Today is a BIG DAY! After 12 years of blogging and almost 7,000 blog posts (crazy, right?!), we decided to dive headfirst into the podcast world! We are really excited to have a new, very casual, format to connect with you.
For our launch, we decided to go ahead and put up three episodes so can have a little mini-marathon and get a more well-rounded feel for the types of topics we want to cover.
You can stream the episodes here on the blog or you can stream them on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, and Stitcher.
Episode 1: Welcome To A Beautiful Mess Podcast
We decided to devote a full episode to just introducing ourselves and sharing some of the topics coming up in our first 10 episodes. We are big believers in the Ira Glass quote (below) and decided to JUST START. We know our podcast will not be, and can’t be as incredible as we want it to be out the gate, so we consider this our practice session!
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.” –
Show Notes + Links:
-The enneagram book Emma mentions: The Road Back To You.
-Not sure what enneagram you are? Take a free test here (and more importantly, read all the descriptions of the ones you test higher on—you usually know in your gut which one it is).
-Our friend Ryan O’Neal did a deep dive episode on his podcast for each of the nine types.
-The astrology app Emma references is Co-Star.
As promised! Here are a few embarrassing childhood photos!
-Hell yes! Found a link to watch Escape to Chimp Eden. 31 EPISODES OF PURE JOY!
Episode 2: Forever Homes
Emma and I are each currently shopping for our “forever” homes. In this episode, we explain what that means to us, what we are looking for and also a little history of the homes we have owned up to this point.
In the episode we promise to give a lot of links! Here we go!
Elsie’s favorite IG: @cheapoldhouses
Show Notes and Links:
My very first home we lived in pre-blog, so I don’t have any photos to share (at all! so sad!). However, we’ve lived in two homes we owned since this blog has been around. The first one is immortalized in a 20-minute video tour. You can also see the dining room, kitchen and living room here. That home (and also Emma’s first home) are the main spaces photographed in our book, Happy Handmade Home.
My current home has been toured much more extensively. Here’s a quick run-through: Kitchen, Den, Master Bedroom, Master Bathroom, Closet, Guest Bedroom, Guest Bathroom, Kiddo Guest Bedroom, Living Room, (that was before we added the rainbow shelves), Nova’s Bedroom, Marigold’s Bedroom, Kid’s bathroom, Jeremy’s Studio, My Office, Dining Room and Sunroom. Also here’s our exterior and our DIY a-frame and play set. Oh, and I have to add “what my home looks like on a normal day.”
And you can see a full video of the “befores” here. It was a big renovation that took three years and was the learning experience of a lifetime!
I put my whole heart into this home and am so proud of the transformations!
OK! On to Emma’s home links. We’ll start with her first home. As I said above, her first home was pretty well covered in our first book, Happy Handmade Home. But there are tours too! Emma’s Bedroom Tour, Living Room, Kitchen and Dining Room.
And then Emma’s current home: Living Room, Kitchen, Dining Room, Office, Backyard Patio, Front Living Room.
Also! Here’s the “scary house” Elsie wanted to buy. We explain why it didn’t work out in the episode.
Here are the links to our Guilty Pleasure Treasures!
-Elsie’s current obsession—The Righteous Gemstones. Here is the trailer.
-Emma’s romance novels … Book one, Book two, Book three, Book four, Book five.
*wow—the covers really are amazing!
Episode 3: How To Do a 100-Day Challenge
Earlier this year I published this post, How I Changed My Life, and the number one comment (DM, etc.) that I heard from you all was asking for more detail on exactly how I structured the challenge. So we spent a whole episode going over the details and giving tips for doing a 100-day challenge! I really hope it is helpful!
We created this simple worksheet that you can download here.
Show Notes + Links:
-Elise Blaha Cripe book: Big Dreams, Daily Joys. We are also big fans of her planner, Get To Work Book.
-Get 20% off the e-course, Launch A Podcast (or any of our e-courses), with the code podcast.
-Also, just in case you haven’t listened, here is a link to John + Sherry’s podcast, Young House Love Has A Podcast.
-OK, I have to say I am getting slightly jealous because Emma’s guilty pleasures are always WAY better than mine!
Whew … well, there it is! Three episodes for your listening pleasure. We truly hope you enjoy it!
As with anything new, we feel super vulnerable! Learning a new skill publicly does that to you—haha. So please be kind to us and remember that we are still in the midst of our learning curve. We want to produce a high-quality podcast for you, but we also have to learn how by doing it one week at a time. Thank you so much for the love and support you’ve already shown to this new project.
If you want to support our new podcast, you can do so by leaving us a review on any of the platforms where you listen, subscribe so you never miss an episode and post on IG (or wherever you like to post) to share it with your friends! Those little steps would help us SO much to get a strong start!
Moving forward, we will be sharing one episode per week, every Monday! Since we did put up three at once for this first one we may take a couple weeks off around Christmas, but we’ll see. We will aim to keep it at one episode per week consistently. And we are treating these first two months like an experiment, so PLEASE let us know which episodes are your favorites and what you’d like to hear more of!
xx- Elsie + Emma
P.S. Special thank you to Mara Dockery, who designed our show art, Amber Ulmer, who took the photo, Jeremy Larson, who wrote our podcast music and Keely Rust, who edits each episode! If you ever look at us and think “How do they do it all?,” it’s because we have amazing support and work with some of the most talented, hardworking people. We are lucky!
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Happy Sunday, friends! Are you as sad as I am that Halloween is over? Thank goodness for Thanksgiving and Christmas or else I would really be feeling blue. Ha.
Do you remember our 
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Happy Halloween, everyone! We’re going to give you a little tour of our haunted house we created for our neighborhood to enjoy this year. If you live in Springfield, Missouri and want to walk through with your family, the house is located at 630 South Weller Street and will be open from around 5:30-9 p.m. or earlier if it seems like no one is coming through after awhile.
Here is the front living area, and what you will see when you walk through the front door. As you can see, people have moved out and now the space is haunted by ghosts and our Slappy-inspired dummy. You can kind of see this in the photo, but there are arrows on the ground that lead you around the furniture toward the dining room. But before you get there …
Peek through the arched doors to see some spooky cat eyes looking back at you! (Note: We took these tour photos during the day, but the house will be a little darker in the evening … of course.)
Then you can walk around the dining room table and see a skeleton family having a food fight! They are throwing carrots! And bagels! And cheese! The horror! (Imagine my voice like a Disney-spooky tour guide).
As you leave the dining room you will enter the kitchen. In here there is a very tall, evil witch! And also tubes of Monster Blood behind her. Was it the witch’s magic or the Monster Blood that has brought some of the kitchen items to life?! We’ll never know. But there is now an evil sponge, dish soap, and paper towel floating nearby!
As you exit the kitchen, you’ll find yourself in the back living room, which is now a giant spider’s den complete with past victims! You have to exit through a spider’s legs to leave, but before you do make sure to peek into the open bathroom that is located by the back door because …
There you will find these two skeletons in the bathroom.
We already shared what the 
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Let’s talk about tiny house living and style and all the things! There’s beauty in simplicity. We hope 
We built our treehouse 10 years ago on our 100-acre property near a wee little town called Durham, in Ontario, Canada. Durham is so small, if you blink, you’ll miss it. With four kiddos and a sprawling countryside, a treehouse just made sense. We upcycled and recycled a friend’s 100-year-old barn (which had been damaged by a tornado). It inspired us to repurpose items, and use them in all kinds of new ways.
We love to give old things a new life. Years later, we added a cabin into the mix. The cabin is the sweet unsung hero of the Treehouse + Cabin Retreat. It’s located in the same forest alongside the treehouse and laTREEn (the little bathroom.) There’s an outhouse and a pool, too!
My husband Michael has terminal cancer, and throughout the years we have learned how important it is to design the live you want to live. Cancer has been a reminder to live every moment … in our home life, our travel life and our family life.
Originally, we tried to build our own treehouse, and it was a rickety disaster. We learned our lesson and hired a pro to build the treehouse that we have today. Our plans were simple: start with a treehouse platform in the trees, drink wine, eat popcorn, frame a basic outer structure, paint everything inside white (there’s no such thing as too much white), rake 436,493 pine needles and create a simply beautiful, relaxing space.
Like anything, not all went as planned, and I’m convinced we didn’t drink nearly enough wine. But we made it happen. It takes soooooo much work to make a magical treehouse + cabin retreat happen. And rules. And codes. And permits. GULP. We had to make a lot of changes over the years to dot all our i’s and cross all our t’s.
One of my fave rooms is the cabin loft bedroom. It’s peaceful, you can hear the birds singing and the rustle of the leaves in the trees. Oh, and hello, bed canopy. Swoon. And fireplace. And, I am reliably informed that the treehouse porch is the best one I’ve met, ever.
We were totally 
We have lived here for 17 years. Strange, since I am only 27 years old (times two). We started with a house, barn, and 100 acres of weeds. After a lot of paint, sawdust and blisters, we built a pool within the reclaimed stone walls of an old burned down barn on our property. Next up was a treehouse. Followed by a cabin. Made with love.
Over the years,