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The $12 Closet Hack That Tripled My Storage Space
I almost hired a closet consultant. Instead I drove to Walmart, spent twelve dollars, and tripled my closet space in a single Saturday. Here is the exact hack — and the three small follow-ups that turned a tripled closet into a functional one.
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Kennedy’s First Big-Girl Bedroom: A Southern Pastel Makeover
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This Common Household Item Is Ruining Your Air Quality
I have lit a scented candle on my coffee table almost every evening for fifteen years. Pumpkin spice in October. Pine in December. Something called “cashmere” in February. They felt cozy. They smelled expensive. They were also quietly leaving a thin gray film on the inside of my windows that I kept blaming on the HVAC. Then a friend who runs an air-quality testing service for renovation projects came over last spring, plugged a little box into my outlet, and showed me what was actually in my living room air. The numbers got worse, not better, every time I lit a candle. I stopped lighting them that night. This is…
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One Year Later: What Moving From New Orleans to Lula, Georgia Has Actually Taught Me
It has been about thirteen months since we packed a truck in New Orleans and drove ten hours northeast to Lula, Georgia. People keep asking me whether we miss it. The honest answer is yes and also no, and the proportions keep shifting. I thought I would write this down before it stops being a real comparison and just becomes our regular life. What We Miss The food first. There is no version of this town where you can walk to a po-boy at midnight, and I am still adjusting. The corner restaurants on Magazine Street that knew our order, the friend who ran a coffee shop in the Marigny,…
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Three Drugstore Skincare Products I Keep Re-Buying
I have an entire shelf of skincare I bought after a flight, or after a magazine, or after watching a reel I should not have watched. Most of it sits there now. But three things keep ending up in my actual rotation, and I have re-bought each of them at least three times. This is not a sponsored post, none of these are fancy, and I am writing this in pajamas with a half-empty tub of one of them on my nightstand. 1. The Cleanser: Cerave Hydrating Cleanser I came back to this after a year of trying a more expensive double-cleanse routine that left my skin tight and angry.…
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A First-Timer’s Weekend in Helen, Georgia
Helen is the kind of place that does not entirely make sense on paper. It is a small mountain town in north Georgia that decided, sometime in the 1960s, that its future was a Bavarian alpine village. So the buildings have steep gabled roofs and gingerbread trim, the bakeries sell pretzels, and the river that runs through the middle of town is dotted with tube-rental shacks. If you stand at the right angle on Main Street, you can convince a kindergartener she is in Germany. We did the drive from Lula in a little under an hour and spent two perfect days there. Where to Stay We stayed at a…
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Mama’s Buttermilk Biscuits: A Recipe Worth Slowing Down For
There are a lot of biscuit recipes in my family, and most of them came out of my grandmother Maggie’s kitchen in Decatur. She did not write any of them down. She would not have considered teaching someone to make biscuits in writing — it was something you did standing next to her, on a Saturday morning, while she explained that the butter had to be colder than you thought, and the flour had to be lighter than you thought. I learned by watching, then by failing, then by getting it right somewhere around my mid-twenties. Here is the simplest version, with the one technique that took me longest to…
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Kennedy’s First Big-Girl Bedroom: A Southern Pastel Makeover
Kennedy turned six in June, which apparently is the age you officially graduate from a nursery to a real, opinionated bedroom. She asked for "pink, but not baby pink, and a window seat with a horse pillow." I said yes to all three, talked her out of stenciled glitter ceilings, and we got to work. This is not a designer reveal. It is one mama, a kid with strong opinions, a tin of sample paint, and three weekends of progress. Here is what worked, what I would do differently, and the sources for everything readers always ask about. The brief: pastel without being saccharine We wanted a room that would…
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The $12 Closet Hack That Tripled My Storage Space
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Spring at Fox Run: Five Things Our Second Year on the Farm Taught Us
The second spring at Fox Run has been our favorite season here so far. After eleven years of New Orleans concrete and wrought iron, watching our own corner of north Georgia wake up in greens and dogwood whites still catches me off guard every morning. There is no Mardi Gras parade outside the kitchen window now — just hens hollering and a six-year-old who has decided she is the boss of the chickens. I thought I would share five things this season has taught us. None of these are revolutionary. Most are the kind of thing my grandmother in Atlanta would have told me before I ever left, and that…
