the refining home
Welcome to Our Home!
My name is Joleen and my husband is Jess. We are so happy to meet you and invite you into our home.
The Refining Home is not only home decor and DIY’s. It’s about family and connections, renovating and decorating, faith and laughter, refinishing and refining and looking for the silver lining.
We are elbow deep in the excitement, as well as the aches and pains of living in our home while fixing it up. Along with 4 children who keep us on our toes, the yard is a total tear out. Undoubtedly, there are days we feel out numbered and in over our heads.
Where We Started…
A year after we were married, we had our first baby and Jess joined the Army. Our life has been one great adventure ever since. I learned quickly that home was where you hang your hat, but also where you hang your heart.
In my quest to set up our new home, I discovered that our last name means “hedge” or “enclosed area/ area of sanctuary”: meaning a place of safety and peace. Despite renting, while saving up for a home to call our own and moving around from “hedge” to “hedge” it made me realize how important refining home was to us, even if it was just a rental. Likewise, creating a space for our family where they could feel safe, at peace and loved became my top priority.
Where We Are Today…
Today we finally have our own home. We’ve lived in 3 different states and have moved 17 times in our 22 years of marriage; and feel so blessed to be sinking our roots deep into the soil of our fixer upper.
So…pull up a seat as you wander through the hedges with us in creating, renovating, decorating and refining our family, faith and home. Welcome to our home!
What You’ll Love About Us:
We are your average family, working from a budget to create a beautiful home for our family. Some projects take a little longer here, because we are working from that budget, Jess works full time and Joleen is a stay at home mom who is also a medical mama taking care of our son who has NF1 (Neurofibromatosis type 1).
We’ll take you along on our family adventures. We love to travel, hike and see new places. And we just added a puppy to our home. He is the cutest little guy, a mini golden doodle. With 4 children and a puppy, there’s a lot filling up our calendar these days.
We love to mix and match styles to make our home uniquely ours. We hope to inspire you to do the same. Create a home you feel comfortable in and one that reflects who you and your family are. We lean towards Farmhouse and cottage with splashes of rustic and industrial.
You’ll find that we don’t just work on the inside of our home but the outside as well. Landscaping and gardening are some of our favorite DIY’s and projects as we love spending time outdoors.
Yes, you’ll see our renovations but you’ll see our decorating as well. Tablescapes are a favorite. We love to entertain and the table seems to be where a lot of our conversations take place. We’ll show you how we refinish furniture and upcycle thrift store finds.
You can expect to see a few brands. We love trying new products and bringing you our favorites. Rest assured that we will only recommend companies and products we use in our home and love. They are tried and tested by us before we showcase them here.
And of course we’ll share our tips, tricks, hacks and what to avoid. We hope that our mistakes will make your projects and adventures easier to navigate. There’s a little bit of something for everyone here.
“Home should be an ANCHOR, a port in a storm, a REFUGE, a happy place in which to dwell, a place where we are LOVED and where we can LOVE.” -Marvin J. Ashton