Late Summer Home Tour

This is a real, true life late summer home tour that has not been styled.

Hey friends!  I am so excited to share my late summer home tour with you today!  And let’s just be honest for one second.  I am calling it a late summer home tour more because of the fact that I am posting this way after all of the summer home tours have long since been posted than because it reflects late summer.

And since we are being honest here, I decided not to take tremendous efforts to style these photos and make my house picture perfect like I do for some of my home tours.  This home tour is different.  I cleaned my house as usual, and then I shot the photos.  You will see real life in these photos.  You will see some things I would normally remove from the room when I am shooting photos.  But this time, I didn’t remove them!  I left them all!  And there are a few spots that I would have taken extra efforts to style, like my shoe cabinet in my split level entry.  I know I have broken quite a few decorating rules here, but it is what it is.  And I am hoping that after you look at these photos you will still like me anyway.

Because to me, summer time is for relaxing, traveling, spending time with friends and family, and it’s not about making sure my house is photo ready and picture perfect.  It’s about sleeping in, staying up late, pool days, and fire pits.  It’s about cherishing my two months out of the year that I don’t have to get up early and go to work, and grind all day.  So I sure do hope you can appreciate this home tour today, let’s get to it!

I found the afghan you see hanging on my banister above at a thrift store in Charleston, WV for only $12!  I think that is a steal for this handmade item that someone poured hours worth of work into.  I love all of the colors and the pattern that is reminiscent of a quilt.

You can click here to see the tutorial for this letter board I made from a restaurant menu board I found on Ebay.  The vignette around my letter board is a collection of things I brought home from our trip to Kauai, Hawaii in June.  The mason jar contains sea glass we picked up from the local beaches, the sand in the bottom of the candle is sand collected from a beach there, and then there are some other shells and coral, both bought and collected.

My kitchen is going to be receiving a makeover sometime before this time next year.  We plan to paint the cabinets and walls, have quartz counters installed, change out the lighting over the island to something with more clean lines and no clutter, top the island with a rustic wood surface, and install a new kitchen sink.  We have already installed a new back door after these photos were taken.  So that’s a start!

One thing I won’t be changing in this kitchen is the faux subway tile backsplash.  We are still very happy with it.  And we are basically updating this kitchen for resale purposes, so we don’t see the need to change this.

I created my mantle for my spring home tour, and I think it is my favorite mantle ever, so it has stuck around.  At our home, when we have cards, we display them on our mantle, and you will see a couple of cards sitting up there because it was our 11 year anniversary at the time that these photos were shot.

The only thing I have added to my spring mantle is the adorable little white and metallic gold pineapple, which I purchased in Hawaii and brought home with me.  I think it fits right in here.

I am still loving the gallery wall in our living room.  I love the gathered vibe.  It’s my jam.

I found the picnic basket  at a local thrift store for maybe $5.  So far, our dog hasn’t tried to chew it once, so I’ll take that as a sign that he is maturing a bit.  Because months ago, he would have eaten it all.

I don’t have a lot of Rae Dunn pottery, but I do think it is really cute, and the two mugs I have are my absolute favorite.  I recently found this little Hey Girl bowl at Marshalls, so I scooped it up.  I had a clear glass insulator that I picked up somewhere, and one day my son, who is a distance runner, told me that he runs in a certain local area where there are a whole bunch of blue ones lying around.  So I asked him to pick me up some.  That is where this blue one came from.  The only problem is that so far, I haven’t been able to get it shiny and clean.  Any suggestions?

Can we talk about this hat for a moment?  I found it for a very reasonable price at the same vintage store where I found the afghan pictured earlier in this post.  When I spotted it, I fell in love, and I was pleasantly surprised when I saw how affordable it was.  So it came home with me.  And I found a place for it on my dining room buffet.  I have it perched on a tall candle holder.  And the pretty roses are an anniversary gift from my husband that happily coincided with my photo shoot.

It’s my dream to have a dining room that can be used as just a dining room.  But that is for the next house we buy.  In this house, we don’t have any extra space for an office, so we combined the two in here.  And although I would prefer to sit at the desk and work, I have been sitting here at this spot at the dining table because it gives me a better view into the mischief our dog may be creating in the living room.  You can read all about the chandelier above the table.  I paid $5 for it at a yard sale, and painted it gold.

Oh how I love the vintage table cloth on the dining table.  I found it on a visit to Sugar Creek, Ohio in Amish country.  I bring it out each summer.

This mudroom that I made over in the Spring is one of the hardest working spots in our home, but for summer, we fill the hooks with bathing suits and beach towels instead of jackets and backpacks.

That’s a wrap for my late summer home tour!  Although I missed the boat on the time frame for posting this, I still really wanted my summer home tour for this year to exist on my blog.  And I thought it would be fun to just shoot the photos without all of the fuss this year.  Because real life is under represented in the land of blogs.  So I’ll take one for the team today.  Thanks so much for sticking around with me and checking out my summer home tour!

Later this week, I have a fun fashion post coming that is a new idea that I have not tried before.  So if you like my fashion posts, I hope you will stay tuned for that!  I am going to try to have it live on Friday morning. I don’t know if you know that I attended Haven this past weekend, which is a huge DIY and home decor blogging conference, so my mind is swimming with new inspiration and I hope to bring you a recap about that experience next week.  Have a great day peeps!