Posts By John Petersik

Want to turn simple store-bought cabinets into custom built-ins? “Hacking” something that’s already made is so much easier than building something from scratch, and it can look really custom in the end. Built-in storage is universally helpful (especially in a smaller home – but really, anywhere), and things like the floor-to-ceiling closets in our bedroom, the desk & bookcase we added to our son’s room, and the wall-to-wall media cabinet in our family room have made such a difference. But one built-in that we’ve barely mentioned since we added and upgraded them are the Ikea Bestas flanking our fireplace: The good news is that it took just a few fairly easy steps to make them

For the first time in our lives, after four decades of living on this planet, we’ve upgraded to a king sized bed! We’ll get more into whys and hows in an upcoming post (it’s both bigger and significantly lower) and we see the obvious irony of owning a bigger bed in our smaller house – but let’s just summarize it as: “the things we do for our dog.” You’ve also probably heard this before, but sometimes the way to feel like you’re living large in a smaller space is with fewer larger furniture pieces (as opposed to a bunch of small dollhouse-scaled furnishings). There’s such a luxury to having a nice long 90″ sofa upstairs,