Entry Fun

While working on our kitchen remodel, our living room got a few new assignments: living room, kitchen, dining room, work space and of course, kitchen storage.

But now that we are done with the drywalling, mudding, sanding and painting in the kitchen (hurray!), we could move our stuff back in and revert our living room back to it's nearly natural state: just living. And with me in the process of putting our Christmas decorations away, I figured now was a great time to bust out (translation: find) our regular decorations (plus purchase a few new ones).

While there are still some things that need to be done to this room (paint the walls, rug, window treatments for small window, new fireplace artwork, etc), with all the snow outside (a couple feet!) I figured now was the perfect time to work on our entryway a bit.

We had purchased an entry table awhile ago during the kitchen work, but it ended up holding dishes, tools and other random items rather than serving it's intended purpose. So we were super-excited when we got to break this baby out and set it by the front door! It's like we had a REAL entryway! Woohoo!


While in the middle of putting away the Christmas decorations, I couldn't help but take a break to decorate the recently added entry table with a few new finds, some old stuff, and a few things we received as gifts this holiday season.

One thing we (and our guests) are constantly doing is tracking in snow, salt and dirt from outside, because our front porch isn't covered. We are glad we have a small tiled area for our entry, but we sometimes still get snow (which quickly melts into water) onto our newly installed wood laminate floors - causing us to freak and grab anything towel-like laying nearby to quickly soak up the mess before it can ruin the fruits of our labor. Since this incident seemed to happen pretty frequently (try as we might!), we started keeping a towel laying nearby for these occasions. While this was fine during our demo-ing and remodeling (and when our living room resembled a garage sale more than a formal sit-down and chat area), we knew we needed a "decorative" answer to this towel problem.

Our solution:

We found a nice woven milk-crate basket at Target, along with some super-cheap white towels that we threw in the basket, and personalized it with a beautiful monogrammed napkin that we had received from my parents (thanks, guys!) as a gift for Christmas. And wahlaah! - our stylish solution to our dirty problem.

Don't you just love those super awesome woven baskets? They can do anything!