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some of my favorite posts

decorate with me – curiosity cabinet

by Kaylah Stroup October 15, 2020

When we bought our new home, the owner offered to leave us any pieces of furniture that we wanted. He was getting divorced and most likely moving to a much smaller home. (That’s just me assuming because this place is massive!) It kind of felt awkward going through the house and pointing out things we wanted to keep. One thing I wasn’t shy about asking for was this glass cabinet.

I’d been eyeing up a similar one (perhaps even the same one?) from Ikea for years! I just thought it would make the most perfect display cabinet for oddities. In my old apartment, I simply didn’t have the room. So when I spotted it in the bathroom of this house, I had to make sure it stayed with the house.

We ended up bringing it downstairs and as luck would have it, my living room has the perfect wall for it.

metal detecting our 150 year old yard!

by Kaylah Stroup October 7, 2020

this post contains affiliate links.

a few of our found treasures from the yard

One of the first things I thought after falling in love with our 150-year-old house at the first showing was ‘holy cow, there’s gotta be lots of treasure in this yard!’ We had the opportunity to meet the previous owner and while showing us some random bits and bobs he’d saved from around the house, metal detecting came up in the conversation. He said that at one point he’d let a friend do a little detecting but nothing was really found. I think Jeff and I both kind of took that as a challenge because a house this old? There has to be something cool buried in the yard!

It’s been just over three weeks since we moved in and while we’ve done a little bit of metal detecting here and there, over the weekend was the first time we really spent some time searching for treasure.

Our equipment – metal detector ▴ pinpointer

I highly recommend both! The metal detector is a great brand and this is a solid model. Easy enough for beginners to start with but good enough for enthusiasts as well! Personally, I think a pinpointer is a must. It and the metal detector go hand in hand. You’re going to have a much better time looking for treasures if you have the pinpointer’s help!

I’m already so excited to get back out there and spend another couple of hours hunting for treasures in our yard. xoxo

we bought a house!

by Kaylah Stroup September 28, 2020

If you aren’t following me on Instagram or Youtube, you may have missed the big news – Jeff and I bought a house. Not just any house, we bought a 150-year-old mansion!

I did a bunch of googling on the definition of a mansion but there seem to be a lot of different ideas of what qualifies a place as one. Fact is, this house is massive. The biggest one I’ve ever lived in, for sure. It also has what we assume are maid’s quarters and a back staircase from there to the kitchen so mansion it is!

Seven bedrooms, one and a half bathrooms, three and a third acres. It’s truly a slice of heaven. We’d been talking about leaving the city and buying a home for well over a year and seriously looking for around six months. It was starting to feel like we were never going to find anything… then we found this gem. It was worth the wait.

She’s a little rough around the edges but exactly what we were looking for. Any worse shape and we’d probably be in over our heads. Any better shape and we wouldn’t have been able to spend that much. This place has great bones and is ready for us to add our touches throughout. I am SO excited to finally have the freedom to do whatever I want to a house.

Wonderful built ins in our bedroom.

My future office.

The living room.

Moving into a house that needs a bit of work in basically every room is super exhausting. It feels like I haven’t sat still for more than ten minutes since we got the keys. I am certainly not complaining though. I felt like we were wasting so much of our lives holed up in our apartment. We had zero outdoor space and had definitely outgrown the apartment itself. It feels amazing to have some privacy and land roam! I’m tired but literally couldn’t be happier.

I’m trying my best to document everything that’s going on here. I’m taking lots of before photos and filming snippets of the work. I definitely plan on sharing the journey with y’all! (So, by all means, if you have any house content video requests – lemme know!)

I’m so excited to see how it’s all looking in another couple of weeks. There will be projects for years to come but I am READY! Hope you’re excited to follow along! xoxo

I’m writing this post from our front porch, snuggled up under a fuzzy blanket. There’s a cool fall breeze rustling the tree in front of me. I can hear a rooster off in the distance. I was more than excited to get out of the city but I think I severly underestimated just how much I missed having outdoor space. This is going to be so wonderful for my mental health. ♥

Stapelia grandiflora bloom!

by Kaylah Stroup September 3, 2020

this post contains affiliate links.

My last blog post was a plant unboxing from Nova Plantae. (Watch the video here + read the post here.) By the time I actually got around to editing and posting that video some of the information was kind of out of date. Namely the fact that the flowers that were on the plants when I received them but had died in transit had started to come back. The unboxing blog post showed photos of the brand new buds I had but I most certainly was not expecting a bloom so soon.

I’ve been so terrible about blogging lately but the fact that I am literally writing this post the same day this is happening should clue you in on just how excited I am.

First thing in the morning. I posted a photo on instagram that said “Would you hurry up already?!” around 8am.

Two hours later, I had this!

My Stapelia grandiflora has bloomed! Ahhhh! The whole reason I got into these succulents, Stapelias, is because the flowers that most produce. Large, colorful blooms… that smell like death.

No, seriously. This flower smells horrible. It has stunk up my kitchen and my living room. I actually realized it was starting to bloom because I smelled something off in the kitchen. It’s so bad I moved it close to an open window and lit incense. I bought this knowing it was produced these ‘carrion flowers’ but didn’t think it’d be something I could smell other than when up close. Noooope. This one small flower is quite odorous.

I truly wish I had smell-o-vision for you. There was a fly buzzing around it before it was even all the way open. Within ten minutes of moving it near the open window there were four flies up against the screen trying their darndest to get inside.

Still, I am so excited about this stinky flower that I keep walking near it and taking big deep breaths. I’ve examined it about five billion times. It’ll most likely be the last thing I think of before I fall asleep tonight and one of the first things in the morning. I am just totally in awe.

Consider me officially hooked. I cannot wait to get more plants that produce smelly flowers. I want a whole dang greenhouse full of them. Someday!

As previously mentioned, I bought this Stapelia grandiflora from Nova Plantae. Mine lives in a south-facing window that receives direct sunlight all afternoon. I have it planted in regular potting soil mixed with perlite and small stones to help with drainage. The pot I am using has a drainage hole drilled in the bottom. (A definite necessity for cacti and succulents! I have a tutorial on drilling here!)

Updating a mere ten minutes after hitting publish to add that I’m not quite sure this is Stapelia grandiflora. I’m leaning more toward Stapelia leendertziae at this point.

plant unboxing – nova plantae

by Kaylah Stroup August 27, 2020

this post contains affiliate links.

Up until last week, I hadn’t been to a store – any store – for over four months. Jeff had been doing our grocery runs. I thought that sending one representative from our family to do all the shopping was the smartest pandemic move. I have missed going out though. Not going to TJ Maxx? I can handle that. No Target? Eh. But no garden centers? Gosh, I miss them so much!

Despite not shopping in person, I have still managed to get my hands on quite a few new plants the last few months. I’m still a tiny bit skeptical of buying plants online. Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t reeeeally stop me that often. Plants are just so delicate and I truly care for them so I don’t want them damaged in transit or to not even be what I ordered. Watching unboxing videos has been super helpful in figuring out where I feel comfortable ordering from though, especially when it comes to super small online shops.

I shared my first unboxing video back in May (watch that here!) and I’m back today with another from a cute little shop on Etsy, Nova Plantae. Watch below + subscribe on YouTube!

This order was from Nova Plantae. Like I said in the video, the prices were SO great. I still can’t believe what gorgeous plants these are for the price considering what I had paid for much much smaller ones on eBay. I honestly want to seconds of each because I love them that much!

Here’s a list of the plants mentioned in the video;

Stapelia grandiflora
Huernia stapelia
Orbea speciosa

A bloom coming in on the Stapelia grandiflora. August 23rd

August 27th. What a difference four days makes, huh!?

Orbea speciosa has some blooms on the way as well!

I cannot stress enough how stoked I am on this whole purchase. I’m just dying for the flowers to bloom! xoxo

eastern prickly pear time lapse

by Kaylah Stroup August 24, 2020

Another time lapse! This time my newly acquired Eastern Prickly Pear! The Eastern Prickly Pear is exactly what the name suggests – a cactus that grows in the eastern part of the United States including Ohio! That’s right, we have cacti that grow outdoors here and manage to survive the snow. To be honest, I didn’t know this until a few years ago!

The house next door to my apartment has been uninhabited for quite a while now. I noticed shortly after we moved in that there was a massive patch of these cacti on the side of the house. I’ve admired them for years. Each summer beautiful yellow flowers explode from this flower -er, cactus- bed. I finally decided that ‘borrowing’ a couple of pads wouldn’t hurt anything, especially since no one lived there.

I had no idea how quickly they grew! While looking up the proper care, I actually found a video that said during a growing season they can triple in size! Wild! I don’t quite think we’re at three times the starting size yet but I did get a bunch of flowers already and that’s darn exciting.

There are just under 500 photos here condensed down into 38 seconds. I shot them over a period of a day and a half. Based on my other time lapse experiences, I definitely expected this to take much longer but the flowers opened so quickly! Such a beautiful treat!

So much smaller of a plant less than a month prior to flowering!

sources – ▴ shutter release ▴ Canon 35mm 1.4L ▴ Canon 6D ▴ Dolica Proline tripod

mourning ring 2.1

by Kaylah Stroup August 6, 2020

this post contains affiliate links.

It’s been a couple of months since my last post on the saga of my mourning ring but I finally have a very positive update!

You can catch up on everything here but the short story is that after my mom died I knew I wanted a special piece of jewelry to wear in remembrance of her. I took forever choosing who I wanted make a piece of mourning jewelry for me, finally thought I found ~the one~, ended up hating it, sent it back for it to be remade and hated it still. A beetle showed up out of nowhere the day I got it which felt significant because the other beetles from this group that I was hatching had emerged a day or two after my mom died. This one kind of showed up out of nowhere. It felt like I sign I should love the ring… or something like that.

It didn’t take very long after that post for me to decide that ‘Nah, I still hate this ring.” I guess it’s pretty fitting though because my mom, with the best of intentions, would often pick out the worst things for me when we went shopping together. She tried so hard but could never really nail my style a lot of the time. To be fair, I’m very picky. So, if that beetle was my mom saying ‘hey, this ring is fine!’ then frankly mother, I hate it.

the first ring I bought after it had been remade.

Everything about it was just wrong. On top of her ashes looking discolored (so so so yellow!), and her hair being nearly translucent, it was just so bulky. It was the correct size but due to the style and weight, it constantly twisted and ended up on the underside of my hand. Not upside down? Well, it’s getting snagged on everything. Guh, it was just bad and definitely not appropriate for everyday wear based on the size and bulk. In the photo above, it doesn’t look so bad but trust me, in person, it’s kind of a mess.

top ring is from Kathryn Riechert, bottom ring is from CaitlynMinimalist.

I went back to the drawing board. I wasn’t keen on dropping a ton of cash again so I actually ended up buying a $25 ring that I had saved in my favorites on Etsy. Getting a simple ring with her initials was always kind of in the back of my mind but I was convinced that I wouldn’t be happy unless I got a piece of jewelry that included hair.

Turns out that $25 piece of jewelry was everything I ever wanted… well mostly. I loved it from the second I opened the package. It just felt right on my hand. I don’t wear a ton of jewelry, especially not on my hands. Generally rings just feel weird. My wedding and engagement rings? They feel natural. They’re essentially just a part of my hand at this point. My new mourning ring felt the same way.

The only downfall was that my $20 gold plated ring didn’t stay gold for very long. I’m not a fan of mismatched jewelry so I opted to upgrade to solid gold. I would have purchased from the same shop because I was super happy with the turnaround time, the look, everything, but they didn’t offer a solid gold option.

A quick search led me to Kathryn Riechert. Solid gold, customizable, and available in a few different widths. The ring I bought? 100% perfect. Oh my gosh, if we could have just fast-forwarded to this purchase instead of dealing with all the bummers that came first that would have been great! This is what I was looking for all along.

size comparison of the two rings. I ordered the solid gold one in ‘tiny’.

I ended up gifting the one that wasn’t solid gold to my fourteen year old niece, a very sensitive soul that I see SO much of myself in. We have a little thing we do now which is throwing out our hands and going “tsssss” at each other back and forth. It’s silly but so oddly comforting. I used to do that with my mom. I’d strike a pose emphasizing whatever I wanted to show off while tssssss-ing and she’d do it back.

I’ve had my new ring for a little over two months now and couldn’t be happier with my final* mourning jewelry piece. It’s perfect. It brings me comfort at the most random times when I glance at it while working, enjoying the air on my hand out the window of a car, cooking, etc. It’s exactly what I want in a piece of mourning jewelry.

*Final? LOL. I’ve already been browsing other pieces. This is more than likely the last ring but I have been looking at necklace to hold cremains. I’m in no rush and have no interest in replacing this piece but I’m definitely open to adding more pieces to the collection. Ya know, for special occasions… or something.

More posts on grief, my mom and loss in general –

▴ my mother’s plants ▴ grief & road trips ▴ I cry over four leaf clovers ▴ grieving in the digital age ▴ the greatest loss ▴ six months / things I want to tell you ▴ the dead moms club – a book review ▴ the beetle & the mourning ring

sixty four-leaf clovers!

by Kaylah Stroup June 25, 2020

In the month of May I found sixty (SIXTY! 60! SIIIIIXTYYY!) four leaf clovers in my own very, very tiny yard.

I’ve had a ~thing~ with four leaf clovers for a little while now. In 2018, I found my first one and then immediately became obsessed with finding them. I was constantly looking for them. I found seven total the whole year.

In 2019, my mom died and I started finding four leaf clovers ALL THE TIME. I wrote a post about it here. There’s a kind of ebb and flow to it. Some months I’ll only find a few, then the next month I find a ton. At the beginning of May I realized I was finding a lot of them every single time I took Klaus outside. Instead of just shoving them randomly in my notebook, I sectioned off an area for all of them so that at the end of the month I could count up my total.

Pretty wild, right!? I can’t believe I found sixty of them in my yard. There is barely even any grass, just what lines my driveway. I’m still not saying it’s anything related to my mom but then again, I kinda am…

Check out my tips for pressing plants here.

how’s it growing

by Kaylah Stroup May 20, 2020

this post contains affiliate links

propagating –

I used to be so nervous about removing the pups from my pilea. As you can see, no issues here now! I LOVE (carefully) ripping it apart and making new plants. From my mother plant I was able to get three brand new pots full of pilea babes. Two of which I gave away for Mother’s Day. (It feels REALLY nice to give away plants you’ve propagated!)

Stolen from my husband’s humble little plant collection in his office! I trimmed some pieces of donkey tail and popped them in a takeout container with a lid for a couple of weeks to sprout some roots before moving them to this planter. I’m generally not a huge fan of this plant because it’s so dang fragile and always losing pieces if you even look at it wrong but it is so cute.

Also from Jeff’s collection, I stole some cuttings of a terribly leggy cactus he had. Same thing as above, I popped it in a takeout container for a bit to root before moving it to this tooth planter. So far so good!

good news –

My Peperomia San Marino will not stop flowering. It’s been about two months now and it just keeps pushing them out. It’s quite apparent she likes where she lives (in my bathroom!) This is probably one of the most low maintenance plants I own.

the not so great news –

Sooo, in my last update I mentioned how I separated a pup from my Madagascar Palm and it almost immediately dropped all of its leaves. I was still hopeful that it’d recover. I hoped it was just shocked.

Alas, death came knocking. At the beginning of April it was just… 100% limp and soggy. Clearly over watered. Whoops. I did a little squeeze on the mother plant and felt that even though she hadn’t fallen over yet, she was still squishy as all heck.

Wanna see something gross? Here’s what the inside looked like. Jeff joked I should make banana bread out of it. I wanna wash my hands just looking at that.

then & now –

My dollar plants that I rescued from Lowe’s! I almost feel like the photos below don’t properly show how much growth each one has put out. New leaves for everyone! I’m super impressed with the rebound each has made.

Buying plants that are already big and healthy is fun but there is something super satisfying about knowing you took a plant from nothing to something. I have a feeling that in a few more months these babies will be some of my favorites.

Above in March, below in May.

The wandering jew (the smallest of the three plants) was the one I was most concerned wouldn’t make it. It just didn’t feel healthy to the touch. It doesn’t look like it’s grown a ton but the photos above and below really show how much color it’s gained! It’s finally developing the purple tones the plant is known for. I’m very excited to watch it continue to grow and hopefully just continue to get more vibrant.

Is it even a plant update post if I don’t ramble on about this special plant? My syngonium! Get the full backstory here. I currently have four plants of my own grown from that handful of original leaves. PLUS, most excitingly, I gifted another to my sister-in-law for Mother’s Day. Felt like a nice way to acknowledge how special she is to me. Also, I know it’s a super common thing to do but my mom ALWAYS gifted plants for mother’s day so it kinda feels like carrying on that tradition except in an ever more meaningful way. Okay, gotta stop. Gonna cry.

I’m just so pleased with how easy these plants are to care for. I cannot get over the fact that in less than a year I’ve made five full and healthy plants from just a few leaves.

new arrivals –

Having not left the house other than for walks in nearly two months should mean no new plants…right? That’s what I thought but a local plant shop, Urban Planting Cleveland, is doing deliveries so obviously I had to support small business.

I’ve gotten a handful of new plants from them. I never had the chance to visit their actual store before the virus but they’ve quickly become one of my favorite local businesses.

My two favorites from them so far have been my monstera deliciosa (below) and the rhaphidophora tetrasperma – which I recently made a timelapse of!

More new plants! Alligator plant aka mother of millions! I’ve been wanting one of these for a while but was having trouble finding them in person and online they seemed to be kind of expensive? Randomly ebay put one in my recommendations and for under $10 I couldn’t resist.

Linked above is the seller I bought from. I highly recommend them! They shipped quickly and the plants look great.

The big reason I wanted one of these is because like the name suggests, they produce lots of babies. I love propagating things. It doesn’t matter what, I just like knowing that I helped a plant multiply. The MOM plant basically doesn’t even need my help.

I had placed the pups that fell off the main plant during shipping in my little takeout container / propagation box when I first got them. It’s been less than a week and they already have roots!? WHAT! I am very excited to turn this one purchase of six small plants (all grouped together in the planter below) into many many plants that I can give away to anyone and everyone I know.

Lifesaver plant. I specifically bought this little dude because of the flowers it produces. Seriously, go look at the listing I linked! I never really go into indoor plants that flower. My experience with flowering things is basically just annuals that I had when I had outdoor growing space. Now more than ever, I’ve taken an interest in unique indoor plants that flower. I think this is the start of an obsession… I am probably going to freak when this baby blooms.

I also bought about a million other things too but it’d take forever to list all of them. I’ve definitely taken photos so I can track their growth though. This quarantine has done a number on my plant collection. When this all started, I didn’t have room for any more plants BUT in true collection’s fashion, I managed to find room. There’s ALWAYS room. At this moment, I’m actually waiting on even more plants from Urban Planting Cleveland to be delivered. Just feels good to have something to take care of and look forward to, ya know? I suppose there are worse things to be obsessed with.

Check out my instagram hashtag for more photos of my plant collection – #kaylahheartsplants.

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