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How to Stain a Fence and Live to Tell the Tale

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Fence Staining 101 - How to Wash and Stain a Fence via MakelyHome.com

One of the many things on our oh-we-need-to-do-that list when we moved into our house was to stain the brand new fence.  It looked great, but we knew from past experience that it wouldn’t look nice for long.  Between the weather, the irrigation system and all of the new home construction going on around us, the cedar pickets were going to go from clean to dirty very quickly.

Fast forward five and a half years.  That fence was still standing there bare.  And you know what?  We were very right about it getting dirty.

Fence Staining 101 - How to Wash and Stain a Fence via MakelyHome.com

The fence wasn’t falling down or anything, but it just didn’t look pretty.  Some of my neighbors have stained theirs over the years, and I decided that this was the summer to join the fence staining team.  Not only would the fence look better, but with the right kind of stain, we could protect the wood from the weather and the sun so that the fence would last longer.

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Trust Yourself. Take a Chance. Stay Scared.

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I’m back from a fantastic trip to the Haven Conference.  It was a fun time with good friends, late nights/early mornings and lots and lots of dancing.

At the conference, Mandi (Vintage Revivals), Ashley (The Handmade Home) and I taught two classes on the topic of Designing Outside of the Box.  The three of us are known for our over-the-top decorating styles, so you know our class was going to be the same.  We laughed a lot, forced the attendees to dance and even bawled on the second day (we were moved when talking about how women feel so empowered when they learn to trust themselves).  It was, quite frankly, the greatest presentation in the history of blogging conferences.

Although we presented the material in a funny way, we were really serious about our main tenets – mainly that we wanted everyone to embrace the power in being comfortable in their design decisions and to keep reaching past that comfort zone.  Because 99% of you weren’t able to be there, I thought I’d touch on our main points so that you could benefit from them as well.

 

Your Relationship With Comfort

Finding your own decorating voice requires your ability to accept two things: the comfort in your own ideas and the comfort in what other people think about your ideas.  As you create your own style and move past recreating favorite rooms from magazines and following trends, you’ll find that you have to trust in yourself and find comfort in your ability to pull off the creative room you see in your mind.  And the more often you push yourself, the easier and quicker it will be to find comfort in your own crazy ideas.

Trust Yourself. The rest will follow. via MakelyHome.comBeyond finding comfort in your own ideas, you also need to be comfortable with other people’s opinions of your work.  The more you push the limits in your decorating style, the more naysayers you will likely hear.  As bloggers who put their crazy ideas out there for the world to see, Mandi, Ashley and I have had our fair share of negative comments about our designs.  But because we are so comfortable in our own ideas, we are comfortable enough to hear all sorts of opinions and just let the negative ones roll off our backs.  It may take a while to get to this point, but you will get there as long as you trust in yourself….

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