Quick and Easy Curb Appeal

You know the phrase "a face only a mother could love" apparently it can apply to houses too.  I quickly realized not everyone saw the same potential that we did in our new home.  One night before we moved we were at the house eating dinner when someone knocked on the door.  Our first visitor?? We were a bit nervous of what kind of "visitors" our house would attract being fairly conspicuous on a main highway.  When Dusty opened the door a young family was on the other side.  They inquired about the building and we explained that it was to become our home.  They were surprised and said that they were planning a Halloween wedding and scoping out venues, and thought that this would be the perfect place, looking as spooky as it does on the outside.  We laughed about it and wished them luck.  When we closed the door I asked Dusty if the house really looked haunted, he just raised his eyebrows at me as if to say "what do you think?"  The next next day I posted some pictures of the house on facebook and someone commented, "Awesome, can I go ghost hunting in there??"  It was confirmed, we had just bought the haunted mansion (without the ghosts).

The majority of the initial work we did was on the inside, while Dusty did spend a significant amount of time knocking down weeds and overgrowth nothing more was done to the "curb appeal" of the property.  One evening, after we were moved in and were burned out from the never ending sheetrock sanding, Dusty came home and announced he was going to paint the shop.  While all of the buildings on the property are in disrepair on the exterior, the shop was in top contention for the shabbiest.  The paint was chipping, the doors were sagging and the roof is 2 different colors.  While paint would not solve all of these problems it would do a lot for sprucing up.  Dusty got a 5 gallon bucket and started mixing the paint we inherited with the building, along with the several partial gallons that we had left over from previous projects.  The mix turned out brownish gray, it was pretty dark so we added a half gallon of white; the final color couldn't have turned out more perfect if we had picked a paint chip.  He spent the evening with the paint sprayer and had 2 coats on the entire building before sundown. 

We brainstormed throughout the evening to use what we had on hand to give the shop a quick and cheap facelift.  The next morning we used the other half gallon of white paint to paint the trim, including the cute details on the 3 swinging double doors.  Dusty did some tightening and reinforcing of the door hardware so they weren't as saggy and swung better and replaced a couple pieces of missing trim on the doors, it was looking like a totally different building, already.

A few months before we found the house Dusty had gone to an auction on a Saturday morning, he usually comes home with tools or trucks from these auctions so when he showed me the lights he bought I was surprised and wondered what I was missing by spending my Saturdays at home.  We had absolutely no use for them at the time, but he got four of them for $5 so we tucked them away with our other miscellaneous building materials for "someday".  As it turned out the shop was the perfect opportunity to use the lights, with a few pieces of pipe from Lowe's we built a bracket and hung one over each door.  The effect of the lights, alone, took the shop from haunted to happy.  While at Lowe's I also bought a new locking door knob for the side door, spending a total of $36.  My trip to Lowe's combined with the $5 lights brought our entire shop face lift to a whopping $41.

Sometimes it is just a quick and cheap project that you need to breathe a second wind back into your worn out self.  With the shop finished our exterior didn't look quite as haunted and we were raring to go again on the inside, with renewed hope for the end product!

Friday Favorites

I am notorious for labeling things as "the best thing EVER!!"  What can I say, I know what I like and when I like something I think everyone should experience it as well. When the darling Miss Betsy from Life Styled Simply announced she would be doing her "Favorite Things Friday" as a link party I thought it was the perfect opportunity to join in the fun and proclaim my love for my current obsessions.

1. - Heated Mattress Pad aka. the best thing ever for chilly nights (and sometimes days too). (affiliate link)  

Let's face it, our house is not exactly warm, during a particularly cold snap in December our house wouldn't get much "warmer" than 58* (if you can even consider that warm).  Dusty's sweet Mom and Dad took pity on us and delivered our Christmas present early in the form of a king sized one of these puppies.  I was skeptical at first as I'm a pillow flipper always seeking the cool spot, however within minutes of putting this on the bed and letting it warm up I was totally converted, it is soooo cozy.  There may have been a few mornings where I begrudgingly got out of bed to send the boys off to school and then slipped back into bed with Cooper to read and stay warm.

2.  www.GrowVeg.com

Most of this week has been absolutely gorgeous outside, even warming up to 60* one day.  February is such a tease this way, it is sure to snow sometime in the next week just to teach me not to get too used to it.  On said 60 degree day I couldn't get outside fast enough.  I bought garlic in the fall but never planted it, I finally decided it was better late than never and I just needed to pick a spot and get it in the ground.  I have a lovely triangle of dirt that is to become my garden, I planted my 2 garlic bulbs and began planning for spring planting.  That evening I put all of my dimensions into this handy program and it mapped my entire garden for me, it also recommended companion plants and told me what conditions certain plants need, for an over planner like me it is perfect.

3.  Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery  (affiliate link)

Seriously, how have I missed this my entire life?  I received the book for Christmas a few years ago and just finally picked it up to read.  I remember my Mama and Grandma urging me to read it when I was young but I never did.  I was enchanted with the sweet story of Anne Shirley and found myself smiling throughout the entire book.  I am looking forward to catching up with Anne again soon in the second book, Anne of Avonlea.

Tell me, what have YOU been obsessing over lately?

A Master Bedroom, finally

The process of moving, unpacking and settling, all while running a business and getting the kids off to their first week at a new school stalled progress on the bedrooms. However, sleeping on a mattress on the great room floor could only go on so long.  We finally took a couple of afternoons, evenings and a weekend and just focused on our bedroom.

Ready for tape and texture!

We had hung most of the sheetrock before we moved, so I received a crash course in taping, sanding, skim coating, sanding, texturing and sanding.  Did I mention the sanding?  So. Much. Dust.  Sheetrock finishing is my most un-favorite part of home improvement, to date.  It isn't even hard labor, it is just tedious and dirty, the fine white dust from the sheetrock mud gets into everything.  I have, however, pretty much accepted it as a part of my decor for this period of my life.

With the walls finished (and dust wiped, vacuumed and swept), we were ready for paint.  We figured we would bring the sprayer in, tape off the room and just shoot it in one evening.  But as it typically happens in home improvement (and life in general) thinking "this will be so easy" is the universe's cue to throw its head back and laugh maniacally.  Dusty hauled the paint sprayer in that we had just used for another project.  We were using the same Martha Stewart "Chinchilla" color we had used in the boy's room, cut with white paint to lighten it up.  It was late, we had the paint on hand and wanted to get the room done, seldom a wise choice in choosing paint colors.  Dusty set the sprayer up while I masked and taped.  He took one swipe down the wall with the sprayer and it jammed, no big deal, just a little clog.  Hahaha.  2 hours, 3 paint sprayers and many cuss words later our room was still not painted.  Womp, womp, womp.

Plan B.  I rolled the room the next day, all of it that I could reach without stepping foot on the scaffolding.  (side note: I am forbidden from getting on the scaffolding, even if I wanted to.  There is a certain story of me stuck on top of a 13 foot chain link fence in High School that has become not only legendary but synonyms for my overall athletic prowess. I think Dusty is scared he will get a panicked phone call from the top of scaffolding and have to leave work to come save me. His fears are probably accurate).

short arms, tall ceilings

As  much as I love the high ceilings they really stump me in the smaller spaces.  The scale instantly became off when walls were built, (think higher than wider).  To combat this I decided to visually drop the ceiling in our master bedroom by painting the ceiling a darker color and wrapping the color down the wall about 2 feet.  We will eventually hang crown at the paint seam.  I am really happy with the effect, the darker paint helps to ground the ceiling instead of a lighter paint fading into oblivion.  The top color is (surprise) Chinchilla, and I am not happy with it in this room, it is way too blue, but it will have to do for a while, we will probably repaint when we put in our master bathroom to tie the rooms together. 

When painting the walls I knew I was tight on paint but thought my almost 2 gallons would be enough (cue universe laughing again).  I ran out about 3 feet shy of making it all the way around the room.  Being a custom tint we had mixed up I was basically screwed.  At this point I decided the room would never actually be finished.  I walked away for a day or so, the room and I needed a break, and my arms hurt from painting over my head.  While I was busy ignoring the room, Dusty painted the ceiling and top of the walls the dark color.  Eventually, I got my second wind and used the last drops of our custom blend to paint a swatch and took it to Home Depot for a color match.  The room was finally painted.

We considered putting carpet in the bedroom, I prefer to step out of bed and onto carpet over hardwood.  However, I didn't want to spend a ton of money on carpet while the house was still very much under construction (remember the sheetrock dust?).  I picked out cheap carpet to tie us over a few years until we decide everywhere that we want carpet and can do it all at once.  But in the end that seemed very wasteful and silly since the hardwood in our bedroom is the best hardwood in the house, I decided to live with some area rugs for awhile before pulling the trigger on carpet in our room.

Next up was trim, we hemmed and hawed in the trim aisle of several home improvement stores.  Crown molding is expensive.  Especially crown molding that fits the scale of a 13 foot tall room.  We knew we wanted to hold off on base because the closet door will eventually be going away and a new door will go in for the master bathroom, to avoid patching trim we will just do it all when we do the bathroom.  We left stores empty handed several times and went home and slept on our mattress in the living room.  Then we had the brilliant epiphany that crown was not holding up moving into the bedroom.  (I blame paint fumes and exhaustion for our lack of common sense).  We came home and immediately started moving furniture.

When we were deciding on a color scheme for this house I worried that our bed would not go.  We built a home in 2005 that was the complete opposite style of this house.  It was rich mochas and browns, dark wood and bronze, the bed was beautiful in our master bedroom at that house and I was concerned that it wouldn't be as appropriate in this room but was not willing to part with it.  However, when we moved furniture in, it was as if the room was made for the bed.  Even though it was 10 pm as we were moving furniture I dug through boxes in the basement until I found my bedding to make the bed.  This beautiful piece of furniture that I had become rather bored with over the past 5 years suddenly had new life and I fell in love with it all over again.

 We finally had a bedroom fit for sleep, nothing quite like that after a month of sleeping in the living room.  It is far from finished, the floors are a hot mess and there are details to wrap up like trim and lighting but it is on its way.

Moving Day

Moving day was finally upon us.  It was a strange feeling to be so excited to be moving into a place that was still far from a "house".  As Summer in construction typically goes we were slammed, Dusty was working 10 hour days and turning around and pulling another 3-4 hours at the house in the evenings.  He was exhausted and quite frankly, out of time to move our furniture.  I had carted most everything in boxes or the furniture that I could lift and fit into the van over the course of the month.  However, we have quite a few large pieces of furniture, in fact, Dusty teases me that I buy furniture based on weight "What is the heaviest piece of furniture you have in the store??  I'll Take IT!!"  So I called in the big guns, I found a local moving company (208 Moving) with a 4 hour opening on Friday, a day sooner than we had planned on moving but I quickly put our name in.  Dusty had a big concrete pour that day so I would be coordinating the move alone.  I had no idea what I was going to get when the movers showed up, the price they quoted was so affordable, I was nervous that it would be 2 guys and a trailer or a small u-haul, but they were available and any help was so appreciated.  I worked all morning to  have as much of the furniture moved to the garage as possible and un-assembled if needed. When the truck turned the corner I thought, "that can't be for us??"  The truck was enormous.  Suddenly "just the heavy furniture" turned into "everything that was left in the house"  It was such a relief to have everything moved in one afternoon.  They were fast, professional and careful with our things which I was so grateful for.

By the time we got to the new house and halfway unloaded Dusty pulled in from work, he walked into the great room and the look on his face was total astonishment and relief, the fact that he was not going to have to spend the weekend moving was worth every single penny we paid the movers. 

With everything still under construction at the new house I just had the movers unload everything directly into the great room.  It was a mess.  Warning: these pictures are scary, even worse, they were taken after we had organized a little.

Why yes, that is a refrigerator next to my couch.  The ultimate in convenience.

power tools + sheetrock + mattresses + other assorted furniture = disaster

As of moving day our bedroom and Cooper's bedroom were not sheet rocked so we knew we would be slumber partying for a bit.  The first night the big boys each slept on a couch, and Cooper and Dusty and I slept on our mattresses on the floor, it was such a fun first night, all of us in about 100 square feet of space, none of us slept well but isn't that what slumber parties are all about?

Our luxurious and private (temporary) bedroom ... Complete with kiddo blankets piled on top.

Over the course of our first weekend in the house I was taken back by the sense of "home" I felt.  Even though it was a disaster of construction materials, dust and tools; furniture and boxes spread every which way and a building that most would not dare call a house.  I was more at home and settled than I had been in 6 years, I felt rooted and connected to the house and could only look forward to making it our home.

Thoughtful Planning

Before the property was even ours we spent hours discussing how we wanted the house to function and what the best use of space was.  We knew we wanted to capitalize on the large, open room and honor the history of the building by not just building a bunch of walls in the beautiful, large room.  However, we also had the opportunity to make it function perfectly for us because we were starting with a blank slate.  We have no intention of moving again, we hope to raise our babes here and eventually be able to call it "grandma and grandpa's house"; literally "build our history" on this historic property so we wanted to make sure that the decisions we make along the way are the right ones for the long run.  I've spent a lot of time thinking of the evolution of the rooms we are building and how they will be utilized not only now, but far down the road as well.

With Grayson and Radlee's room "finished" in the back of the house we turned our attention to the front of the house where the Master bedroom and Cooper's room would be.

One of the stumbling blocks we ran into while laying out these bedrooms was natural lighting.  As I've mentioned, the original building has windows on 3 sides (18 in all) however, the entire west side (5 windows) is behind a wall that will be the master bath and closets, 3 are in the room in the south east corner of the house, 1 window is in the future pantry on the north east corner and 2 have been cemented over in the baptismal (these will eventually be re-installed for our kitchen).  This left 7 windows currently in the main room, but 2 or 3 of these would have to be in the master bedroom.  In order to capitalize on the natural light in the great room and provide a bit of privacy to our master bedroom we set the door back from the plane of the bedroom walls, this creates an entry nook to our bedroom, and allowed us to utilize an extra window in the great room.  As it stands now, our bedroom has 2 windows and the great room has 5 that provide beautiful light.

First walls going up, height isn't an issue when scaffolding is involved!

The other benefit of recessing the master bedroom door is that it creates an entrance to the room, the wall the door is on is about 5' wide, I have chosen to use narrow double doors (4' wide total) into the space.  Standard height doors (7.5') would look squat in such a tall room so we decided to put transoms above the interior doors which will visually increase the doorways to the height of the windows, plus allow more natural light to bounce around.  All of the existing exterior doors have transoms so this will also help build cohesiveness throughout the house.

Master bedroom to the left, Coopers room to the right

Straight into our bedroom is a sitting area, the closet door will eventually go away and the door to the bathroom will be moved further down this wall.  I envision a cozy love seat for curling up and reading, the sleeping area is to the right of the entry.

Master bedroom entry

 Cooper's room posed a new set of challenges.  Having a kids bedroom door directly off of my great room was not ideal, however after toying with the plan it was the only solution we could come to.  We considered building a wing wall, perpendicular to the big living room / bedroom wall, creating a hallway for his bedroom door and the future powder room but, again, we didn't want to chop up the space with unnecessary walls, maintaining the symmetry of this space is very important to me.  I decided that hidden (and easily accessible) storage would be key in not driving me crazy in this room that is in plain sight from the couch.  We ran closets the full depth of the room on the wall that his room shares with ours, lots of shelves and storage behind closed doors should help.  I am also considering a platform bed with rolling bins underneath he can roll out to play with toys and roll away when he is done.  The other situation we had to consider was the back wall of his room, which is shared with our bathroom.  Our bathroom has lower ceiling than the rest of the house (8', I think) and we have designed our shower and toilet room to pop into his room, in order to not have 5' of empty space and to eliminate battle of the ceiling being higher than the room is wide, we created a loft on 2 sides of his room, making the closet only 8' high, as well as the back wall.  I am so excited to create a reading loft for the boys in this space with a ladder and railing.

Cooper's loft, the openings will all be framed and sheet rocked in.

 

I couldn't believe the difference the these walls made, suddenly our commercial building was becoming a home, ready for move-in day!

First Projects

Most people's dream house doesn't include a large amount of trash haul off and demolition work in order to move in.  We aren't most people.
I feel like I have an ace in my pocket with Dusty.  Not only can he do anything he owns every tool known to man, including tractors.  He claims they are for work (they are) but I know he also looks forward to the days he gets to just work around the house while sitting in the tractor.  The first week here was a dream come true for him, so much brush to clear, so many weeds to scrape, so much gravel to spread.  The boys always get excited to see him at work so when the work was happening in our own backyard it was like hitting the jackpot!  Once the space was cleared we went to work on goat-head abatement and followed up with grass seed, hopefully by next spring we will have a patch of grass to call a backyard.

Our first "big" inside project was getting the boy's bedroom built.  The first day of school fell Monday after our moving weekend and it was really important to me to make this feel as much like home before the boys started at a new school.

This bedroom is currently being shared by our oldest two boys, Grayson and Radlee, and is in the addition, next to the kitchen.  It is not a big room by any means but it fits both of their beds easily and the closet is more than big enough for their clothes, I put a dresser in the wide hallway outside their room for their folded clothes which also acts as a "landing pad" when we come in the back door for bags, groceries, mail ect.  It is also my folding table on laundry day.

My favorite thing about this room is the 3 windows, it is so bright and has a great view out the back window into the fields behind the house.  The vaulted ceiling makes it feel like a really large room.  It obviously needs work and has had minimal decorating done but the boys are happy here and even though they won't admit it I think they really enjoy sharing a room.

There is space for a built in desk next to the closet and I am excited to make this a really special space in the room.  This room will eventually be just Grayson's and Radlee's will move next door where the kitchen is now.

The wall color is "chinchilla" by Martha Stewart at Home Depot in eggshell finish.  Typically I am a paint snob and prefer to only buy professional grade paint from a paint store, however we bought Glidden brand from Home Depot for this project and were very satisfied with the coverage and quality.  The color is a little more blue than I like my gray's but it has grown on me and I love how it changes tones throughout the day. 

Out with the old

Upon closing on the property our first priority was to get it cleaned up and cleared out.  I went after the inside and Dusty started work on the outside.  We had 29 days from the time we received the keys for this property and the day we had to hand over the keys for our other house.  With no bedrooms, and no shower or bathtub we had our work cut out for us.
Having been vacant for about 2 years it was grimey.  Thick, black cobwebs occupied the basement and corner rooms and bugs and dust bunnies turned up in most every corner.   I scrubbed and sanitized until it felt livable and then cleaned some more.  By the time I was done inside it was mostly rid of the musty smell and was beginning to feel like home.
The church we purchased it from left behind all of the church pews, all of their Sunday school furniture, various tables, chairs and other misc. items.

Just a sample of some of the lovely furniture we inherited.

I immediately went to work listing the leftover furniture on Craigslist.  I also started hauling the boxes and boxes of random decor, books, toys etc. from the basement and other nooks and crannies to the main room for a large yard sale.
We set the yard sale for the second weekend we owned the property and had high hopes of clearing the space so construction could begin.  I filled table after table with artificial flower arrangements, vases, lunch trays, coffee carafes, bibles and more, pricing most things around a quarter.  Foot traffic was light but a consistent stream of items left the building.  On Saturday an antiques dealer stopped by and bought all of the remaining church pews and they were hauled out that day.  By the end of Saturday the remains of the sale were re-boxed and ready for pick-up by the Youth Ranch on Monday morning and I had an extra $400 in my pocket.  Once those boxes had been hauled away it felt like a fresh start and a whole houseful of opportunities.  Not to mention that Radlee could now ride his bike.  In the house.