Young House Love: Book Review

One of the first non-wedding blogs that I started to religiously follow was Young House Love.  I was first intrigued because John and Sherry are from Richmond, and I had just moved from there, plus I have not found too many blogs in the local area that I like so I thought it was neat.  After reading just a few posts I was hooked!  I love the tone of their blog posts and the topics they blog about.  Michael and I have become fairly crafty over the past few months and we have TONS of ideas we want to try out, but most will have to wait until we buy our own house.  John and Sherry are sort of an inspiration to me for when this eventually happens.  Anyways, needless to say, when their book came out it was on my definite must-have list.  Michael bought it for me for Christmas and I think it is up there with my top favorite gift.  I have already almost read it cover to cover and it is chalk full of awesome ideas - even those that us renters can take on.  There are tons of super budget friendly projects and I love that the book is written in the same style as their blog with little hints and tips along the way.  If you are looking for a fun coffee table book or if you like crafting on a budget (or not!) then I highly recommend picking up a copy of this book.  You might not be able to put it down.

Enjoy!

Erin

Note: I was not in anyway paid or perked to write this post, all opinions are solely my own - I just love the book!

Designer Bookshelf

Okay, so I am definitely the first one to admit that I am really not very good with matching, creativeness, or design, but I really enjoy what we did with the bookshelf Michael's mom gave us in exchange for cleaning out things from his childhood room.  We have a wall in our living room between the two windows that was just dying for a tall bookshelf and now we have one less wall to hang things on (side note: we have almost nothing on our walls and we have been in our house for 5 months now).  This bookshelf worked perfectly and just one year ago I would have stacked it full of every book that could fit and call it a day, but now after a year of some intense design blog reading I have been getting more inspired and Michael and I created some pretty cool displays on the shelves with things we already had!  There are still lots of books, but only those that made the cut after much scrutiny. Also, please excuse the picture quality - I need to a) charge the battery on my nice camera and b) take some time to learn all the awesome things I can do with said nice camera.

Full view, still need something on the top.

 Top two shelves, with our wedding wine in the back.

The bottom two shelves have some classics aka those books you read for school and hated it but maybe someday you will read them again and appreciate.  We also have some LOTR and C.S. Lewis in there.

Harry Potter is of course on top, complete with nerdy 3-D glasses from the movie :) and yes we DO know that we are missing some books - those are to come!

Currently reading section with the engagement present from my sisters and our ring box from our wedding.

Michael's beloved Game of Thrones (I just watch the show).

And finally, the history section since Michael is a history buff, and people might think we are intellectual.

So there you have it, not exactly designer quality but much better than anything I have had before! I think it needs a bit more color but I think that is a project for down the road and it definitely needs something on top, but we can't decide what that is yet - any suggestions??