Goings on.....

I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas!  We had a wonderful weekend full of family and friends.  AND, unlike last year, I was not up until 3 am making and wrapping presents!  Actually, a good friend and I got togegther on Thursday, and while the kids ran wild played nicely at her house, we wrapped all of our presents.  We will definitely do that one again! 

See my pretty new bedroom in progress?  It's hard to get a true picture of the color - it's a lovely blue/gray color.  I painted it the week after Thanksgiving.  I had grand intentions of going to get laminate wood flooring to replace the icky pink carpeting that was in this house when we brought it.

Well, it's going to be torn up again real soon. Christmas Day night Todd was walking between the bed and that wall getting ready for bed, and right up against the wall the floor gave way under him.  Monday we pulled the carpeting away from the wall and found this hole:

Apparently, were the addition meets the original house, there is a gap under the shingles.  And there has been water leaking in here for who knows how long.  It probably didn't help that this year has been the wettest year on record for Ohio!

On the other side of that corner is our living room - and when I moved the stuff out of the corner, I found this:

See that nice gap between the floor and the baseboard?  Yeah, the floor is  rotting away under there...

I KNOW it wasn't like that last spring, because I wanted to re-arrange that end of the room where the TV and stero sits, but Todd wanted it back the way it was after I pulled everything out, cleaned back there and moved it all.  And I'm very certain I would have noticed that!!!

And this is what we found in the basement (the sub floor under the living room).....

So the contractor who put the addition on came out yesterday and poked around.  That whole corner will need torn apart and the end truss fixed, new shingles, siding, 2x4 walls, insulation, drywall, subfloor and floor joists put in along with who all knows what else.  An adjuster from our insurance company should be coming out in the next couple of days to give us the go ahead to get started. 

But....the good part?  I did NOT put new flooring down in our bedroom which would have to be ripped out (although if I had we might have noticed it a litte bit sooner)....small good part yes, but still good.

We (Todd, the contractor and I) are really hoping we can get this fixed soon...before more damage happends.  The weather here has been just horrible (lots of rain) so that might be tough....but our contractor says 2-3 days and he can have the outside all ripped out and rebuilt.

So...I'm off this week and going to clean out the basement.  Some stuff that we had to move to get back into that corner is water damaged, so I'm planning on getting rid of LOTS of things.....

In love.....

We've been wanting to re-do our kitchen for quite some time now. Technically I have wanted to gut it and redo it since we moved in way back in July, 1998. It started with Jessie and I removing a hutch from our kitchen way back when.

I'm happy to say that this weekend, phase 1 (the kitchen island) was installed. In about 4 hours!


I ripped out the little wall that separated the kitchen from the family room. I will never understand why someone would want to close in their kitchen by putting in a 40" wide wall.

Give me space any day! (I also don't understand why anyone would put white linoleum down in a kitchen on a farm but....me? I'd rather have poop brown.....hides the dirt better)

My BIL came over yesterday and they started installing the base cabinets. They aren't anything fancy - American Classic cabinets from Home Depot - but considering the shape our kitchen cabinets are in - these are wonderful! We are doing this as we can afford to, paying cash as we go (or in the case of the base cabinets - gift cards from Home Depot gifted to me).

The countertop? I am seriously in love with it although it wasn't my first choice. I really wanted poured concrete.

Todd said not on his life was he doing concrete counterops. He must have thought they would be hard to do or something:)

I knew I didn't want laminate. And granite is WAY out of our price range. So are the solid wood countertops from Home Depot.

Until I found an Amish woodworker who built me a 42" by 8' butcherblock countertop. For just over $400:

I still need to oil the top side. So it will darken considerably once I do that. But it's heavy, solid and gorgeous! I love it so much we are doing the rest of the countertops exactly the same when we get to the rest of the kitchen! Yes, they are a bit of maintenance (you have to oil them every month to seal them) but.....

We chose oak, maple, cherry and walnut. Had we left out the walnut, it would have been $375.

There is still a lot of finish work to do (move the light switch for the light over the island - you can see it hanging in the first photo), stain the backside of the island (stock kitchen cabinets you need to put a nicer back on them - in this case oak plywood), oil the top of the cabinet and put the toe kick boards under the fronts of the cabinets. Oh and I have to find some bar stools that I like (preferrably with backs on them).

Next up? We are saving our pennies to have our Amish neighbor build us cabinets for the rest of the kitchen (which won't be all that much really - it's only about a 6 foot stretch which includes the sink and the dishwasher), which will also have the butcher block countertop, new laminate wood flooring, new pantry cabinet and a new window. The flooring will be the absolute last as we want the laminate to also go into the family room.


Although it may have to wait until this fall/next winter. I told Todd he could put his addition on the barn before we finish the kitchen.....

Tyler's bedroom redo

Over Easter weekend, we re-did Tyler's bedroom. I am so tired:)

I found a fantastic deal on laminate flooring - 47 cents a square foot (which translated to about $80.00 a room for each of their bedrooms). So I got enough to do Tyler's and Jessie's room both!

I gave all 4 walls a fresh coat of paint, beige on 2 opposite walls:

Red on 1 wall:

And blue on the 4th wall:

New curtains (which are kinda hard to see here):

Some firetruck prints on the wall. I took a bunch of pictures from the Firefighter Festival two years ago in West Salem, and printed some of them off. I'd like to get some of Todd's department and the trucks that are on it (especially the one that we rode away from the Church on when we got married):

And a spot to hang his fire helmet! This is Todd's first firehelmet when he joined the department back in 1989. Needless to say, it's not legal for him to wear it today. But Tyler has enjoyed playing with it, he LOVES to play fire fighter:



I still need to put baseboards up all around. And probably get a few more area rugs before next winter. But I'm thinking I'm going to wait to do the baseboards until we have the floor laid in Jessie's room. And I really don't feel like staining all that trim! Eventually we will have laminate flooring throughout most of our house - it's so much easier to care for than carpeting.

I was amazed at how easy it was to install it. A friend of ours and I did it on Saturday morning, we started at 8:00 a.m. ripping out the carpet that was in there, and by 1:30 it was done.

I still want to find a few things to hang on the walls, like an old fire hose and fire extinguisher (which I actually think Todd has at his parents' house), and I do have some letters spelling his name that I painted in royal blue that I need to hang, but for now, it's complete.

Now it's onto Jessie's room:)

Kris

Meet Frosty

The kids' busdriver is having a snowman building constest. I haven't heard what the prize is, but.....

....the kids spent a good hour and a half creating their snowman at the end of the driveway on Sunday afternoon.

I'm so glad they found a use for Todd's ripped rubber boots and my old broom:)

Too bad they couldn't have built him yesterday - it might have stopped some of the bickering that was present in our house between the two of them!

Although I did manage to get more done in the laundry room:

I got the peg shelf and the bench in my laundry room all finished up - just in time for Todd to come home and say "yes, I like it go ahead and do the new cabinet the same way". What a relief! He likes wood to look like wood, if you know what I mean:) Tonight I will start on the cabinet - at least get the inside done so I can get everything put away.....

See that little quilted mat on the bench? Yes, I made it yesterday in about a half an hour. Nothing fancy but it sure beat paying the $20 they wanted for a little braided rug to fit on there! And it came out of my stash.......

Enjoy your day!
Kris

Laundry room makeover

I'm home today....our normal babysitter is sick, and I didn't feel like calling all over the county to find another one:) due to the holiday.


Friday night we installed the cabinet above my washer and dryer, and went from this:




To this!:






I love it. I have to finish it yet, but hopefully that will get done this afternoon. Tommy (one of Todd's friends who builds fantastic furniture) brought it over - and it was a tight fit to get it wedged in there. We previously had a metal shelf in there, but I'm on a kick to spruce up the house this year, and probably next:) It was waayyy cheaper to have him build it from scratch than to go and buy a premade cabinet. And it fits in there exactly.



Tyler thought it would make a nice hiding space before they lifted it up. We wondered why one end was soooooo heavy! lol.



This morning I played around with paint and stain. I know what I want, but.....acheiving it was another matter. I think I finally found the look that I like:






flat white paint with walnut stain rubbed on gently over top. I want the distressed look, without all the beating up of the furniture. I didn't want to sand any corners off of this peg shelf, as it is painted blue underneath the white, and I certainly don't want that showing through!


Enjoy your day! I'm off to do some more painting and staining:) after I hunt up a pair of rubber gloves...............
Kris

Snow, basketball and painting....

... that was pretty much my weekend!

The kids didn't have school on Friday - so I got a "snow day" too. I really can't tell why they didn't have school - we were out and about and while the roads were snow covered, they weren't really slick.

Saturday was Jessie's first basketball game - what a HOOT! 10 girls got at least 18 fouls called on them (that we caught) for being too aggressive.

We lost - 14 to 8, but they tried. Our girls just aren't consistent with actually making the baskets yet. If we had made every basket that was attempted - our score would have been 44.

And yes, they ended up on the ground more often than not fighting over the ball. But they had so much fun.

As one of Jessie's friends who happended to stick around after his game to watch her play said - there is no way I am playing basketball with these girls - they fight too much!

Tyler wanted to go hunting with Todd in the worst way this weekend - it's muzzleloader season and pretty much Todd's last chance to hunt this year. But...with highs of 11 for Saturday and 18 for Sunday, we didn't want him sitting out in the woods all afternoon.

So Todd and Tyler went back in the woods behind our house. No deer were seen, but they did see lots of tracks where apparently the deer were coming right up around the house!

Yesterday I spent getting ready to paint the laundry room. We are getting a new cabinet for above the washer and dryer on Friday, so I had to take down the old metal shelf, pull off the wallpaper and paint. I thought I was going to have to call in the HazMat team when I pulled out the washer and dryer. Apparently I don't clean behind those 2 appliances enough:) But it is nice and clean now, the walls are painted and we are ready for the cabinet.

I am not sure that I am sold on the color - it's got a pinky/grey tint to it - I'm thinking I may want something that is more a brown/yellow tint, but I'm waiting to repaint it until after the cabinet is in and everything is painted white (cabinet, trim, etc.) and distressed. We'll see.

Enjoy this sunny day....although I hear we will be heating up to the mid thirties by the middle of the week in Ohio. I cannot wait!

Kris

New Window

I got this book the other day at the new junk store I found:






And then I saw this post on a primitive blog.


And so I turned my kitchen window from this:





to this:





Yes, crappy window, but we want to gut and redo our kitchen one of these years, and put a new window in - so for now, I'll live with it (and do you know how hard it is to take a picture of a window???). I think I like it. The best thing was, I didn't have to buy anything to put in this window - it was all stuff I had laying around the house.

Last night I picked yet another bushel of roma tomatos - although I have a friend who said she needs some romas as hers all bit the dust. Hopefully, she still wants them, as I really don't want to do anything with them right now. We have soccer pictures this morning, so I'll see her at some point then and with any luck, she'll take them.


Life is good.

Kris

The View from Our House

A few weeks ago Kellie at Sugar Creek Farm was tagged for a post on your views outside your front and back doors - and she tagged anyone who wanted to join in. It looked like fun. So here goes.

To give you an idea, we live on the corner property in the country - a chip and seal road to be exact. Our 19.56 acre property starts at the road, just 60 foot wide. Once you wind your way up our driveway about 200 feet, and after a couple turns, our property opens up into one big square. When we moved in during the summer of 1998, I am not kidding, there was our house (a 1400 square foot modular home 3 bedrooms 2 bath and no basement - just a crawl space) and a little white shed 16 ft. square. There was no yard, no trees except the woods behind us, no deck, no flowerbeds, no driveway (seriously - they just had a base of great big rocks and that was it) no nothing.

These are all the view from our back door (which is the main entrance, as our front door is on the west side of the house facing the woods - basically the house is on our lot backwards):

Looking North - the edge of the green (before what looks like a treeline)

is the edge of our property

Looking East - the itty bitty dark green spots (pine trees) are the edge of the property

Looking West - used to be all woods just beyond the propane tank

Looking out our front door:

Looking West - basically you look at the dog pens and the wood shed

Looking North - yes there are tire marks in the grass -

this is how I get Jessie in and out of the house with her cast -

there are only 2 steps to carry her up rather than 8-10 deck steps.

Looking South - the woods and our closest neighbor - the second fence line if you can see it is our property line

In 2003 we put a 24x24 foot addition on the house - with a family room and computer/sewing room and full basement underneath it. The basement has a walk out door onto a patio that Todd and Company built, planned and created (and which I absolutely love).

I had to get a shot of the patio and my awesome sandstone walls

Looking East

Looking North

Looking South - East

This is a view from the Northeast corner of our property - what you see as you drive up our incredibly long driveway not including the horse barn - it is approximately .35 of a mile long - we measured it when I was pregnant with Jessie - I could walk up and down it 5 times and walk 3 1/2 miles- which I did religiously 6 days a week for 8 months of being pregnant - I was not as dedicated with Tyler - but did manage to get in 3 or 4 walks a week. If I was really motivated, I would walk up and down the driveway twice, and then walk down our road to a corner a mile away and walk back). The funniest times were when I'd be huffing and puffing my way up and down the road - and Todd would just up and pass me up on his way home from work - he would be kind enough to stop and ask the pregnant chick if she wanted a ride (to which I always replied no - it defeated the purpose of walking). But I only gained 24 lbs. with Jessie and 19 with Tyler - and believe me, it would not be hard for me to eat my way to 200 lbs.

And of course, a view of the cows out on the nice green grass!

Anybody else want to share some pictures?