FEATURES
Home Beautiful Magazine - Hamptons Kitchens
One of my proudest moments, particularly home related, was picking up this Home Beautiful – Hamptons Kitchen edition magazine from our local news agency and seeing our kitchen that I put so much love and time into designing, selected to be featured in this special edition, as 1 of the 20 kitchens!
Of course I had to buy a couple of copies, and from the time that I picked them up, one of them was proudly placed on our kitchen bench on a book stand, and it never came down until we packed up that kitchen once we had sold the home.
Grateful doesn’t even express how much this opportunity meant to me, and I am so lucky to forever hold onto these copies and hopefully show them to our future children and grandchildren one day.
Fortunately it is still available to purchase on magshop.com.au, so I will put a direct link below if you wanted to purchase a copy yourself, and if you didn’t want to purchase a copy but wanted to have a peek into the kitchens featured, I’ll also put a link below that to an article that shares a preview ♡
Home Beautiful Magazine - Top 10 Beautiful Rooms
I’ve always been a big fan of Home Beautiful magazines, and when I was reading a copy in 2018 I saw they a competition running with Temple & Webster to find “Australia’s 10 most beautiful rooms”. I thought I wouldn’t have much of a chance, but figured I would enter anyway… and it turned out they selected my laundry as a finalist!!
I couldn’t believe it when I got the call – I still remembered how excited I was telling my fiance Dunc, and that I couldn’t take the huge smile off my face. They let me know that they would be sending out a stylist, as well a photographer to capture the perfect photo that would end up featuring in the February 2019 edition (as you can see on the left).
Unfortunately I’m not sure that specific edition is available to purchase anymore, but between myself, my parents, Dunc’s parents and my grandparents, we probably have about 10 copies – so if one ever goes missing, we’ve got plenty of back ups!
Although the hard copy is no longer available, I did find an article that Home Beautiful posted, so I will link that below if you wanted to have a read and see the other 9 finalists that were selected ♡
Home Beautiful Feature - 10 Hamptons
Instagram Accounts
Another huge honour from Home Beautiful, this time to be included in an article they posted to their website sharing 10 Instagram accounts to follow if you love Hamptons style homes!
I’m not quite sure if they made the connection between my laundry & kitchen features in their magazines with my Instagram account, but either way I was over the moon to see my little old Instagram included among so many other beautiful accounts, including my lovely friends Paula from @hamptonluxuryhome and Susanna from @coastalhamptonstyle!
I’ll link the article below if you wanted to read and find some other inspiring Instagram accounts to follow ♡
Daily Mail Feature - Home & DIYs
Back in early 2019 the Daily Mail Australia reached out to see if they were able to feature my home & DIY projects in an article, and I couldn’t believe it! I had only started sharing my home on my Instagram account (@jo.marie_blissfulbuilds) for around 6 months or so at that point, so it felt like such a huge achievement to be recognised, let alone asked to be featured in an article.
Creating this blog has been so nice, as I’ve been able to look back at events like this and see how far my little interiors Instagram account has come, especially my styling and photo editing skills, because I have to try not cringe when I look at some of the photos featured in the article, haha. But we all start somewhere, right?!
Reading back through the article reminded me that I was a bit confused when it was published at the time, as there were some quotes in the article that I didn’t say, or were twisted in a way that I never intended, so if you do have a read of the article, keep that in mind – but at the end of the day, the fact that anyone wanted to feature my home in any article was such an honor, and even looking back at all these years later still makes me feel proud, especially remembering the excitement it brought me at the time.
And one thing that hasn’t changed and never will – is how much I love a bargain, hate to buy full priced items and love a good DIY project! No matter if my home costs $500k or $5 million, I will always be on a mission to get the best prices with everything on sale, and if I can’t find something that I’m after, I’ll DIY it! Not only do I then get exactly, or almost exactly what I’m after, but since I love to get creative and crafty, I also get the joy out of doing the project itself.
Below I’ve added the direct link to the article if you wanted to have a read ♡
Daily Mail Feature - Ikea Walk in Wardrobe
A couple of months after the Daily Mail posted the article above, they must have seen my walk in wardrobe on Instagram and asked if the could do whole article dedicated to it. I was so happy with what I could achieve with the Ikea pax system, so of course I said yes!
In that home we had a spare bedroom that would have just gone to waste if we had a bed in there, so we decided to turn it into a walk in wardrobe, and couldn’t have been happier with the end result.
We initially thought we’d get custom cabinetry put in, but when the quote came back over $12k we were both quite shocked, so we thought we’d have a look at the Ikea options. I had quite a clear idea in mind of the layout and design I was after, and fortunately I could get a similar result with the Ikea pax system for around $2k!
I often get questions about it all, so I will do a dedicate blog post with exact details, but if you want to read the article and see all the photos, I’ll leave the direct link below (which unfortunately also has “quotes” that I never made, like the other article) ♡
Home Beautiful Feature - DIY Kmart Tray
I was so excited when I saw that Home Beautiful picked up my little Kmart tray hack and featured it in an article on their website!
I’d been looking for a nice white folding tray for a while, but when I found this simple bamboo one at Kmart I thought it would be a fun & easy project. All I did was sand it back, prime and paint it white, as well as add some cararra marble tiles to the top that we had left over from our build, and it gave the tray a whole new look that now tied in perfectly with our home.
If you’re interested in the exact steps and products I used, I saved all of the details in my DIY highlight on my Instagram page (@jo.marie_blissfulbuilds), and I will also leave the link to the Home Beautiful article below ♡
**HOME BEAUTIFUL DIY TRAY ARTICLE**