Mandy’s Home Made Lovely
Welcome to Home Made Lovely, a special home tour series.
Hi, I’m Mandy! I blog over at Mandipidy sometimes, but these days I am more likely to just share little snapshots of our day and projects on Instagram. I’ve been inspired by so many of these Home Made Lovely tours, so I was giddy with excitement when Heather asked if I’d share our home today!
We’re a family of almost five; my husband and I have a 2-year-old, 1-year-old, and a baby due this June. We bought our first house in South Carolina this past August… a 1970′s brick ranch. Instantly, we fell in love with the wooden floors and giant front windows, and we were eager to take on the challenge of creating a space that reflected our style and felt like home.
Both my husband and I like to keep things very simple, not too cluttered, and we are working on making our spaces as useful as possible. Usually we are drawn to neutral and clean colors for the bigger aspects like walls and furniture, but our love of interesting patterns, shapes, and textures comes out more in the decorating.
I’ll let you see for yourself. Come on in!
The first room you step into is my favorite- the living room.
This room sold the house to us. Those big, south-facing windows. The natural light that streams inside. {love}. I’ve tried to keep this room simple and just let it be a light, clean space to enjoy.
It’s a place for quiet jazz and relaxing reading. My 2-year-old daughter also thinks of it as her dance floor. So many happy memories are being made in this room.
The two tufted chairs in the window were passed on to me as a project. My husband sanded and painted the frames, and I reupholstered and tufted the seats. Almost all of the rest of the furniture in the room was acquired either for free or very inexpensively from Craigslist. Those hexagons on the wall were a gift from a dear friend for Christmas, and they are my favorite!
(triangle pillow cover | book initial)
The living room flows into the dining room, which has recently become a multifunctional space. I enjoy being in this room so much that I asked my husband if I could take it over with my workspace. So now this is where I print and package my Etsy orders, paint, sew, and create when I have the time.
This china was my husband’s grandmother’s wedding china… one of the loveliest things I have ever been gifted. I could never have dreamed up a more perfect pattern and color for me, and I love that it’s an heirloom as well. The hutch was also a Craigslist find that we fixed up and painted a few summers ago.
The table stays a small circle to work at most of the time, but it can expand to be a more legit dining table if we need it to when guests come over.
The old South Carolina map on the wall was a public domain image that I found in a google search. I tweaked the colors a little bit, resized it, and had it printed as an engineering print at Staples for a few dollars.
After a serious purge, I managed to get almost all of my craft supplies organized into this bookshelf. Having kiddos and the messes that they bring has caused me to let go of some of my obsessive organizational tendencies… but occasionally, I still just can’t resist the urge to arrange things by color order for as long as they will stay that way.
Tucked behind the tan chair is my desk. It holds my computer, some more supplies, and my two giant beasts of printers.
I am so happy about our decision to make the dining space more useful for us! Having my work area right in the middle of the house where I can be with and keep and eye on the kids instead of tucked back in our guest room is definitely working well for us right now.
Most of the bedrooms are still works in progress, but my son’s room is coming together.
Again, mostly thrifted furniture and diy projects in here. The chevron rug is actually a quilt that I made for him before he was born. A friend of mine has that saying hanging in her nursery: “The days are long, but the years are short.” Such a great reminder, and I wanted it up on my son’s wall too, so I created a design and had it made into an engineering print at Staples. (Printable here).
I’ve started a collage wall in this room with some art that is special to us. A vintage 5 for the number of people in our family, a trumpet/violin duet that was written for us as a wedding present, a watercolor that my daughter painted, a lovely and simple painting of the word “love”, a favorite quote of mine, a camera printable that I found online, a drawing of my husband and I that my sister made for us for Christmas one year, a special love note that my husband doodled for me years ago … Sweet, sweet gifts, memories, and reminders that I love to walk by every day.
The family room flows into the kitchen. My husband built the farm table for me almost two years ago. He’s handy like that. The chairs were bought through Craigslist and we painted them robin’s egg blue. The curtains were one of those awesome Target finds where someone bought them online, didn’t like them, returned them to the store, and then I got to pick them up for 70% off! We got the light fixture here. And the striped wall is actually back in our laundry room, and it adds the extra little pop of “crazy” that I felt this space needed.
You’ve seen a good chunk of our home all put together, but in all honesty, it rarely looks this manicured. By ten o’clock most days, the floors are strewn with toys, there are chunks of half-chewed banana sticking to the couch, and all of the books are off the shelves. And I daily have to remind myself to look for beauty in the mess too; because I don’t think real beauty in a home is necessarily found in the way the things are arranged, but in the bonds of the people who call that place their home. How thankful I am to share this “home” with these sweet ones that I love.
Thanks so much for stopping by! And thank you for the opportunity to share on your beautiful blog today, Heather!
