Better Homes & Gardens- EEEKKKKK!

So first things first, if you are new to my blog WELCOME!!! Welcome to the place where I share my intense love and passion for interior design as well as my obsession with color and pattern. This is also a place I come to share my life, my family, my struggles, my good news and everything in between. SO… first I would lOVE for you to follow me on social media…INSTAGRAM, FACEBOOK & TWITTER. And THEN, if you would like to follow my blog you can sign up right here…

Never Miss A Blog Post!

*E-mail Address *

So now let’s pretend we are BFF’s and I am picking up the phone to call you. You answer and I scream “AGGGHHHHHH!!!!!” Whew, okay got that excitement over with. As super corny as it may sound, I am really excited about today. One of the days I dreamed of since graduating with a Bachelor’s Degree in Interior Design almost 12 years ago. Like I screamed when I opened the mailbox yesterday. If you have been on the AW train for a while now you know that I have been waiting forever and a day for my BHG article to come out. 14 months and 12 days to be crazy person exact. And come to find out, I actually have TWO feature spreads out this month! The original feature I chatted about last year in BHG’s Color Magazine is coming out April 18th AND THEN they decided to run my home in their standard BHG April issue as well! Woot! Woot! The full home spread with every room they photographed and our full story will be in the BHG Color Magazine (April 18th) and then the slightly “smaller” four page spread is in BHG’s April issue out TODAY!

So… 14 months and 12 days of anxiously waiting for one of my bucket list career dreams to come true. Well that was actually a countdown from the day of photography which you can read more about HERE. But then when I really really think about it, it has been more like a two year journey. Two years ago this Spring, I received an e-mail from a magazine editor who works for numerous home publications and had stumbled upon my blog and my home. She wanted to have it scout shot to pitch to quite a few big publications. I then read that e-mail forty five times, looked her up to make sure she was legit and then got so excited I couldn’t hardly contain myself. And that pretty much hasn’t ceased since that day. Yes, it’s just a magazine. But let me diverge really really far off topic so that maybe, just maybe, you can understand my excitement a wee bit better…

Have you ever been to an art gallery and seen or heard an artist talk about the inspiration behind their work? To you, it’s a bunch of random brush strokes but here they are talking about deep stuff and big visions and you are all like UMMMMM… OKAY. Okay well that person is me. Except replace the abstract art with my home and replace the art gallery with this post.

You see several years ago life sucked. Really really bad. It was the best and worst year of my life. It was 2013 to be exact. I had just given birth to our second daughter Winter and I had just appeared on ABC’s Shark Tank for my then bedding company Addison’s Wonderland. As exciting as it all was around me, Mark and I were going through some really tough shit. Ooops sorry I really just said that. It’s just that it was the only word I could possibly use to describe it. I’d discovered “some things“ and I was devastated. Well that was the better of the two adjectives if I am being really honest. Much better. No really though… it was bad. I know you probably think I am crazy for sharing but if you follow me regularly you know that at times I get really brutally honest. And I have shared much of this before. And I also know that we all go through some things. Some much smaller and some worlds bigger. It was one of the those times when you don’t know if you have died and gone to hell or maybe you are having a forever long nightmare or maybe God just hates you. It was one of the three. I was confident about that. So life was bad, I was a mess, I decided to give up my bedding company I mentioned above and I then think sometime around that point I just threw up my hands and said I give up. I just give up.

At this point in my life we were not going to church regularly… like maybe at all. Yet I remember praying hard. I wasn’t the intense praying type at the time but I resorted to anything that had the remote possibility of working. And I swear to you that He listened. Swear it. I wish I had written things down at the time because my memory has faded but there were strange little things that kept happening. Weird shifts in my life that kept leading me down a path that I didn’t mean to go down. Words I said, things I did and decisions I made that weren’t even me making them. Today I truly look back on those times and I think God had his hand ON my shoulder and was finally directing me down HIS path for MY life.

Okay so here is where it gets really weird and yes, I am weird. Although I do now think that His path was leading the course of my marriage but I even more strongly believe it was leading the course of MY life. My personal life. And even though the hard times really were all about us, in the end I somehow became a completely new me. Someone down there tried really hard to make me an angry, bitter, life hating woman but God held on tight.

So what on EARTH does this have to do with a home spread in a magazine? It actually has EVERYTHING to do with this feature. With THAT home (“that” since we just moved again) EVERYTHING… Did you know we moved since then? Maybe not if you are new here. So yes we did and you can FOLLOW OUR NEW HOME JOURNEY HERE! Okay so back on track… That home that we purchased was actually a move I never wanted at all. That home came about because we needed a fresh, new start. That home that I resented to heck and back turned all of my lemons into lemonade. I have no clue how it happened but that home became my diary. Not literally but the actual DESIGN of that home. It was my long run to cool down and think… it was my late night teary eyed diary writing… it was my “I don’t give a shit what anyone thinks about me or my style” period of life… it was my “I need to get my mind off of things” project home. Does that even make sense? Let’s just say that I was so lost and so mad and so confused that I took all of my everything out on the walls and floors and ceilings of that home. And in those moments everything changed. I found me again. I found the me that loves life and loves being creative. That loves interior design so much that I sought refuge in a paint deck. God didn’t give me the easy road but He gave me a canvas to heal. And with every room I healed more and more every single day. My bedding company Addison’s Wonderland became my blog and my blog became my outlet. That home gave us a fresh new start and gave me a whole new world. That home that I resented so much became a door that has opened so many opportunities for me that I sometimes sit in awe. That that situation led to that house that led to this dream… So yes, it’s just a house and just a magazine. But that house in that magazine represents God’s crazy wonderful plan.

Now here’s a peek at the rooms (not the exact images though) that will be in this month’s BHG as well as product sources and paint colors for each space…