Top Ten {Tuesday}: Ten Beautiful Blogs (Eye Candy!)

A thing of beauty is a joy forever--John Keats 

I love to read and look at design blogs. While my own house is decorated with an eye toward kid-proof and easy care,  I find it refreshing to look at houses that are a delight to behold. Anything from way-out-of-my-price-range mansions to easy DIY will do. Here are ten of my favorites, in no particular order.

1. Porchlight Interiors

This Australian site has amazing photos of exotic locales. Be sure to catch the vacation spot in the Maldives (the blue water, the glass floor, sigh) along with lovely pictures of hotels, resorts and beautiful homes. It's also interesting to see what the styles are like on the other side of the world.

2. High Heeled Foot in the Door

The blog of an interior designer just starting out. It's fun to watch the development of her career and interesting to have someone treading that middle ground between the amateur decorator and the all-knowing professional. Sprinkled with DIY projects, before-and-afters, and insights on color and style.

3. French Kissed

According to the About page, "French Kissed is a design philosophy for people with big ideas and small budgets".  It's a wonderful place to train the eye to see the possibilities. Don't miss the photo tours in the sidebar. Gorgeousness all around!

4. Decor to Adore

A professional interior designer in Phoenix, AZ, Laura Ingalls Gunn, wants to share beauty with the world. Be sure and check out her ideas for lightening your decor for the summer months and her Oprah audition. I'm inspired by her creative space outfitted for only $15. Wow!

5. House of Turquoise

Part of the Decor by Color blogs. Explore all the different ways the different shades of turquoise can be used in your decor. Not a fan of turquoise? Scroll down and look at the right sidebar to find the blog featuring the color of your choice. How about purple or black and white?

6. The Jewel Box Home

This is probably the one that I have been reading the longest. It's all about making a smaller home beautiful. Genevieve lived in and decorated an 1800 square foot home with her husband and two sons for more than 15 years, so she knows whereof she speaks.

7. Cote de Texas

This is what happens when an interior designer living in Houston has French decor in her heart. Joni Webb also writes for The Skirted Roundtable, along with Megan of Beach Bungalow 8 and Linda of ::Surroundings. (Did you see how I just managed to sneak in those extra links?) In accordance with its Texas roots, Cote de Texas encourages thinking big. Good thing, because I'm now trying to figure out how to raise $24, 500,000. Just kidding... sort of.

8. The Inspired Room

Melissa is a design consultant, mom of 3 and a pastor's wife (wonder what she does in her free time?). The mission statement of this beautiful blog is "to inspire women to create an authentic home they LOVE and for their home to inspire their life." I love it!

9. Between Naps on the Porch

If you like inspiring pictures of things you could actually do, this is the place. Metamorphosis Monday and Tablescape Thursdays will keep you busy with so many ideas you won't know what to do. There aren't enough hours in the week for me to keep up with all the linked posts on those days, but it sure is fun to try! And then there's awesome content on the days in between. Maybe I could give up sleep.

10. 320 Sycamore

Named for the old Granville house in It's a Wonderful Life, Melissa's blog is about seeing the charm in your house and bringing it out. This SAHM has lots of great and easily accomplished ideas. Be sure to check out the "under $10, under 1 hour" projects and "little makeovers".

I had a really hard time limiting this to only 10 (and failed as you can see from #7. There are so many beautiful and inspiring blogs out there. To find many more, look at the blogs the above blogs follow and link to. Happy viewing!

For more terrific top 10 lists, visit Oh Amanda.

Happy Independence Day!

Enjoy this blast from the past and have a great Fourth of July!

Stories from an Unconventional Childhood, Week Four

Over at Mommy's Piggy Tales there's a cool project going on about family history. There is a challenge to blog for 15 weeks about our growing up years, with a different time period covered each week. Spitfire talked me into joining in because she's hoping for some wild stories from my childhood.

In the fall of my second grade year, it appeared things were settling down. We were actually still living in the same house and my parents were still going to college. I was attending a school about four blocks down the street from my house. My parents dropped me off in the morning on their way to school. I was accustomed to arriving a bit wind blown from the motorcycle, so imagine my delight when my mom told me we were getting a truck.

My father was still in art school and had really gotten into large-scale paintings. By large-scale, I mean most were 6 foot by 6 foot. As you can well imagine, these paintings were way too big to carry on a motorcycle. My dad was getting tired of having to arrange for a friend to move his paintings every time he had a show or needed to move a painting he had done in his backyard studio. So when he heard of an old pickup someone was selling cheap, he jumped on it.

I loved that old truck. It was a 1949 Ford pickup. It had rounded fenders and a narrow bed. A big stick-shift came up out of the floor and had a large ball on the end. Best of all, I didn't have to sit on the gas tank of a motorcycle to go everywhere. It was a funky old truck, but I loved it.

One day, we were on the way to my school, something went very wrong. A man running late for work, driving in excess of 45 MPH, sped through my neighborhood. When he reached the intersection two blocks from my house, he ran the stop sign and ran right into us. He caught the front of the truck and curled the cast iron bumper. The crunch of metal and sound of shattering glass broke the early morning quiet.

When the dust settled, my dad had bruised ribs from hitting the steering wheel. My mom had flown forward and her forehead hit the windshield. The safety glass broke into a million little pieces. My mom had tiny little sparkles of glass dust on her hand if she rubbed it across her forehead for years thereafter. As for me, I hit that lovely ball on the stick-shift. In the impact, I flew forward and it caught me right at the base of my breastbone. I had a pretty dark bruise there for weeks. The fellow that hit us? He was injury free and mostly just mad that the wreck was making him even later to work. The policeman on the scene was pretty disgusted with him and told him so.

Unfortunately, the accident totaled our old truck and we were back on the motorcycles until another truck deal came along.