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Love and Specs

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Home, Home Decor, Tour Our Cottage Style Home

Our New Exterior Wood French Doors for Our Home Office

We’re still hard at it on our backyard home office renovation, but the exterior is finally finished! So today we’re sharing all about our pretty new exterior wood French doors on our office and ordering custom wood doors online from US Door n More!

Home, Tour Our Cottage Style Home

Our Exterior Paint Makeover with Sherwin Williams Alabaster & The Best White Exterior Paint Colors

Today we’re sharing our home’s exterior paint makeover in one of our very favorite white paint colors for exteriors, Sherwin Williams Alabaster and taking you through the best white paint colors for exteriors, with descriptions and examples of each!

DIY, Home, Room Makeovers, Tour Our Cottage Style Home

DIY Laundry Room Makeover With Design Ideas, Decor & Painted Cabinets

We’re sharing our little laundry room makeover with before and after photos, all of our laundry room ideas and fixes, the decor we chose including our fun new light fixture, our DIY painted laundry room cabinets and more!

Home, Home Decor, Tour Our Cottage Style Home

A 5-Month Review of Our Pottery Barn White Couch: The Townsend Reversible Storage Chaise Sectional in Performance Boucle Oatmeal

We’re giving you a thorough update about how we’re liking our white Pottery Barn couch, the Townsend Reverse Chaise Sectional in their Performance Boucle Oatmeal fabric and how it’s holding up after 6 months of daily use. We’re also talking about how we clean this white couch and how it held up in the face of some pretty scary stains. Come see our full review and hear all about how the white couch saga panned out!

DIY, Furniture Makeovers, Home, Room Makeovers, Tour Our Cottage Style Home

Quarantine Decor: An Easy, Cottage-Perfect DIY IKEA Hemnes Coffee Table & Media Console Hack

We haven’t done an IKEA hack in a while, and definitely didn’t intend to do another one any time soon, but thanks to a inspecting every inch of our house for weeks on end now, no piece of furniture in our home right is safe from my paint brush! So today we’re sharing a super easy IKEA coffee table and media console hack with a DIY furniture makeover tutorial that can be applied to upgrading any old, beat up piece of furniture around your house.

Home, Home Decor, Tour Our Cottage Style Home

Finding The Perfect Durable White Sectional Couch For Our Living Room: Everything You Need to Know if You Want a White Couch

We’re sharing all about our hunt for the perfect white couch for our living room, all about the things we learned along the way where white couches and sectionals are concerned, what we found at IKEA on the white couch front, and all of the things we considered when we finally chose “the one”! Come see the new, comfy-cozy white sectional we’re absolutely in love with and get all of your white couch questions answered!

DIY, Furniture Makeovers, Home, Tour Our Cottage Style Home

DIY Home Decor: Easy DIY Bedroom Nightstand Makeover

Oops, we did it again! And by again I mean we gave our affordable wood IKEA nightstands another easy, fun DIY makeover for our cottage-cozy master bedroom! Not only are we sharing the before and after and the story behind this makeover, I’m also sharing an easy, step-by-step tutorial for painting wood furniture and achieving the perfect finish without the fuss! If you’ve ever wanted to try your hand at painting furniture, but have been too afraid of failure to try, this one’s for you. We’re makin’ it easy breezy!

Home, Home Decor, Tour Our Cottage Style Home

Budget-Friendly Cottage Headboards We Love: Upholstered, Wood, Seagrass, Metal & More

We love this topic and it seems like you guys do, too so today we’re taking a deep dive into the bedroom decor piece that you can have tons of fun with and that can serve as the centerpiece that brings a bedroom space to life – headboards! Specifically, we’re talking about all of the cheap (as in budget-friendly) cottage style headboards we love from around the web, including seagrass and other natural materials, upholstered, wood, metal and more! What are you waiting for? Your perfect headboard awaits!

DIY, Home, Home Decor, Room Makeovers, Tour Our Cottage Style Home

Small Master Bathroom Remodel 101: Ideas, Decor Sources, Storage Solutions & More!

Our first post of 2020 is here and it feels appropriate to really kick this year off here on the blog with a bang! You guys have been asking what’s up with our small master bathroom water debacle and remodel, and today we’re delighted to report that the work is finally done, which means we’re sharing before and after photos of the space, tips for maximizing space and storage in a small bathroom and all of our design ideas and decor sources. Come celebrate with us!

DIY, Home, Room Makeovers, Tour Our Cottage Style Home

Our Entryway & Guest Bedroom Decor Refresh Ideas Made Easy

Today we’re sharing our super simple, cottage-inspired entryway and guest bedroom makeovers full of easy decor ideas. Even better, we’re sharing the recent home improvement revelation that has been a total game-changer for us and allowed us to kick the “hangxiety” and hang anything and everything with ease – High & Mighty! Seriously, friends, if you’ve ever hung anything or plan on hanging anything on your drywall in the future, you need this in your life!

DIY, DIY Home Decor, Home, Room Makeovers, Tour Our Cottage Style Home

Easy DIY Wood Kitchen Cabinet Hardware Makeover

Today we’re talking all about our journey into wood kitchen cabinet hardware, including all of the trials and triumphs that happened along the way when swapping out our old black kitchen cabinet hardware for wood knobs and drawer pulls. This is such a fun, easy way to give your kitchen a cool, cottage-cozy DIY makeover, and we’re giving you all of the inside info, tips and tricks for how to get it done!

DIY, Home, Room Makeovers, Tour Our Cottage Style Home

Our Backyard Patio Pergola Project: The Full Reveal!

The moment is finally here and we couldn’t be more excited to show you our backyard patio makeover and the reveal of our beautiful new pergola space with Leisure Time Products and Home Depot! With tons of cozy, inviting cottage design details and decor, our slightly boring backyard was transformed in just one day to become a magical little backyard oasis we’re completely in love with. Come see the incredible before and after pictures!

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Maryal Miller Carter

loveandspecs

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Instagram post 17874356132304607 Another look at our backyard home office w/ our pretty new wood French doors! I don’t know how my life took this strange adulthood turn, but I am now obsessed with doors. Had you told my teenage self that I’d spend hours scrolling through the @usdoornmore site just daydreaming about all of the cool doors I could install around my house, I would have spit out my Slurpee & laughed in your face. Yet here I am, pregnant, freaking out about the magic of doors! 🤷‍♀️ I already loved our backyard office, but now it’s about 10x more cottage cozy with these doors & all that natural light streaming in! Working from home never felt so good 🥰 You can see the before & after pics & learn all about how to order custom doors online at the link in my bio!
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Instagram post 17906274784724051 The weather is starting to get pretty perfect here in Phoenix & it’s making me V excited to start exploring the amazing spring front walkway situation around Arcadia! I look forward to riding my bike around, snapping these pretty flower-lined spring paths pretty much all year & from what I’ve already seen around the neighborhood, this year’s spring Arcadia lovefest tour is gonna be GOOD! I think I’m basically just going to focus all my attention on the walkways this year. They’re just so incredible! Are you guys as excited for this year’s spring Arcadia tour as I am?! 🏡🌸🌼💐
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Instagram post 18195918829015109 Oh man am I excited to start sharing our finished exterior remodel of our cozy cottage-cute backyard home office! This space is & has always been a favorite part of our home & tackling the exterior remodel with the help of my parents over the last year has been so much fun & such an education. We’ll be sharing more of how we tackled replacing all of the exterior siding, etc. in the coming weeks but today is all about these beautiful new wood French doors that I’ve dreamed about putting here for years. Years! And they’re even prettier than I’d hoped. Hop over to the link in my bio to see the before & after pics of the front of the office & the doors & hear all about our experience ordering custom wood French doors online, how we easily sealed them to protect them from the elements & more! 🎉
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Instagram post 17897897764829822 You know I love Valentine’s Day so I’m just gonna allow myself to stretch the love fest out a little longer 🥰 💗Chris left this morning for a work trip for a couple of weeks & I swear pregnancy has made me even more sappy for this guy than I already was! 😭 I wish you guys could all know him & have a chance to laugh with him like I do because it’s just the absolute BEST! He’s just an amazing guy. Amazing friend, amazing partner, amazing uncle, amazing everything. I’d never gone through the pics on my phone and saved the photos of us in a folder so I could look back on our relationship over the years & reminisce a little, but I finally did it last night during my typical 3am to 4am pregnancy wake-up & now I’m just over here getting lost in reliving all of the fun we’ve had! 10 snaps doesn’t even come close to covering it. Swipe to the last pic to see our very first photo together that my sister snapped on our first double date to send to my parents so they could scope him out 🤣 Hope you’ve all been able to feel a little love in some way, shape or form this week & if you find yourself needing some more, just DM me & I’ll remind you how awesome you are & how glad I am to have you here! 💗💗💗
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Instagram post 17936172811445601 Man I just 💗 this holiday! I can’t help it! 🥰 Especially now that I get to have this incredible guy as my Valentine for the rest of my life (and my baby daddy). How did I get so darned lucky? So happy Valentine’s Day, my love. You’re my very favorite thing about life & make me the happiest girl alive, day in & day out. May you always find an ocean to ride a wave on! 🏄🏻‍♂️
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Instagram post 17884006397006795 It’s my birthday! And because I love birthdays & basically any reason to celebrate anything, I thought it would be fun to finally share a little secret me & Chris have been cookin’ up for my 36th year 👶🏼🤰We’re closing in on the halfway mark &  it feels pretty awesome. It’s also getting harder & harder to hide this big ol’ belly from you guys 🤣 Everything has been a lot slower around here (well basically me... I’ve been a lot slower) for the last several months, but I have to admit that I’ve kind of loved the slow down. We’ve been in a little bubble of happy. Guess quarantine really got us good 😜 Baby boy arrives this summer & I’ll just be over here fussing over his cozy cottage nursery (which has been SO much fun to design w/ my mom’s help) & Chris will be over there stockpiling all of the kids’ golf & fishing gear he can find. It’s gonna be a heck of a year! 🎉

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