There's no place like...

"ruby slippers" image
found here

...home!  As I mentioned yesterday, we had a fabulous trip home for Christmas.  The first half of our adventure was spent with my husband's family.  It was just his parents and his younger brother and such a quiet, relaxing portion of our trip.  The second click of my ruby slippers took us to my family.  My family is neither small nor quiet.  It is perfect chaos and I love every minute of it.

Living so far from our families has been hard at times.  I am usually fine for a few months and then get incredibly homesick.  I haven't lived at home since before I went away to college (almost 15 years ago...yikes!), so it's not like I recently moved, but I think I will always miss being at least within driving distance of my family.  Seeing my son have so much fun with both of our families really hit me and had me wishing we lived a bit closer and saw them more often.  Until then, Skype will have to do.

As much as I cherish our time back "home", our real home is right here for now and despite my feelings of homesickness, I really feel like we have made the most of our current location.  As hard as it was to leave our families last week, coming home gave me a sense of relief.  I LOVE our home and truly cannot imagine being any other place when all is said and done.  We have filled our home with things we love and find interesting, but more importantly, it is filled with our love.

Enough of the mushy stuff and on with some goals to make our home even better and more functional for us:

1.  Create a play room.  For years we have had a dining table that we never use for dining purposes.  Honestly, it just takes up space.  Since our home is on the small side, we need to make the most of our space and decided to make the nook of our entry room, that was once our "dining room",  into a play room.  The other half of the space will remain a living room, but I'd love to spruce it up and make the room feel cohesive, while still multi-functional.  Here are some spaces inspiring the look I hope to achieve:

I adore the look of this Maria Muro space found at French By Design.

This room by  Sara Sjögren  found via desire to inspire just seems fun and energetic...exactly the feel I want for our living/play room.

I used this Palmer Weiss image back in this post.  I like how the play area coexists with the living space.

This play room inspiration from Pottery Barn has me wanting a space that fosters creativity. 

2.  Create a sitting/reading/yoga/reflection room.  Along the same lines as our unused dining space, our guest room really only gets occupied a couple of times each year.  Other than those rare occasions when we have overnight guests, the room is virtually untouched.  Again, when we feel as if we are running out of room in our home, why not make that room more functional for us.  We have already removed the headboard from the room's queen-sized bed and have turned and centered the bed along the back wall, so it resembles a day bed.  I plan to pile it with pillows (which won't be hard since I have a pillow closet), fill the room with books, magazines, a yoga mat, and some relaxing images.  The spaces below somewhat show the look I want in there:

I am loving this space found via houzz.

I used this old image from Domino a long time ago in this post.

This space found via houzz is also appealing to me.

3.  Paint bathroom cabinets as practice for kitchen cabinets and frame the mirror.  At some point I would love to paint the cabinets in our kitchen, since ripping them out and installing new ones is just out of the question.  I would love to do it myself and think practicing on the bathroom cabinets would be a great warm-up and a great test as to whether it will even work.  This bathroom is set up exactly like ours and is inspiring me to go dark with the cabinets:

Jennifer Worts bathroom found via decor pad.

...or perhaps white cabinets like these in this Ashley Goforth bathroom found via decor pad.

There are several more things on the list, but I think this is enough to handle at the moment. ...more to come as these projects get completed!