One of the not-so-great byproducts of working on your house is the neglect of your house!  While I’m busy sewing and putting up trim and working on projects, the house is getting out of control.  Especially with the boys being home most of the day on summer break.  And…dude…my house is messy.  The floors are fuzzy and crumby… Didn’t I make a no-eating rule in the family room?  Between lax summer days and movie nights, I’ve let that slip a little. Staring at stuff like this every day just stresses me out.  The boys went to the pool for the afternoon, so I had a quiet empty house.  I got a freelance project done and then cleaned my family room.  It took me over an hour to clean one room.  I cleaned the windows, vacuumed the curtains, got into every little corner with the vacuum wand…the works.  It looks so

We’ve made some nice headway in our master bathroom over the past couple of weeks, so I thought I would show how it’s coming along.. The marble on the floor and in the shower is finished and I finally got to put on the new faucet handles.  They look so classic against the marble subway tile.  They were a bargain find on E-bay for $60. A part of the tiling in the shower was making these niches for shampoo and soap.  I love how custom they look and the functionality they add.  No more wire shelf hanging from the shower head! The vanity is in, but the sink isn’t hooked up, yet.  The dark wood and vintage details against all of the white looks exactly as I pictured it in my head. I even kept the castors on the old dresser.  Little details like that make me happy. AND we

 Disclosure: This is a sponsored post brought to you by Frog Tape. This is my house. Obviously, not in July, but this is it.  It’s a 2 1/2 story Cape Cod style home that was built in 1948.  It was built by a local builder known for his barns, but he built a few houses in the community, including ours.  It is a super sturdy home with solid oak plank sub-floors and plaster walls, but the glass doorknobs are as fancy as it gets.  All of the trim is just simple pine boards.  (Of course, they didn’t last a year before I painted them white!)  When we first looked at the house initially, I was hoping for a lot more architectural detail, but the trim has really grown on me. When an addition was put on the home about five years before we bought it, there was no effort made to marry

This is our first real summer as a family of four.  You know – experiencing summer as a 2 1/2 month break from a five-full-day-a-week school schedule.  I find that I waffle between wanting to give my kids the kind of summer memories they will cherish for the rest of their lives and really looking forward to things getting back to “normal” when school starts again.  When the latter is becoming too predominate in my thinking, I remind myself that I only have a limited amount of summers with them and I will regret spending them wishing for the next school year.  So, lest you think it’s all-work-and-no-play at the Mustard Seed household, here are a few things about summer 2013 so far… My six year old son jumped on the diving board for the very first time ever today. My four year old swam all the way across the

There’s a little piece of wall in my family room between a window and the side door.  It has a light switch in a totally rational place, but it messes me up when I try to figure out what to hang there.  For a couple of years, I’ve had a tall, skinny shutter there, but I removed it when I recently shuffled around the furniture. See the wall I’m talking about…? So, it’s just been naked for a while, but it looked naked.  I noticed its nakedness every time I looked that way.  Yesterday, when I was hit with inspiration, I grabbed some things from around the house.  As I was scurrying around, gathering plates and hangers and random pictures, my husband looked up at me.  “What are you doing?” “Oh, I’m just hanging some stuff on the wall real quick.” I think that dinner was on the stove at