By now you probably know that historical fiction is my favorite genre, but every now and then I stray and pick up something from a different genre. My feeling when I do this? Well, I usually enjoy the book, but not quite as much as I enjoy my historical fiction. I think some of this has to do with the fact that, very broadly speaking, historical fiction tends to be a little cleaner of a read than your average book. I find that there tends to be more foul language and more adult content in the books I’ve picked up outside of the historical fiction genre than I typically come across in historical fiction. That being said, I still found the following titles to be gripping reads with convoluted plots that kept me guessing so if you are looking for a few more titles to add to your reading list, check out the ones I am listing below.
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The Hundred Year House by Rebecca Makkai
I read a description of this book that said that we aren’t sure if the house was haunted or if the residents within the house were haunting it. … I did not think there was much of anything about the house being haunted but there were lots of pieces that keep me guessing, puzzling out how everything fits together until the very last page—and even then there were a few things that made me wonder. The Hundred Year House begins in 1999, right before we flip over to the new millennia; then we are transported back in time. We become acquainted with the current residents of the house. We are then transported back to the 1950s, and the people who lived there at that time and the tragedy that happens. Next we are transported to the 1920s when the house was a retreat for artists. Lastly, we visit the house at its conception in 1900 when the house’s tragic history all began.
My Lady Jane by Cynthia Hand
This book is young adult fiction and is a retelling of Lady Jane Gray’s story—until the authors decide to take a different route than the actual history—with a bit of fantasy tossed in. I have to say fantasy is really not my thing … at all! However, I really enjoyed this book! It was written by three different authors which I think always makes for good plot twists and great humor. This book made me laugh out loud a few times! If you are looking for a twist on history with some quirky characters and a lighthearted read, you’ll enjoy this one!
The People We Meet On Vacation by Emily Henry
Rarely do I ever read contemporary romance; I just want more going on in my book than a love story, especially because, how many love stories have you ever read in which you couldn’t guess the ending? But, the joy is in the journey. … The people we meet on vacation is a story about two friends, Poppy and Alex, who have been best friends since their freshman year of college. Every year since then they have taken a summer vacation together until one year something happens and their friendship falls apart. Two years later Poppy wants to rekindle their friendship but they haven’t spoken in two years. She decides to contact Alex to see if Alex would go on one more vacation with her as her date to her brother’s wedding. Alex agrees but will this vacation be a dream come true or a nightmare? Will they be able to save their friendship or will things only turn out worse?
The Maidens by Alex Michaelides
Maybe it was because I read this book at the perfect time of year (early fall when the weather is just starting to turn cool and makes you want to curl up with a cozy mystery) but I really enjoyed this murder mystery set in present day England. Marianna Andros is a group therapist with troubles of her own. She becomes even more troubled when her niece’s friend is murdered at the college where her niece (Zoe) is attending and where Marianna herself attended. She gets hooked into trying to solve the murder and is becoming increasingly convinced that one of her niece’s teachers may be to blame. Things get even worse when another one of her niece’s friends ends up dead—killed in exactly the same manner as the other. Will Marinna be able to put the pieces together before something happens to her niece or herself?
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For His ways are not our ways, nor His thoughts like our thoughts.
This year at our church we are doing a year-long series on patience. I think we are all a little apprehensive and impatient about what this year will hold. When a series is done on patience, there will, no doubt, be lots of testing of our patience!
I remember a while ago I really wanted to redo my kitchen. It was one of those things—we looked at our current house and we talked about how redoing the kitchen and taking down the hanging cabinets could really open up the whole house … and then we moved in. And the fridge broke. And the skylight leaked. And the kitchen took the back burner—so to speak.
A year or so later after we were more settled into the house we revisited the kitchen topic, decided to start saving, and made an appointment with a designer to get ideas and pricing for what exactly we wanted to do. I dreamed about my new kitchen! We worked and we saved, and we saved.
Finally, we hit our goal and were ready to place the order! It had taken a year of dedicated saving to get to this point and I was so excited! We bought flooring when we first moved in as we had planned to redo the floors right away but when we decided to redo the kitchen, we thought it would make the most sense if we waited until the cabinetry was installed. Redoing the kitchen was the gateway to getting rid of the ugly, old carpeting and flooring, old countertops, cabinetry that had seen better days, and we were opening up the design of the house as we had envisioned it when we bought it.
We went for one more appointment with our designer to discuss all the details, the exact finish, hardware, and all the details for the cabinets before we placed the order. He told us to go home and figure out a few things and then call him with those details and he would place the order. So we went home and that was when everything fell apart. I’ll spare you all the details but it was one of those times in life when one unexpected expense after another came up, and pretty soon, we were back to almost the starting line in saving for our kitchen. I was devastated—we had been so close to getting it done! Have you ever had something like that happen? A goal that you have been working towards is almost within reach, when suddenly the carpet is pulled out from under you and you have to start all over? Sometimes things just take longer than we expect.
This stood out to me the other day when I was reading about the construction of the temple that Solomon was starting to work on. In the book of Exodus, the temple was talked about during the time when God led the Israelites out of Egypt. They thought they would be building the temple when they got to the promised land. But it ended up being another 470 years after they were settled in the promised land before construction even started! 470 years! 470 years before construction even started, then another 7 years until the work was completed. David thought perhaps he would be the one to build the temple, but his hands were too sullied by all the blood he had shed in battles so the Lord delayed the building of the temple. The Lord declared Solomon to be the one to build it.
Now if I was the Lord, I would have wanted it built way sooner, and probably would have tried to work a miracle or two along the way to speed things up. Many times we want to rush things, to make things happen and get it going quickly. But, His ways are not our ways. How much better to wait on His timing. The Lord wanted to maintain purity. He wanted to make sure He had the right people at the right time to entrust to build the temple. He didn’t rush.
We finally saved enough for our new kitchen. We ended up receiving the cabinets at the very beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. We were doing the work ourselves so this ended up being a huge blessing in disguise—there was nowhere to go and nothing to do so we had more time to work on the kitchen and were able to get it done more quickly which was great because the process of living in a house that was totally torn apart showed me that I am no Joanna Gaines who adapts to living in a house under construction! If we had had our normal schedules while trying to redo the kitchen, it would have taken much longer and I’m not sure I would have survived that.
God taught me patience in waiting to order the kitchen. He spared me the turmoil of living in a torn apart house longer than was absolutely necessary. What things has He saved you from in the midst of teaching you about patience?
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We are in the process of setting up a nursery for our first child! It has been so much fun to think of all the possibilities to decorate a room for a new little one and, of course, there is some specialized furniture we will be needing: namely a changing table.
We had an old dresser that had been given to us that we didn’t have an immediate need for so it had been living in the basement. It is shorter in height and longer in width, making it the perfect size for a changing table. There was just one problem—it looked a little dated. My husband does not, in any capacity, understand my desire to paint real wood furniture and I don’t understand his desire to stop me! If we don’t like it we can always use a stripper to remove the paint. It took me months to convince him that it really would be ok to paint the dresser and finally I was able to get busy!
We do not know what gender we are having so I wanted to paint it something that would work for either gender—that I could either make more boyish or dress up to be more girly. I decided on a deep teal/navy for the dresser. Either way, I wanted to jazz things up a bit. I wanted to paint the outside of the dresser the teal and then do a wallpaper on the drawer fronts. I got on Etsy and found some wallpaper that I fell absolutely in love with (it is floral so my mom thinks it’s a little girly if we have a boy but I don’t think the baby will know that florals are traditionally more feminine) and found some snazzy bee knobs to keep things from being too sweet. (And too girly!)
Below are the steps I followed to update the dresser as well as some links to the paints and wallpapers that I like. Check them out and let me know if you have projects that you are working on. Find me on Instagram @Essentiallyemmamarie.com.
Steps for redoing a dresser
A few notes before we get started:
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1. Select the paint and wallpaper you want.
2. Remove all the drawers and hardware.
3. Lightly sand the dresser first. You don’t necessarily need to sand the drawers but doing a quick sand will help the wallpaper stick better.
4. Using a damp rag, thoroughly wipe all the dust from the dresser. Let dry.
5. Wipe again with a clean, dry cloth. I like using a microfiber towel for this.
6. Some paints require that you sand your surface first. Others will only require that you wipe and dry the surface. For the paint I was using I needed to do a light sanding first. (In my experience the paint typically takes better with a light sanding regardless.) You just need to sand enough to rough up the appearance of the finish—you don’t have to aim to remove all the finish. You can do this by hand or with an electric sander. You want a fine enough grit sandpaper that it will rough up the finish but not so much that you will have scratch marks to fill. Aim for 320-400 grit. I used an electric sander to speed things up. Don’t forget to wear a mask and protective glasses if you are sanding.
7. Wipe with a slightly damp microfiber cloth.
8. Wait a few minutes and wipe with a clean, dry, microfiber cloth to get all the dust off.
9. Now for the paint! Apply two light coats. If you need a third coat you can but it is always better to apply more thinner coats rather than fewer thicker coats.
10. After the paint dries (the back of the paint can you are using will have directions for how long to wait in between coats and how long the paint takes to “set”), you can apply your sealer. I used a polyurethane sealer because I expect this dresser to take some hard wear and tear.
11. In the meantime you can apply your wallpaper to the front of the drawers. Wipe down the drawers and make sure they are clean and dry. Measure each drawer and mark your wallpaper (on the backside of the wallpaper) before cutting. If you are really nervous, you can unroll the wallpaper and set the drawer on the wallpaper to use as a pattern. Make sure to leave an extra half inch around all of the edges of the dresser.
12. It is easiest to do this step with someone: Set the drawer so it is standing upright with what will be the front of the dresser in the air. Have one person hold one end of the wallpaper as you peel away the backing from the other side. Lay the wallpaper on the drawer and smooth the wallpaper with your hand, or a straight edge, like a ruler, as you go to make sure there are no air bubbles.
13. Press the edges of the wallpaper around the drawer and square off the corners. You may need to apply decoupage or a type of glue to keep the edges in place depending upon the stickiness level of your wallpaper.
14. Taking a tool with a sharp point on it, such as an awl, small screwdriver, or long nail, puncture the wallpaper from the backside through the hole where the knobs were. Just make a small hole. Be careful!
15. From the front, insert your tool and wiggle it in a circular motion until the hole is big enough to fit your new knob through.
16. Insert your new knob and tighten with a pair of pliers.
17. You’re all done!
I hope this helps spark some ideas of ways you can redo and repurpose some items that you may already have around your home! If you do (or even if you don’t) I’d love to hear from you! Come connect with me over on Instagram! I can be found at @EssentiallyEmmaMarie.
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So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
2 Corinthians 4:18
In my “former life,” I was a cosmetologist and worked at a salon. One of my male clients was a contractor; he had his own small contracting business and did both small jobs and large ones, such as building new houses. He was nice but he was not a big people person. He lived and worked in an area where people tended to be a little … high maintenance, shall we say.
As I was cutting his hair one day, we were talking and he was telling me about a particularly ridiculous situation that he had to take care of earlier that week—it seemed to him that the woman was being extremely nit-picky. He concluded his story by saying, “I wanted to tell her that it is just a stupid house! You eat there and you sleep there. It is not worth all this fuss!” I think I actually laughed out loud when he said that!
If you’ve been with me for any length of time, you know I care about the house that I live in and I want it to be nice. I currently have a house cleaning business for my day job which offers me the opportunity to help others keep their homes nice and in a comfortable condition in which to entertain and relax. We take pride in our homes; we go to great lengths to make it reflect us and our own specific tastes, our own private retreat, and our homes are very important to us. But—. There are still times when I find myself getting all hung up on the details of a project in my house, or I find myself dwelling too long on something that has absolutely no importance in the grand scheme of things that I find myself repeating this man’s words, “It is just a stupid house. I eat there. And I sleep there.” There are bigger things to dwell on in life. We can so easily get hung up on the minutiae of life that we start missing the big picture. We forget that while earthly things (like a house) do matter in this life, it won’t matter one bit in eternity.
“Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.” Colossians 3:2 NIV. I don’t know about you but that verse is a little more convicting than I would like for it to be. I can think of lots of things that I give way more energy and time to than they ever deserve. The new kitchen table won’t matter in eternity but the relationships built around that table will. Are we spending time exemplifying Christ? Are we investing time and energy building relationships with people, sharing the Good News? People are what matter and not the things of this earth.
Certainly the things of this earth are a blessing and we should be thankful and be good stewards. The condition in which we live will affect how we feel on this earth and you will never hear me say that it doesn’t matter. But, when we focus too much on the details of this life we miss the big picture. Eternity is what this life is really all about.
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How is your new year going? Are you sticking with all your new commitments? Or are you struggling? If you are anything like me and enjoy a quieter start to the year, where you slowly start to focus on things that have a cumulative effect throughout the year then read on for a few of the tips that I have accumulated over time to help me maximize some of my time and streamline some of the more mundane tasks.
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What Should We Have for Dinner?
If you aren’t someone who loves to cook, or doesn’t have much time in the evening to cook, then this can be the most dreaded question of them all! I am a huge fan of meal planning and prepping ahead. (Check out my Meal Prep post here.) Preparing meals ahead of time for the coming week or next few days is a huge timesaver, but even that can be daunting. Where to start?
A lot of people find it helpful to have a meal prep matrix, where you always have a taco Tuesday for example, or soup on Sunday. This gives you a rough outline to follow every week. If you like to cook but can become easily bored with the recipes in your normal rotation, try dedicating one day a week in which you find yourself with a little more time to try a new recipe. Or go to a local farmers market or specialty food store and pick up a new food item that you’ve never used before. Then look that ingredient up on Pinterest for ideas of how to use it!
Even if you have no desire to prepare a week’s worth of meals, try doing a little bit of prep ahead on the weekends. Wash all your veggies when you come home from the store. Cut up veggies a head of time so that they are easier to grab to munch on when you are hungry—having a healthy snack ready a head of time can save you from grabbing a less healthy option later.
Laundry
I hear so many people bemoan the never ending mountain of laundry and I have to say—I don’t get it. I’m sorry but I don’t! Maybe it’s because we don’t have kids yet so we don’t produce quite as much but I don’t think that is the case.
What I have found that works well for me is to only do laundry once a week. Time management experts and studies have shown that while throwing in a small load of laundry everyday can make you feel like you are staying on top it, actually ends up taking more of your time each week than biting the bullet and doing all the laundry at once. I do laundry on Friday and Saturday. I only have one rule and that is all of the laundry has to be dried and put away before we go to bed on Sunday—otherwise it will be sitting there all week!
Another thing people often do that makes laundry take longer is breaking their loads into smaller portions than they actually need to. They have whites, lights, bright colors, dark colors, delicates, heavily soiled items, towels, and sheets. No wonder they dread laundry day! Yes, like colors should be washed with like colors but your white shirts and whites towels? They can be friends; wash them together! Do your sheets and any colored towels in one load. Heavily soiled rags and work clothes can often be washed together too. And what about the socks that go missing and never seems to have a pair even though a pair went into the washer? Try washing the socks all together in a mesh bag. This is especially helpful if you have little kids with little socks. You can even attach a Command hook to the inside of the closet or to the side of your laundry basket to hold the mesh bag and then every time you have dirty socks to dispose of, place them in the mesh bag so you don’t have one more thing to sort when laundry time comes.
If you produce a lot of whites and colors, try having two laundry baskets so clothing gets sorted as it is worn. As far as the actual wash and rinse cycle, my husband and I find that throwing in a load or two before work on Friday, and then switching out loads as much as we can Friday night into Saturday really helps. Unless your water has a really unpleasant odor and a really, really heavy amount of metal in the water, most of your items will be fine to sit for six hours overnight if you throw in a load before bed. It will finish while you are in bed and be ready for you in the morning. Try it!
The biggest pain point with us is clothes that aren’t quite dirty. They’re too dirty to go back into the drawer but not dirty enough to go into the hamper. Ever had that problem? We were able to greatly mitigate this dilemma by using command hooks. We put a few command hooks on the inside of our closet and that is where “almost” dirty clothes go!
Tidy Up
One of the things that I think makes the biggest difference in keeping a tidy home is to do a nightly tidy-up. In her book, A Simplified Life, Emily Ley talks about how at the end of each evening she grabs a laundry basket and goes around and gathers up all the miscellaneous stuff that has been sprinkled throughout the house. Her family all gathers around as she dumps the contents on to the floor and then everyone is responsible to put their items away. When you do a nightly tidy up like this, your house doesn’t have the chance to get too out of hand. It makes it easier to run the vacuum or do some touch up cleaning that might come up.
Cleaning
Speaking of cleaning, I approach cleaning the same way I approach laundry—once a week! This isn’t necessarily true of a few things, i.e., wiping the counters and running the vacuum, but for the most part, I do my cleaning weekly. I like my house to be pretty clean; I really notice when it is not, but the other advantage of cleaning weekly is that it doesn’t get the chance to get super dirty which means it cleans easily and more quickly than if I waited longer in between cleanings. For an in depth discussion of how to establish a cleaning routine that fits your life and schedule, check out my post, How To Get into A Cleaning Routine.
Buy the stuff
Have you had the thought at all while reading this, “Oh that reminds me I need to buy…?” I do this. A lot. I just bought a runner for in front of our sink that I’ve been wanting to buy for over a year and just never sat down and did. There are lots of little things like this. Projects are the same way—sometimes we have big project we want to tackle. Sometimes we have lot of little projects we want to do, such as cleaning out a closet. We put things off thinking when we have time we’ll do it and then we never have time.
Often instead of needing a huge chunk of time to do some of these things, what we really need is to make use of a few little pockets of time. In her book, Better Than Before, author Gretchen Rubin talks about how she established a power hour to tackle some of the tasks weekly that she always found herself putting off. If you have several little chores you want to tackle, or things you want to buy, make a list and then the next time you find yourself with 20 minutes and are debating what to get into next, pull out the list and get busy!
Your Schedule
Are you happy with how your new year has started? Are you feeling bogged down already? Take a good hard look at your schedule and ask what really has to be there—not what always has been there, but what really has to be there. I’m guessing work, maybe a religious commitment, and possibly one or two family commitments are all things that have to be on the schedule. Double check yourself before another year goes by of you doing things you don’t really want to be doing while you delay starting the things that you really want to do.
In her book, 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do, Amy Morin talks about the power of alone time and journaling. We get so crazy, so used to the constant influx of noise and content flooding our consciousness that we never take time to quiet our souls and decompress. Try taking 15 minutes to write down what you did in a day and to list one to three of the most important things that you have to do the next day and see if you don’t feel more at peace than you were with all of it floating around in your mind.
It is always my hope that these tips will help to serve you and bless you. I certainly don’t have it all figured out but these are all things that have helped us to simply and streamline our lives so we are better able to focus on what matters to us. I hope it will do the same for you! Here’s to a great 2022 for you!
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