Home Décor | Escape Adulthood with Kim & Jason

A Post About The Winter Blues (and Ben’s Favorite Ornaments)

quack-quack
For the last week I have felt this unsaid pressure to take down the Christmas tree. It’s January 15th, we “should probably” get it all put away. (Hmm, is this a “rule that doesn’t exist“?) Here’s the dealio… when the tree comes down, I’m afraid that the reality of January floods the house. It’s cold. Spring is a LONG ways away. Like, not even in sight. January has the potential to be quite BLAH without the twinkling lights on our beautiful tree.

grover-ornament

But if I think about it even more honestly, the real reason is not the winter blues. It’s this… Continue Reading →

Removable Whimsy for Your Walls

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Kim and I are suckers for whimsy. Especially when it comes to home decor. No, seriously. It’s true.

So it should come as no surprise that we are in love with Blik, a company that makes removable wall decals. It’s the coolest way to add a dash of artistic whimsy to a room without having to possess any artistic ability. Wallpaper wishes it could be changed this easily. Talk about an easy way to transform your home or office into an Adultitis Hospital! Here are some of our favorites: Continue Reading →

Messages in a Bottle: Make Your Own Memory Jar

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At the end of every year, Kim and I sit down and review the year that was. We talk about what went well, what didn’t go well, and reminisce about the adventures we had and the things we accomplished. The hardest part is remembering it all! We review our calendar and archived to-do lists, and even though I’m amazed at how much you can accomplish in a year, I always feel like we’re missing stuff.

Which is what makes this idea pure genius.

Find a neat jar and put it in your kitchen with a pen and a stack of tiny paper nearby. Throughout the year, write down any cool adventures, funny stories, or happy things that occur and put them in the jar. Then on New Years Eve, read all the notes and bask in gratitude at the cool stuff that happened during the year.

Since everyone in the household can contribute, a highlight is reading the notes other people added over the course of the year. Even neater: a shelf in your house that features your memory jars through the years!

Looking for some fun ideas to make sure your memory jar is filled with awesome? Try this.

Hat tip to Jill Bodwin and Jaden Hair.

Wishlist Christmas Ornament

Star Wars stuff was always in the conversation when it came to what I wished for from Santa, but I remember one year when I had Go-Bots listed as the top of my list. (He delivered, big time.)

I’d love to know what I was pining for those other years.

This ornament idea is a pretty cool way to record the visions that kept your kids on their best behavior through the Decembers of Christmas Past. You can buy one here, but I’m pretty sure you crafty types could figure out a way to make your own!

Turn Your Game Boards Into Works of Art

I like this idea a lot. Beckie of Infarrantly Creative was not a big fan of board game boxes, so she did something about it. She framed the colorful game boards and turned them into functional art. Continue Reading →

DIY Kickball Planter

So what happens when your trusty kickball — *sniff sniff* — gets a hole in it?

Turn it into a planter, of course!

Places where this would be cool: a gym teacher’s office, a principal’s office, a sports medicine or therapist’s office, and pretty much any other office in the world (except the Adultitis-ridden ones).

Here’s instructions on how to make your own.

We Decorated Our Kitchen with Cereal

I’ve been playing with a neat macro lens borrowed from my buddy Judson, doing a series of up-close photos of cereal (my secret love). Last weekend, I painted our kitchen — the barrage of beige was starting to get to me — and decided the cereal photos would serve as a cool accent for our kitchen.

We were not disappointed.
Continue Reading →

Lucy Lives in an Art Gallery

This summer is one of big transitions in our household. With the new baby coming in December and a slight reprieve from a busy speaking schedule, we’ve been working like mad to get a lot of projects checked off the holy to-do list.

One of the big steps was transitioning Lucy to a “big girl bed” in her new “big girl room.” (Next up, potty training — heaven help us!) This required purchasing a “big girl mattress” and some redecorating. It went much more smoothly than I anticipated, and the items we’d collected over the last year or so really tied together well.

Among the highlights is the focal point of the room, a series of original paintings I did featuring the beloved Fisher Price Little People. Kim rescued them from her basement a while back, and they’ve become one of Lucy’s favorite toys. I had to share! Continue Reading →

Good Day Sunshine: 7 Ways to Make Your Living Space More Fun

If you’ve followed us for a while, then you know that like many entrepreneurs out there, Jason and I have had to work and sacrifice a lot to get where we are today – all the while being quite unsure if the investment was actually going to pay off. We spent the first seven years of our married life together living and working in a crowded apartment here in Madison. When we were selling greeting cards and prints wholesale to retail stores (one of our early business models), we often felt like we were living in a Hallmark store/warehouse filled with boxes, packing peanuts and the screeching sound of packing tape at 10:30 p.m. Yikes!

It took an enormous amount of mental and physical energy to rise above our physical environment in order to keep our blue sky mentality. I realize that our situation was not unique. This is a challenge for many folks for a variety of reasons. A tight budget may be preventing you from upgrading that outdated decor. Your spouse’s job loss may have brought you to the reality of downsizing your square footage. You might just be looking for something to lift your spirits to combat the negativity that pummels us day in and day out. Whatever the reason, here are a few easy ways to make your home more fun, with a little inspiration from our friends John, Paul, George and Ringo. Continue Reading →

Stable Tables

Our open house was a big hit last Saturday. It was nice to have a firm deadline to get the new office ready, and it was nice to see family and friends that I hadn’t seen in way too long. (The 14 straight hours of sleep Sunday night was also quite nice.)

It’s amazing how quickly snow cones and cotton candy can help people escape adulthood. And it’s uncanny how consistent children are in their desire to combine all possible snow cone flavors.

I think my favorite part of the whole space are the tables in the conference room (we gotta come up with a better, less corporatey name for that room). There are four tables in all, constructed by my dad and decorated by me. We were originally going to paint some checkerboards on them, but then I was inspired by the background image on my blog and thought it might be neat to cover the tabletops with a collage of Kim & Jason sketches. I knew it would be a big job, but once I thought of it, I couldn’t not do it. Continue Reading →

Time For the Tree

In three days there will be hundreds of thousands of Christmas trees being put up and decorated. When I was little we always put our Christmas tree up the day after Thanksgiving. While searching shoppingblog.com I found that this year you can actually put up the Charlie Brown Christmas tree. Shoppingblog.com shares,

‘Well, Urban Outfitters has recreated that same little Christmas Tree. For $24 it can be yours: to display in all its pathetic misery, or to turn into something wonderful yourself.’ Continue Reading →