New Here?
If you’ve just arrived at Cedar & Linen, you’ve landed in a homeowner’s journal — a place where we document real home improvement projects, from the initial planning stages through completion and what we learned along the way. This site exists because home improvement is as much about the process as the result. We believe in sharing both the beautiful before-and-after moments and the small frustrations that come with any renovation or DIY work.
What makes a project worth documenting isn’t that everything goes perfectly — it’s that you finish it, learn from it, and end up with a space that actually works for your life.
The Key Figures
| What you’ll find | When it appears | Why we track it |
|---|---|---|
| Project walkthroughs | Every week | Step-by-step documentation of what we’re actually doing, with cost breakdowns and honest timelines |
| Before-and-after galleries | As projects finish | Real results matter more than promises — we photograph the actual state of things |
| Tool and material reviews | Ongoing | When something works, or fails, we say so and explain why the difference matters |
| Contractor and service notes | When relevant | Honest observations about who we’ve worked with and what made them worth recommending |
| Cost guides by region | Monthly updates | Material costs shift constantly — we track what things actually cost right now, in real markets |
The Detail
Cedar & Linen started in 2023 because we kept finding ourselves saying “I wish someone had documented this” halfway through a project. There are plenty of home improvement sites out there, but most of them feel either too polished or too scattered. We wanted something that reads like a friend’s journal — detailed enough to actually follow along, honest about what works and what doesn’t, and grounded in real costs and real timelines.
The blog covers the full spectrum of home improvement: kitchen and bathroom renovations, painting and finishing work, structural projects, landscaping, energy efficiency upgrades, and smaller DIY projects that add up over time. Each project gets a dedicated post that walks through the process, the decisions we made along the way, and what we’d do differently next time. We also review the tools, materials, and services we use, so you can see exactly what we’re recommending and why.
If you’re looking for quick tips or shortcuts, you might find them here by accident. But we’re more interested in helping you understand the actual work — why a step matters, what it costs in real terms, and how to know if you’re getting a good result. We also keep a running list of contractors and services we’ve actually worked with and would recommend, because when you need professional help, knowing someone has already vetted the work makes a real difference.
Start with the Start Here page if you want a guided tour of what the site offers. Browse the Topics page to search by project type. Or jump straight to the Home page to see the latest projects in progress. And if you have questions about a project we’ve documented or want to share your own results, the Contact page has several ways to reach us.