Small Updates & Holiday Prep in Our Home

I love being able to make changes around the home that have subtle yet noticeable results. With Thanksgiving coming up, I am extra motivated to get some tasks done so we know our house will be in tip-top shape for entertaining and festivities. It also gave us a reason to stop putting off projects that we've been procrastinating since...oh, I don't know...summer?

First up: installing this sa-weeeeeeet pendant light that we got from my brother- and sister-in-law as a wedding gift:

At night.

At 7 AM. Because I love it so.

It's from Target and from the Threshold collection, but it looks like they don't carry it anymore.

It's MUCH better than the old builder's grade frosted pendant we had hanging over the kitchen sink. I don't have any before photos since hubby tackled this before I could take the photos, but here is the MLS photo of our kitchen with the pendant light blending woefully into the blinds.

It's like Where's Waldo. And don't even get me started on the boob light.

This light is actually a plug-in, but my super awesome husband hard wired it for me while he was off and I was working one day. We won't go into details on how that's done because it's one of those things you do at your own risk and we are certainly not ones to be handing out electrical advice, but if you really wanted to find out how to do it you can Google around for some information.

We also enlisted the help of my uncle to add a coat of paint to all of the doors downstairs.

The doors on our closets and powder room were of the pre-primed variety, but had never actually been painted. Since the trim had been painted, the doors always looked gray and dirty against the white of the trim.

The above is an "in progress" photo since my uncle is unstoppable with a paint brush, but you can check out the MLS photo for the sad gray door in all it's glory.

After five years of being naked, I decided those doors needed some paint for the Thanksgiving festivities:

Much better, no? All of the doors on the first floor, including the back of our front door (which has a happy coat of red paint on the front; you can see the finished product here) and both sides of our mudroom door got a coat of clean white paint. That's a total of six doors--two closets, powder room, mudroom, front door, pantry. On the first floor. I feel like that's excessive for a first floor. We haven't gotten to the second floor yet, but they're next on our list.

I love these small changes because while they're not a huge deal, they're juuuuust enough to be noticeable. Especially since so many of the doors downstairs are our in our front hall, they brighten up the space considerably now that they've been painted.

I'm also in the process of deep cleaning our home from top to bottom. Doing all those fun and exciting things like wiping down baseboards, cleaning windows, and (gasp) pulling out furniture and CLEANING UNDERNEATH OF IT. It makes me jump for joy, really.

Just kidding. But the last thing I want is to have the dust bunnies join us for a delicious turkey dinner.

That's what we've been up to in order to prep for the holidays around these parts. Anyone hang any fun lights lately? What's your least favorite part of deep cleaning? Feel free to spill the beans in the comments.