Time for an update on several of the continuing mini-Hayley Home Improvements! After all, we did have a weekend to work on things…and there’s a rapidly-approaching party that’s lit a fire under us to get some things done. The Living Room Ceiling Fan Remember the poor Boy using my makeup compact to read the fan […]

The Boy has the most amazing (though small) hat collection from his travels overseas. I’ve always thought it was a shame to simply store the hats in a box with other souvenirs. I’ve spent a great deal of time since moving into the Hayley House thinking about what we can do with the hats. I […]

From horrible humidity and temperatures in the 80s, fall made a sudden appearance in Dallas on Friday. Saturday I decided that fall might be here to stay, so I gave the Hayley House a bit of a seasonal makeover: We’re not ready to turn on the heater yet, so the furbabies spent the day either […]

Another weekend, another round of projects! If you thought high-tech upgrades were the only thing happening around the Hayley House, think again… While men were putting things together (making appropriate manly sounds through the process), I stayed out of the way and worked on a project of my own. Because we still haven’t found a […]

Our game room is currently game-less…no Wii, no flat screen, no pool table. While we, and the poor game room, await the funds to make it a fun space, we’ve repurposed it as a Projects In Process room. I finally got tired of seeing stacks of photos to hang in the Projects In Process room […]

We love having guests – even more so now that we’re living in the Hayley House. I’ve finally gotten organized and built a hospitality basket for our guests. If you come to visit, you’ll find it waiting on the guest bed for you: Inside the basket, you’ll find: Shaving cream Razors (unused, of course!) Toothpaste […]

When we bought the Hayley House, no one told me…or at least no one adequately explained to me (!) the scope of to-do’s that one single purchase would bring to my life. Simple things, like organizing stuff become their own projects because you have new and interesting places to hide store things. Take this cubbyhole. […]

With the Great Blind Crash of August 2009 comes an opportunity to rethink our window treatments. Or perhaps not. Standing at the kitchen cooking island, I can look out the kitchen bay window. Don’t you love the oh-so-attractive missing center blind? Or I can turn and look out the french doors leading from our breakfast […]

Just after we finished working on a bunch of home improvement projects, we experienced a disaster. The center set of blinds in our kitchen bay window fell: Thank goodness there weren’t any kitties sitting in the window at the time! Closer examination revealed that the blinds were mounted into the ceiling. The screws simply pulled […]

My friend wasn’t kidding when, soon after we’d bought the Hayley Home, she said: Welcome to the world of everything breaking and Home Depot owning your checkbook. We’ve spent our 4-day weekend (weekend+2 days of staying-at-home) working on mini-project after mini-project. And I have to say that we’re getting a bit better at this repair […]