I’ll start out by saying this isn’t an ad. I really like this product and want to show you how awesome and easy it is 🙂 As you can see, I am getting low and need to find more. I bought this at an antique market about 6 years ago, but the seller is no longer there. I found that Lowe’s sells it too. It’s a wood polish and conditioner from Howard and smells like oranges.

This stuff is liquid gold. If you have some dull wood around the house, use this and watch it transform.

This year the rhododendrons were really spectacular. I think they had more blooms than I’ve ever seen.

As you may remember, back when I was doing the Fall 2018 One Room Challenge, we decided that we would skip the floor renovation portion due to our funds and time. The current situation is that we still don’t have the funds or budget to do a proper, long-term floor, but we did find a great solution!

I was talking to a friend (and my amazing cleaning lady), and she asked what I was going to do about the carpet in this room. Ha. She appreciates how we change things up in here often, and she knows about some big news coming to the Brand*Eye world, so she had to ask. It got me thinking about low cost solutions to make this flooring way better. Before I basically filtered the hell out of it to make it look good on social media 🙂 But in reality it was dirty and drab and ugly.

My first thought was to go to Restore. Do you have one of these by you? You should check, because you probably do. It is Habitat for Humanity’s shop where they sell super affordable building materials, housewares, furniture, cabinetry, counter tops, light fixtures, you name it. Anyway, so I was there and found a really dark grey carpet square. You may know the brand name FLOR, which I love. These are similar, but a commercial brand, and I found them for $30 a box. I needed about 7 so it was only around $200. That is a really great deal and less than $1 a sq ft!

The color is called balkan sea and it is a REALLY dark blue/black/grey. It sort of works like a neutral, but in a really funky way. It makes all of the other colors pop!

In order to try to reduce the obviousness of the lines of the tile, we installed them in a staggered pattern (called running bond). It breaks up the lines of each tile so that they aren’t as obvious. Don’t get me wrong, you still can tell, but not as much as if it were a grid!

The install cost was $0. We will spend $35 to have our township haul out the old carpet, but the demo only consisted of labor (removing carpet and staples). Then we swept, vacuumed and installed the carpet squares. They were relatively easy to trim to size with a utility knife and my fabric cutting surface. I say relatively, because Dave was really good at it and I was not. He deserves the credit for most of the labor.

I’d love to know what you think of the new space! The dark flooring really gives it a new vibe, which I dig.

I’ve been neglecting this blog for months, or probably more accurately, years. I actually started blogging 11 years ago today. What the hell? I should definitely be better at it by now, Haha. For a trip down memory lane, my old blog is here:
http://brand-eye.blogspot.com/

What I’ve been struggling to figure out is what to post about. I’d love to know what you want to see more of. Interior design ideas? Garden ideas? Travel? I definitely owe you an update on Lucille Jean, our vintage 1964 Shasta Camper. Stay tuned for that.

And does anyone even read blogs anymore? I’d love to know your thoughts on what you want to see and where you want to see it. If you find that you don’t follow me on Instagram, but sure to give me a follow at @brandeyehome.

The two photos are from a couple of months ago in the winter. And the third is from a couple of weeks ago. I love to switch things up around here. I moved the leather chair to where the bench was, and moved this bench to the front.