While I lived on my own for over 5 years before moving to Boston, this is the first time I really feel like I can do all the things I want to do with a house. I think it is mostly due to the fact that in Michigan, while I loved my place, I lived in an apartment building. Now we live in the first floor of a two unit house. So we have a front door with a porch, a flower potter out front, a little yard, and overall, it just feels more like a house than an apartment. Because of this, I have gotten a little Pinterest crazy.

First it started with the interior and curtains. I made new curtains with blackout fabric for our bedroom to match the new bedding set we got for our wedding. The curtains themselves took maybe two hours to make. It took me two months to hang them though. Since we live in an old house, I’m not used to the construction style, so when I went to put anchors in for the curtain rod, I was baffled by fact that I couldn’t get the anchor to go into the hole I drilled. While I could fit an entire pinky into the hole, every time I tried to put the anchor in, it bounced back at me. As a temporary solution so the curtains wouldn’t get wrinkled, Jaz and I taped the curtain rod to the top of the window frame. And then I forgot about it. Finally in October I bought a different kind of anchors from Home Depot, the super heavy duty bolts with the wingy thing on the back, made an even bigger hole, and got the curtains up.

After that fiasco, I got a bit discouraged on the curtain making, and all the fabric I bought for the kitchen windows is still sitting in my craft room. But with fall starting, I had all these grand plans to decorate outside for Halloween. I wanted to make a big sign for the porch, put out hay bales, and decorate inside. Well that didn’t happen. I did make a fall “wreath” for the door though, and put out some pumpkins. Since our door has an oval window, I knew I couldn’t do a typical circle wreath, so after so Pinterest/Googling, I found out there is a swag wreath which would fit the shape better. After collecting the supplies, I was happy to find that the swag wreath took me all of 20 minutes to put together. I bought a broom looking leaf bunch, and then wound a couple leaf garlands through it to give it more volume. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, and now I want to try and make one for every season.

As Christmas came along, I got a little too into home décor magazines, and decided that I wanted a magazine Christmas house. This involved plans for changing the decorations of all the rooms of our house so that I could cover up the extra colors come the Christmas season. Needless to say this has also not happened. I do like the idea for the future, I just don’t think I’ll get it all done at once. Plus Jaz keeps telling me not to make all sorts of curtains for a place we don’t intend to stay more than a year or two. So instead of redecorating everything, I made some crafts that I can keep every year for Christmas décor, like these felt/yarn trees and a Christmas door swag.

I think my favorite craft so far from Christmas though has been the Advent calendars I made for both of us. I saw this idea online somewhere to make a reusable calendar out of match boxes, and just needed the match boxes to put it all together. Thankfully my grandma found me a bunch, and brought them to me at Thanksgiving! I’m very happy with how they turned out, and I think it’ll be fun to fill with candy and keep every year.

Slowly but surely, we are settling into our new home here. While I haven’t gotten to all the projects I want to do (especially since I keep coming up with more!), it is really nice feeling like we have a house without the stress of owning one yet. Although I am counting the days till the end of football season in the hopes our upstairs neighbors will not like hockey or basketball. (Jaz and I cheered when the Patriots lost in the AFC championship last weekend, not because we cared about the Broncos, but because we wanted to not worry about our ceiling falling down on Superbowl Sunday.)