an errand so that when we arrive back home, everything is freshly vacuumed and looking good!

These 4 simple tips are what we subscribe to around here and help keep our spaces mostly clean, most days. Any other quick tips you’d like to share?

I thought it might be fun to start a new series where I share something I’m loving lately. It seems like I’m always online looking for that one thing and in my search I end up with so many good alternatives so…why not pass those finds onto you?

Laundry is probably last on the list of things I like to do. Scratch that – putting away laundry is last on the list of things I like to do. Anyone else? But dirty laundry has to be stored somewhere until we run out of underwear and I’m forced to do it, so why not keep the dirty laundry in a vessel you don’t mind looking at?

The two hampers we already have – the one in the master and the one we keep in the nursery (we have this one in a different colorway), were both TJ Maxx/HomeGoods finds! I love oversized seagrass baskets as hampers and the two I found were a steal – less than $50. I linked a few similar options below if you like that aesthetic but always check out your local TJ Maxx/HomeGoods for similar options at a lower price point.

Click on any of the pictures and it’ll take you directly to the linked site. Really loving #5, #7, #8, and #12 from the round-up above.

I plan to keep sharing finds like this, but if you enjoyed this post and would like to see something specific in a future post, just leave a comment and let me know!

You may have noticed a few changes around here – ahem…peep that new blog name! Did you notice?

At the end of last year I decided to make a few blog changes. I switched platforms. I purchased my very first domain (serious stuff, people!). I also wanted a new, cleaner look and decided to finally change the blog name. It’s been something that I’ve been secretly contemplating and wanting to do for a while but never shared with anyone. Not even with Sikmon. So when I brought it up to him at the end of last year he was all…huh? Why?

I never felt like Made2Make was it for what I wanted this space to be and I always felt like the name lent itself more to a small craft / DIY impression – which is great but not really relevant to what I talk about most: our life and living in this house. But when you start a blog you have to choose a name and that’s just sorta what I landed on. I never really knew what it meant or how to explain the name to others when asked and I never felt proud about sharing what I write about on the blog – mainly because I was embarrassed by a name that literally meant nothing.

When I started blogging in 2015 I didn’t really know what this would turn into. It hasn’t turned into much (yet) but what I’ve discovered is that I’m passionate about DIY, interior design, and home décor. I’ve never been passionate about anything (aside from being a Mom) so it’s pretty cool to find something you love and have people tell you you’re good at doing what you love. For that alone, I’m forever grateful.

For now, this is just a hobby but maybe some day it can be something more. I get on here and share what we’re up to when I can but occasionally I hear that people actually do read and do enjoy the updates so it pushes me to keep at it. I say every year that I want to devote more time to the blog and some years it happens and other years it doesn’t. That’s just the truth. Changing the blog name is the first step I’m making towards really reaching and chasing after this passion of mine.

But why The Homebody House?

Because when you get right down to it, that’s exactly what our house is – a house full of homebodies! So it was time for a new name for the blog – one that more accurately reflected our life and who we are.

I do have a sneaking suspicion though that our daughter is NOT a homebody…but Sikmon and I? Hardcore homebodies through and through. We always joke that we’ll die in one of two places – at home or at the home improvement store – it’s so true! We love our house, being at home, and renovating our house to make it our home – our own home.

Welcome! We’re glad you’re here.

Last year we hosted our very first Thanksgiving with about 20 family members. Most of those 20 family members have been to our house before, have seen the progress we’ve made over the last almost 2 years, and have witnessed the slow transformation our home has undergone. But for some odd reason, a week before Thanksgiving I had this brilliant idea to give our guest bath a little love as if I was trying to impress people who needed no impressing AND right before all the chaos of prepping for a party of 20. #genius

You see…our guest bath is probably the worst room in our entire home – the most outdated and abused. It had definitely seen better days – yellowed walls, peeling laminate, need I say more? – and this was the very reason I added it to our 2017 House Goals list at the beginning of the year. We had the best of intentions to give this little room a full overhaul – tub, tile, the works – but then life got in the way and our money tree out back stopped producing which meant that all plans we made just fizzled out.

Case in point:

Also…paint swatches I painted on the wall like week 3 of homeownership still here almost 2 years later.

With December just weeks away, I kinda knew we weren’t going to get to the bathroom this year. So I started looking around and saw that even though the floor and tub were (still are) in desperate need of replacement – a little paint could go a long way and at least make it look OK. Lucky for me, I had tons of leftover paint from other house projects just lying around. So I decided – 6 days before Thanksgiving – to refresh our guest bath using stuff I already had on hand.

Here’s the result:

The very first thing I did was paint the entire bathroom – Super White by Sherwin Williams – left over from this project. The original color – a very creamy / ivory did nothing for the bathroom except make it look and feel old and outdated. The fresh coat of bright white paint brightened everything right up and instantly made the room feel bigger and cleaner.

The original bathroom vanity was fine. It looked like it was painted with nothing more than primer but I decided to paint it a light grey – probably the 1st decent paint job this thing has ever had. I took all the paint samples I had when we were trying to choose the perfect shade of grey for the living room, mixed them all together, and went after the vanity with my batch of paint. It turned out great and it was free.

At the last minute I changed out the hardware for these champagne bronze drum knobs and guys…new hardware is always a good idea. Trust. I grabbed 5 of these knobs at Home Depot and BAM! So much better…

The cultured marble top on the vanity looks even yellower than it did before against the fresh white walls and it’s a bit more obvious now but that’ll all get remedied this year. Until then, it’s fine people. It’s fine.

The mirror above the vanity is your typical builder grade mirror but instead of extending across the entire back wall and behind the toilet like most do, it’s just a giant square that someone took the extra time (not me) to frame out with some simple trim. Thank you who ever you are. It could totally be worse and it could absolutely be way better. After I shot all these photos, I realized how much better it would look if I painted the frame black – which is an easy fix and I have plenty of black paint lying around so that’s still something I want to do in here.

We swapped out the old light fixture for the one that was already living in our master bathroom. Not my dream fixture but it was the right color, nice enough, and free. Imagine the look on Sikmon’s face when I asked him to swap fixtures. A giant eye roll and a look of pure annoyance. His response afterwards? “This light looks awesome in here.”

Well…duh.

I also think I might eventually swap out the frosted shades for some clear ones – another super easy, inexpensive way to update what you already have without spending tons of money. I saw these in store the other day and thinking they might look great in here.

We spent about $40 to add some much needed interest to the once plain and very boring back wall. It was easily the biggest transformation (other than swapping the light) of the entire bathroom and the best $40 we ever spent. The new trim work got a fresh white coat of paint too – Extra White by Behr (same paint used on all our trim work throughout the house – and we added 3 black hooks to hold some inexpensive Turkish towels and give this wall some purpose.

We did absolutely nothing to the shower area except hide it’s ugliness with a shower curtain that we already had. It too looks yellower than it did before much like the vanity top but its days are numbered.

Other than that, the updates we made were all in the form of accessories. We removed the old towel bar in favor some new art, threw a new rug down and called it good. Crazy how much a space can change in 6 days, right?

Come back tomorrow for all the sources where I break down how this room refresh cost under $150!