Hooch's Holiday House (So far)

To say things have been busy lately would be a complete understatement. I mentioned in an earlier post that I am currently taking classes to obtain a real estate license...add that to an already busy work schedule and throw in the holidays for good measure and you will get one exhausted blogger! Because of the hectic schedule, I made a decision to cut back on my holiday crafting and decorating for the year, and I have to say, I'm kind of loving the streamlined look. So, with that said, let's take a look at my holiday house (so far of course, I will probably add more if time allows :)

For my mantel this year, I bought a 15 foot fresh garland from Lowes on black Friday for five dollars. I added in some picks of berries and pine cones that I bought at Hobby Lobby and called it done! The stockings are from Pottery Barn from about four years ago, but I'm pretty sure they still have them available.

In the last year, I sold all of my previous furniture in my living room and started fresh...never once thinking about where we would place our Christmas tree with the new layout. The weekend after Thanksgiving, we loaded up the car and drove out to purchase a new artificial tree since we spent a good three hours last Christmas trying to figure out why 80% of our lights on our previous tree were not working. In addition, the tree was starting to look pretty sad from years of use and storage so we decided now was the time purchase a new one. We ended up buying a 7 foot lightly flocked prelit tree that I love from Big Lots, of all places. They had the best prices out of all of the stores we looked into. We used silver and red ornaments on the tree and I draped burlap ribbon from Hobby Lobby around it. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, even if we did have to rearrange the living room to make it fit!

I also bought two fresh wreaths from Lowes and hung them on my stair railing in my foyer using the same burlap ribbon that I used on my tree.

Finally, I wanted to share a picture of the outside of our house at night. Again, I went simple with wreaths on each front window, as well as a lighted garland, wreath and mini trees around the door. I wrapped the garland and wreath in red deco mesh to make it more interesting during the day. Hopefully I will be able to get daytime pictures for you all to see at some point.

And because we like to keep it real around these parts, you will probably notice in the last picture the mess that is my storm door. Apparently my daughter decided to leave her finger prints all over the door today...and I would even venture to say that she may have licked the door based on the picture evidence (FOUL).

Anyways, I hope you enjoyed the tour of my holiday house so far! Have you cut down on your decorating this year or have you decided to go all out? Let's talk in the comments!

*I'm off to Windex my door!*

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Jennifer Rizzo