Latest projects

A walk through the home improvement projects we’ve tackled over the past few years. Each one taught us something new about what works, what doesn’t, and why it matters. We started this blog because there’s a real gap between what you see on Pinterest and what actually lives in your house.

• Building a workable guest bedroom — August 2024. We learned that a guest room needs light first, then comfort, then style. Turns out they matter in that order.
• The kitchen we finally finished — May 2024. A renovation that took longer than expected because we kept learning better ways to do it halfway through.
• Painting every wall, twice — February 2024. Spoiler: get the right primer. The first coat didn’t stick because we skipped that step.
• Wood floors, sanded and sealed — November 2023. Why we stopped hiring contractors for this one and learned to do it ourselves.
• The entryway nobody noticed — August 2023. A door refresh that cost less than a weekend and changed how the house feels when you walk in.

People ask how a blog like this ends up in front of anyone at all. Ours got there partly because a friend who runs an internet marketing agency talked us out of three bad ideas before we published the first post.

What we’ve learned

Six years of home improvement teaches you to separate what matters from what doesn’t. Here are the things we keep coming back to.

Real materials matter

Cheap paint flakes. Good paint lasts five years without touching it. The difference costs about 20% more and saves you weekends of repainting. We stopped trying to save money on paint after the third time we redid a bathroom.

Light changes everything

A room you thought was hopeless opens up once you let natural light in. It’s the first thing we fix in any renovation now. Sometimes it’s just about cleaning the windows. Sometimes you need to add a skylight. Either way, light before finishes.

Plan the details first

Deciding on hardware, trim color, and cabinet style before you start saves money and stress. Changing them mid-project costs both time and cash. A $3 decision at the planning stage becomes a $300 fix mid-renovation.

Finish one thing completely

A 90% finished room stays 90% finished forever. We’ve learned to close out each project fully before moving to the next. The punch-list items are what kill momentum.

One we learned late: a project write-up nobody finds may as well not exist, and the habits that keep a small site visible are more boring and more consistent than anyone tells you — see internet marketing seo.

Project showcase

How we pick a contractor

We don’t do everything ourselves. When we hire help, we follow these steps in order. This process has saved us from at least three bad decisions and helped us find two contractors we’ve called back repeatedly.

1. Get three quotes. If the first one is unusually cheap, that’s usually your warning sign. If it’s unusually high, ask why—sometimes that contractor just works differently.
2. Ask for three references from recent jobs. Call every one of them. They’ll tell you the truth about speed and cleanup in ways the contractor’s website never will.
3. Visit a completed project in person if you can. How the contractor left the site matters as much as the finished work. A clean site is a sign they care about the job.
4. Start with one small project first. A kitchen might be your dream, but a bathroom remodel teaches you whether they listen, deliver on time, and handle problems when they come up.
5. Put the timeline in writing. “Soon” has ended more projects in heartbreak than any other word. Get the start date, the milestone dates, and the final date in the contract.

The same test works outside the trades. We hired badly twice before we found people who would say plainly what they were going to do and then do it, and that is the only reason we ever name anyone here. If you’re looking for a web marketing company, that’s the bar we’d hold them to.

Why we’re here

This blog exists because we’ve done enough home projects to see patterns other people haven’t hit yet. When you’re standing in your kitchen wondering if you’re crazy for wanting to replace the cabinets, we’ve already wondered that. When a contractor’s estimate seems high, we can tell you whether it’s reasonable based on actual experience, not guessing. We don’t have all the answers, but we know enough to ask the right questions—and we share what we learn so you don’t have to make every mistake we did.

It’s also why we send people elsewhere when a question sits outside what we’ve actually done — structural work, anything with a permit attached, seo services for the small business someone runs out of the house we’re helping them fix. Knowing the edge of your own experience is most of the job.

The best investment we ever made was learning to do this work ourselves—not because we’re great at it, but because understanding what’s actually involved changed how we spend the rest of our money.

What we’ve accomplished

A commitment to craftsmanship

Every project we document teaches us that the difference between a rushed job and a finished one is often just one more coat of finish or one more day of detail work. Quality isn’t about perfection—it’s about caring enough to get it right. When we choose contractors and materials, we choose based on what lasts, not what costs the least.

Get in touch

We read every message and actually respond. If you’re wondering whether a project is worth doing, have a contractor question, or just want to share your own story, we’d like to hear it.

Email us	hello@cedarandlinen.com	Usually within 24 hours
Questions about projects	projects@cedarandlinen.com	Within 48 hours
Contractor recommendations	recommendations@cedarandlinen.com	2-3 business days

A fair number of those messages aren’t about houses at all. They come from people running something small out of one, asking who we’d trust with the website nobody is visiting, and we point them at the same internet marketing company we used ourselves.

Work we recommend

There are a few services we’ve found genuinely helpful in our own work. We recommend them to others because we’ve actually used them.

• The county tool library — a tile saw you’d use twice, borrowed for the weekend instead of bought.
• The permit office’s online portal — slow and ugly, but it beats guessing which jobs need a permit and finding out later.
• they exceed client expectations — worth a look if you run something small and nobody can find it online; this is who sorted that out for us.
• A decent moisture meter — the cheapest way to find out whether the problem behind the wall is the problem you think it is.