Fresh Pine Garland and Entry Way Tour

Hello! We are still working on organizing ourselves and getting settled here, but we are loving the new house. We are so excited to spend our first Christmas here!

 

When we bought our Christmas Tree, A beautiful North Carolina Frasier Fir, the friendly man at the tree lot offered us all of the branches we could carry away. We brought two big bushels home in the back of our van, and I decided to make some fresh garlands out of them. We went back for more (he told us we could take all we wanted and to come back if we needed more) and we were greeted with a warm "Hey there, I remember y'all!" and he insisted on loading them up for me (the south is such a friendly place!)

 

It took a few hours, and made a huge mess in the process, but we enjoyed decking our halls with the Christmas-y smell that only live pine can bring!

 

Come on in and check it out!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I need to get a whole house shot some night when the window candles are lit up, it's fun. We are so busy with getting things out of boxes and setting rooms up that we just knew we couldn't tackle exterior Christmas lights this year, so we kept is simple with wreaths and candles.

I fully intend to share a full house tour soon. Life is just very busy these days! Stay tuned, but don't hold your breath!

Closet Turned Built-In

One of my favorite details of the house we just left behind was the sweet little built-in bookshelf we made for the basement. 

With everything we had going on, plus adding our third little fella into the mix, it took us longer than I care to admit to get 'er done. But get it done, we did.

It all started when we had the basement dry walled. We had planned for a closet in that spot, but seeing it all framed out and dry walled like that gave us an idea. It was the perfect spot for a built in, and we had plenty of unused closets down there, so why not use that space to make a statement and add some character to our home!

 

We did most of the finish work on our own, with the exception of the staircase, so the trim work and paint fell upon the hubby. He enjoys doing a bit of finish carpentry here and there, and we were under the gun to get the walls painted and the trims in and painted and caulked so the carpet could come. All of this fell around the time I was hospitalized and put on bed rest with little boy #3, so we did the bear minimum to make it work and put off finishing the built-in for a later date. 

As you can see below, we placed the bead board on the back,  and had made a few shelves for it, but didn't complete it for some time.

 

My original plan was just to paint the back white like the rest of the trim work, but on a whim I chose this pretty blue paint and it really helped bring some color into an otherwise neutral space. 

 

Around the time we were prepping our home for selling, we finally rounded up the rest of the materials needed and put the remaining shelves in. I brought in some last minute accessories and we called it good.

I had intentions of filling these cute frames (all from target) with pictures of our own family, but when we sold the house on the first day, it was no longer a priority for me. Instead, we moved to boxing things up and packing up our life. 

So, we only got to enjoy this shelf finished for about a month! Sometimes it's that last little push to finish a long project that just kills us. We always say it's usually the last 10% that we struggle with getting done. Please tell me we're not the only ones! I sure loved walking past it and admiring it for that short period of time though!

Our New House...

It's not really "new" news anymore, but we're still pretty darn excited about it... We are building a house!
 


We Went under contract toward the end of April, and since then we've been busy gathering our selections and getting our permitting and financing. It's been a lot of fun, but we can't wait for it to be finished! We are targeting October for closing. It has been so rainy here this summer (wettest on record from what we hear, totally abnormal) and it's really messed things up with getting the foundations in, not just for us, but for other houses going in near us. I'm hoping we will be in by Halloween.

Here are some of the details:


 



 
The brick is Edgewater, a nice red brick with some variation. I love it. The siding choices are a light grey and arctic white. The only door color I liked was this outer space, it will probably get painted later. They had limited door colors, because it's not painted on site.

The floor plan:

 We love the floor plan. It's exactly what we've dreamed of for a long time now. We've walked through some similar and can't wait to walk into our own!

Master bathroom tile choices:
 

We didn't love any other tile at the design center, so we opted to put in vinyl flooring in the kids bath, mudroom, laundry room areas and tile ourselves. I've been dreaming of hex tile for the kids bath and we couldn't see paying extra for something we knew we would just be ripping out.

Same goes for counter tops. They had about 6 choices of dark and tan granites, I have something else in mind, so we opted to downgrade to laminate for a credit and we will apply that toward taking them out and putting in something we love after we move in...

The cabinets:


I love them! I had to fight for pure white. They offered creme with a glaze, but I guess I'm a purist. I just wanted white. Having renovated three houses now, including white-ifying two of those kitchens, this was just a must. I told them it was a deal breaker, and we ended up going through the sub contractor they use and tracking down the white ones on our own. The funny thing about that was about two weeks later, they got this sample in the showroom and the sales rep said they sent it right after I ordered mine. So I guess white cabinet lovers everywhere can thank me for calling to their attention they needed a white option. Ha ha ha.

The flooring:

 Love it as well. It's hickory, in a distressed finish, becuase it will get that way anyway, might as well make it be on purpose and let the oopsies blend in over time.

The Lot:

 

It's bigger than 1/3 acre, smaller than 1/2. We originally wanted something larger, but this neighborhood was just calling out to us. It is full of kids, and we decided the yard will be plenty big enough, but the boys have really missed having kids to play with close by. The house we are renting has a huge yard and no neighbor kids, and while it's been fun, in our stage of life we chose neighbors and friends for the boys over a massive yard. It won't be tiny though, so we are happy. About the size of our last yard, which was great, but tree-less, so we are very excited about the amount of trees we will have here! 

We got to go through and choose which trees to keep and which ones to clear to make room for the house. Our back yard will have lots of trees. The boys can't wait to build a tree house, and we are looking forward to having a space for playing and entertaining.

The footings are poured!

And I've been busily collecting my ideas for the interior. We ordered pre-wires and no light fixtures so we could pick our own. It's an overwhelming task picking light fixtures for an entire home, but it's so much fun! Here are some of my ideas:

So much to do, but we are enjoying making it our own.

I'll hopefully be back sometime soon and share our house hunt. Although we are really excited to build this time around, there were a few really great houses that caught our eye and made us think twice. It would have been home reno #4 though, and though it's a lot of fun demolishing things and rebuilding, our hands are full with three boys 6 and under running around, so this option is good for us this time around!

DIY window seat



It's been so long since I've posted that I forgot my photobucket account log in! Ahhh! It's been a busy time in my life. Over the course of the past few months our family has had lots of changes. We sold our home, it sold quickly... quicker than we ever expected! Within 24 hours we had three solid offers and one verbal. Super exciting! We moved our little family from Utah to North Carolina, and now that the dust has settled, we have some projects from before the move to share!

 

This sweet little window seat was easy to put together and added some storage and upped the cute factor of our living room.

 

Our little guy loved to perch on top and look outside at the kids going by on their bikes.

It started with the handy little base cabinets I found at Down East Home (a liquidator of clearance items from pottery barn and other stores and other places)

I did take a before picture, but can't find any of them at the moment. Here's the basic just of it: It's the Cameron storage system, they come in a variety of components. I ended up with two drawers and one open shelf. I picked them up for about $45 each, not too bad, considering the drawers slide nicely and are pretty large.

I ended up with two in a dark cherry finish and one in this oak finish. I primed them and painted them all white. I love the look of built-in shelving and a built-in window seats, this house didn't come with those details, so we decided to put a little something together on our own. The best part is, nothing was permanently attached, so we got to bring it all with us when we moved!

 

The shelves are just the Ikea Hemnes bookshelves in white. We measured everything twice before buying them to make sure it would fit just right. We got lucky and the size of our wall was about as perfect as it could have been for the pieces that we had.

 

This wasn't done for staging purposes, but it sure did help. That first day we were on the market, we had 11 or 12 showings. Many of them arrived with realtors at the same time I was exiting. When they stepped inside I heard several people ooing and ahhing over the window seat and wondering if it stayed with the house. We would have considered leaving it, but with multiple offers on the table, we didn't feel like we needed to throw in any extras.

 

And here's a WAAAY before picture of the room when we first saw the house.

 

 

 

Adding that little window seat did a lot to help our bare bones living room out.

 

Looking at pictures of our home makes me miss it a lot! We are currently renting until October while we are building a home here. We are so excited to get settled again!

 

I have a handful of other little projects that I'm hoping to share soon!