After living in New Mexico (closer to my family) for the past 5 years, I’ve decided that I’m not a desert girl after all.
I’m moving back to the state that I felt most at home in: Idaho.
So I’m on a new adventure!
The first order of business is to get this house totally in shape to sell in the spring.
I started off by hand painting the entire stucco house myself this summer. With that all done now, my focus is to do all the transplanting this fall and then this winter to work on the inside.
By April/May, I’ll list it then find my property in Idaho.
In the past 5 years, I’ve turned this acre of desert sand in a to a green oasis (unusual for this area). But it’s come out beautiful!
For instance, here’s the back yard when I moved in:
How it looks today:
The cute benches were made from scrap lumber and all the cushions covered in the same cheery fabric.
What a lovely place to relax with the sound of the water to soothe you.
My point for telling you all of this is that with a vision, you can turn your own home in to the home of your dreams in so many ways. Don’t let anything stop you.
Though I will sell this house, I know that the new owner will enjoy the fruits of my labor, and the really cool thing? I get to take all I’ve learned here and make my next home my “forever palace”.
We’ve always been all about decorating the inside of our homes. But what about the outside?
There are many ways to use stencils and your own creative artwork to add your personality to outdoor spaces.
I love decorating with raised plaster stencils. They create a raised design on anything you put them on! Whether you want to add an elegant design to planter boxes,
Or make over an old garden tool shed,
Plaster stencils give you dimensional beauty!
On this shed door, I combined plaster branches from our Raised Plaster Pine Tree Stencil Set with pine cones from the included plaster molds to give it a woodsy look.
Just about any surface can be embellished with your own art or stenciling.
Here, Lynn Low used her own hand painted art to create an interesting mural on her block wall surrounding her pool.
Simple acrylic paint was used to create the tree, vines, bushes and urn full of plants. Where you don’t have artistic skills, that’s where stencils come in!
So before “living outdoors” once again takes place, take a look around your exterior to see what you can make prettier with a bit of art.
Exterior surfaces that can be stenciled:
Deck rails
Concrete walkways and patio floors
Planter boxes
Block walls
Wooden fences
Garden pots
Porch posts and floors