I killed three flower beds before I figured out what I was doing wrong. Not “they looked a little sad” — I mean full-on, dirt-and-mulch, HOA-letter-in-the-mailbox dead. Turns out most flower bed inspiration online is shot three weeks after planting, before the deer show up, before the Texas sun in July, before you realize that…
I have the kind of fine hair that goes limp by 2pm no matter how much dry shampoo I throw at my roots, and for years I kept walking into salons asking for “something with more volume” and walking out with the exact same flat, one-length cut, just a few inches shorter. It wasn’t until…
My first apartment had a living room shaped like an L with a support beam jutting out of nowhere, and I spent an embarrassing amount of time pushing the same couch into the same three corners before I figured out the layout actually mattered more than the furniture itself. My friend Nora, who’s rearranged her…
I ripped out my old shower-tub combo three years ago thinking it would be a two-week project. It took four months, cost almost double what I budgeted, and I learned more about grout lines than any person should have to know. So when I say these 32 walk-in shower ideas are the ones worth your…
The first time I walked through a century-old house in San Miguel de Allende, I kept noticing what wasn’t there as much as what was — no matching furniture sets, no single “theme,” just thick walls, worn wood, and colors that looked like they’d been chosen one room and one decade at a time. That’s…
I learned to crochet from a YouTube video at 11pm the December my daughter was born, mostly out of panic that I had no handmade ornaments for her first tree. Six years later I have a storage bin specifically for Christmas crochet that my husband has asked me to “please stop filling.” I haven’t stopped….
I once spent four hours piping royal icing onto sugar cookies that looked gorgeous, sat on a plate for two days, and then got quietly thrown out because nobody wanted to be the one to ruin them. Meanwhile my aunt’s plain, slightly lopsided peppermint bark disappeared in twenty minutes. That was the year I stopped…
Every year my street turns into the same five layouts, repeated house after house — icicle lights on the gutter, one string wrapped around a bush, maybe a spotlight on an inflatable Santa. Nothing wrong with it, but it all starts to blur together by the second week of December. My friend Nora redid her…
My coffee table is where I actually live during December — it’s where my coffee goes, where my laptop goes when I’m “just checking one email” on a Saturday, and apparently also where every holiday decorating impulse I have ends up landing first. For years I over-decorated it. Candles, a runner, a mini tree, a…
I used to think “vintage Christmas” just meant throwing a few plaid ribbons on my tree and calling it a day. Then two years ago I helped my friend Nora redo her entire living room for the holidays using stuff she found at estate sales, and I realized how wrong I had it. Real vintage…