Morning, friends.

I hope the weekend treated you well. Mine was filled with dinner with old college friends (there’s really nothing better than old besties), a run in the sun, a few garage sales, Target (I somehow spent less than $20!) and supervising a little basement project, which I am sharing with you today…

We started out with a very scary and creepy area underneath our basement staircase. It took the cake for creepiness. I’ll let the photos do the talking:

And with the doors open – yikes!

And now torn down to the studs…

Scary, right? Something had to be done, and even though we are usually up for a little DIY action, this job was totally above our heads. So we hired a woodworker, and after one day of work, the area looked like this:

And after today, our built-in staircase storage just needs to be primed and painted and then it will be complete! Here’s where we are at:

We’ll be busy priming and painting the entire bookshelf this week (Benajmin Moore’s White Dove, of course), but I couldn’t wait to show you our nearly completed stair storage progress. And of course, I have ants in my paints to style this bookshelf. I’m thinking lots of storage baskets and such. Any other ideas?

When completed, I’ll take much better photos with the mighty Nikon, and I have other fun basement updates for you later this week.

Happy Monday!

I have another room reveal up my sleeve for you…however, it’s not technically a room. It’s just the corner of our living room (I’ll be fully revealing the whole living room sometime later this summer). Because we live in a small bungalow, we need our furniture to be both functional and practical. In other words, we needed this corner to store shoes, coats, hats, and other necessary house items. Closets and storage space is sparse around here!

We had our eye on the Samantha Entryway Collection from Pottery Barn, but we ran across two problems. First and foremost, it was out of our price range. And secondly, it was too wide for the wall we were working with.

To solve both of these issues, we commissioned a local woodworker, which meant we could customize the size of the piece and it was much more affordable(not to mention we were supporting a small, local business – always a plus!). 

The results? See below…

And for those of you who religiously follow Restored Style, you’ll remember meeting my letter N from Athropologie a few weeks ago. Well, it resides on the entryway bench. It’s the first thing you see when you open our front door and I think it makes quite the statement.

The baskets seen in the above photos are stuffed with stuff. We LIVE in our home and I hope that comes across in the photos I post on Restored Style. The scarfs are always changing, I actually wear those rain boots (remember, I live in rainy Portland), and Kyle digs into the baskets daily to find his beloved hats. This piece helps us organize our chaotic lives and is a great catch-all for workout bags, purses and my keys, which I’m constantly “misplacing”…

A few weeks ago I showed you my DIY earring organization solution, and I also promised you that I have just as much love for necklaces – they need a proper home too!

Taking inspiration from this picture from Pottery Barn…

I was determined to make myself one of these, for nearly the fourth of the price! I went to Home Depot, snatched up four of these hooks(for only a few dollars each!)…

And then screwed them into the wall…

Hung an old frame on the hooks…

And that’s it…an easy jewelry organization project!

Honestly it’s really that easy, but I’ll break it down again:

1.) Select the frame you would like to use  – design style, color and size are all up to you!

2.) Purchase appropriate sized hooks for your frame from a hardware store (mine are from Home Depot and are Crown Bolt Hooks and Eyes #106). Make sure the hook is long enough to accomodate both the frame and a few necklaces.

3.) Measure, level, and mark where you want your hooks to go. Choose a drill bit that is slightly smaller than your hook and drill a small hole in the wall. Then, screw in each hook accordingly. Hook should be tightly screw into the wall and feel sturdy.

4.) Hang your frame on the hooks and enjoy!

And there you have it – my home storage solution for displaying pretty jewelry. I still need to paint one of my white necklace frames a different color…always a project to get to! And did I mention this little project costs much, much less than purchasing one from Pottery Barn?