Holiday Home Tour 2013

Good morning, and welcome to our home!

I am pleased to give you a tour of how I decorated for Christmas this year. I didn't get to do as much as I had wanted to due to my husband travelling, but I am happy with what I did manage to get done. I hope you enjoy.

Front Entrance:

 

Our front entrance is all about simplicity. I do the garland and red bows on the railings every year and also add a wreath to our front door. This wreath is new this year since a leak in our garage ruined the other one we had. This one is from Target. I also added a nice potted plant in front, which is from Canadian Tire.

Our Living Room:

 

 

I decorate our mantel every year and try to do something different each time. This year I added these beautiful dear I picked up at Costco. My sister Shannon gave me this home made snow globe on Christmas day (she's very crafty) and it is a nice touch to the mantle.

Then there is our tree. We actually put it up by our patio door because it has the most space available. We then like to put all of the Christmas cards we receive on the bookshelf beside it.

I didn't get to do much else around the house this year, but I did manage to put a few small items in our basement. We have a big screen TV there so I just put a couple of items on either side of it on the TV stand. 

 

The first photo is a black decorative bowl with sparkly balls inside placed next to a picture of our nieces and a foam tree that Eric made last Christmas.

The second picture is a grey vase with sparkly floral pieces. I think placing photo's around it give it a really nice touch.

The last thing I'd like to share is our dining room set-up that I put together for Christmas dinner. It turned out beautifully. We had 10 adults and three kids over for Christmas dinner. It was lovely.

 

I hope you enjoyed this small home tour. I am already excited about going bigger and better for next year.

Happy New Year!

Organizing Your Utensil Drawer

Thanks to Alejandra from Alenjandra.tv, I have discovered an awesome new way to organize my utensil drawer! I probably shouldn't be so happy about organizing utensils, but it has been fabulous not having to search for the items I need. It's all at my fingertips - literally.

The product is DrawerDecor by KMN Home and retails for about $29.99. I picked mine up at Solutions.

The DrawerDecor system is actually a relatively new product of theirs, only launched about a year ago. The kit itself contains a silicone base with small dividers that all work together to keep your utensils in place. Even as you open and close the drawer, they just wont budge. They are also very easy to clean with only a damp cloth.

They have a few colours to chose from, but as soon as I seen it in blue, I knew I had to have it given that it's my favourite colour.

One of the great things about this product is that you can cut the mat down to size to fit your drawer, which is what I had to do. And although you can absolutely fit more utensils in your drawer without this, you don't have to fight to get the drawer open or have to move several things around to get to what you need. Once I bought the DrawerDecor it actually made me realize that I had way too many utensils in my drawer, a lot of which I didn't use or that I barely used, so I was able to purge a lot of the items.

Here's my before and after.

I really can't believe the difference. It just looks so pretty that I could almost stare at it all day. I just love the pop of blue.

I would really recommend this product to anyone. If you happen to pick it up or are currently using it, let me know what you think.

Oh, and be sure to check out Alejandra's website for some awesome organizing tips and video's!

Happy organizing!

*This post is of my own opinion and I am in no way affiliated with KMN Home or Alejandra.tv.

Organizing Under Your Bathroom Sink

I've had my bathroom sink organized for several months now, but I wanted to show you how easily and cheap creating a nice, organized space can really be. It's nice to see everyone in the family making use of the space, and when your items are organized, it's easy to put things back where they belong each and every time. It's very refreshing when you can find things without having to sort or search high and low for them. Plus, it saves so much time.

For this project you only need two things; stackable bins and a label maker.

The stackable bins I used are from the dollar store and they were only $1.25 each. I used 8 in total.

Then all I did was label each bin and sort my items into each bin before putting them under my sink.

For my bins, I have one side for my feminine products and the other side for hair tools, hair products, razors and cotton swabs, and travel and sample sizes.

I left a couple of items in the centre of my sink, like the extra hand soap and extra box of cotton swabs.

I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. But the best part - it cost less than $10 to do.

Now if only I could figure out a way to hide the piping.