Weekly Inspiration ~ Sunshine

Hello and welcome to my very first "Weekly Inspiration"  post! Each week I will choose a different theme, this weeks is "Sunshine"! Enjoy!

Farmhouse Winter ~ 2017

It is the dead of winter here in the Pennsylvania snow belt region and I must say I am enjoying every minute of it. Seems like every one is eager for Spring but not me, I love being snowed in with a fire going and the candles lit. I love all of the seasons equally for different reasons, but I love how much I can get done inside the house in the winter. All of the other seasons involve inside and outside work but other than stacking the wood pile there isn't much you can (or want) do outside here in the winter.

Winter means getting the house scrubbed clean, the closets organized and just overall decluttering...some of my favorite things to do. 

You have probably noticed that I painted the fireplace brick, more on that in another post, bottom line the red brick wasn't working for us. This room is so small and it was just making the room look smaller and overall too busy for our liking. One thing we are loving though is having a fireplace and being able to have a warm and crackling fire every night.

I love keeping things really minimal this time of year, all of the white snow outside is just so beautiful and I like the inside to be calm and white just like the outside is.

Winter also means sitting by the fire in the evenings under a warm quilt and not feeling guilty about it. The rocking chair is a family hand me down and has become Neal's favorite place to sit, I told him he just needs a cigar now (not really, ew). 

This giant antique wooden bowl is a recent find from one of my favorite local antique shops, Yesterday's Best Antiques , and I just love it.

Neal built us this long bench for behind the couch, it is perfect for stacking extra quilts and pillows. He actually surprised me with it, I came home one evening and it was sitting there, my kind of surprise all right:) I am going to have him build a bunch for us to sell at the spring Springfield, Ohio Antique Extravaganza (May 19, 20, 21).

Winter also means lots of time spent in the kitchen, making comfort foods and baking lots of goodies. 

I was so excited to find another one of my very favorite things to collect, scalloped ironstone bowls, on ebay recently. This ones a true beauty with all of her discoloration and I think my favorite so far. And I found another old wooden spoon, another thing I love collecting, while shopping with my mom last weekend. 

I also just got the most beautiful items in the mail from PCB Home.  Simple and creamy white this beautiful egg holder and small crock are just perfect for our farmhouse kitchen. 

I hope you are all doing well and until next time...stay cozy! If you ever have any questions please email me directly for a faster response versus using the comments section! And make sure to follow me on Instagram for daily pictures!

Farmhouse Kitchen Shelf

Hello friends, hope all is well with you! I wanted to share with you the shelf that I had Neal make for this little area above our kitchen cupboard (which he also made) that I had painted to be a chalkboard. I needed change and had grown tired of the chalkboard and I have so many in other places it seemed redundant. Plus I was looking for another area for some of my favorite items to be on display.

I designed the shelf to look like an old farmhouse shelf that had always been here. I had Neal add a dowel rod to the shelf for my linens to hang on. I have so many pretty linens and I just don't enjoy them as much when they are folded and unseen somewhere.

I stained the shelf first and then painted it Behr's Cottage White then lightly distressed it.

The flea market has been especially good to me this year. I found the beautiful bowl on the shelf there and the old rolling pins.

You guys know how much I love little drawers so I bought this pair as soon as I spotted them on Etsy. I love anything that is cute and keeps things organized. I can't figure out why they are such a thing of the past so Neal is currently building me some for me to sell in my Etsy shop and we also bought some at the Springfield Extravaganza to sell so keep an eye out for those! As far as Springfield goes I hope to do a post soon about it and all of the goodies I sold and bought there:)

I am soooo glad that the weather has finally cooled off here and that we are having chilly evenings and nights. This is our first autumn with the fireplace and we have been having a fire just about every evening and I'm in heaven. We have a toasty one going as I write this actually.  And yes I plan to do a post just about the fireplace as I promised so long ago...I didn't forget:)

We just put the new windows in the dining room and can finally finish up the work we are doing in there and put the furniture back! I have already started to put some things back in the sitting area...I just can't help myself. Here is a little sneak peek....