hello, saturday

When you start planning a move from Texas to Colorado, it won't take long for you to dream up a huge, beautiful, river rock fireplace with a gorgeous mantle.  And it's not a big leap to see, in your dream, full green garlands lit up with twinkle lights and festive stockings hanging from the gorgeous mantle for Christmas.

But then you move to Colorado and you realize that it's much colder here than in Texas.  And central heat isn't as practical in Colorado as it is in Texas.  And while fireplaces are beautiful, they aren't the best way to make houses warm.

We heat our home with a wood stove.  It's not a beautiful fireplace.  It is a practical wood stove.

It heats our entire house.  As wood stoves go, it's the cutest one I've seen.  And it's totally fun to have a fire every night for 7-ish months of the year.

Unfortunately, it's not the best idea to put a mantle near a wood stove.  I saw one once in a Hallmark movie, but Honey says that Hallmark movies aren't always real.

Sigh.  Oh well.  Love the house you're with, right?

When I was unpacking I realized that the mantle had always been a pretty big focal point in our past living rooms.  I had a hard time finding places for my favorite things that used to sit on the mantle.  And don't even get me started on Christmas decorations.

So I started dreaming up a way to solve the no mantle problem.

I started by printing off Shanty2Chic's free plans for a floating shelf.  I broke the news to Honey that I had a Joanna Gaines style vision of a floating shelf on the huge blank wall above our TV.

So we took the pick up to Home Depot to buy some 2x4s and some cedar because that's what Joanna always uses.

We knew we wanted our shelf to be longer than our TV cabinet and the wall was barren enough to handle it, so we planned to make our shelf 8 ft long.  At the 11th hour, I took a chance and asked Honey if we had enough barn wood left from our loft project.  And we did!  We were able to piece some of it together and use it instead of the cedar.  Sorry Joanna.

Because we did that, our shelf ended up being 8 inches deep instead of 6.

I'm so glad though.  I think 6 inches would have been too small for the space.  A wannabe, but not quite.

I'm also really glad we used the barn wood.  I love having a bit of the loft wood wall in the living room.

Now the arranging and rearranging can begin.  And maybe I'll wait til after Halloween to hang the garland and stockings.

Before:

Today (because we all know it changes pretty often):

#widn

You're right Misty, I kinda left you hanging with the whole pile in the sun room thing.

It's gone!  This room is my favorite now...it's DONE!, best view, best sun, no boxes, clean, easy to keep, and the place where all the fun stuff happens.  Great big giant check on the list.

I'm a list person.  I love making lists.  I love checking stuff off of lists.
I have a house list rolling around in my head right now.

-paint last 2 kid rooms
-paint master
-paint bar stools
-refinish front of breakfast bar
-build floating shelf in living room

That's kind of it right now.  They're all relatively small projects.  I feel like once I get this list checked I can move on to decorating, hanging more stuff on the walls, do final unpacking/organizing in the bedrooms, get to a place where we call the house done.

Well you know...it's not ever really done...but...done.

Of course there's also a list rolling around in my head of some bigger house projects.  But that's stuff that can just wait til time, budget, and help allows.

Spring break is coming up.  Maybe we can knock out some painting...

The Loft

The girls' rooms and bathroom are upstairs.  There's also a secondary living area we call the loft.

A couple of pictures from before:

 Hello Mr Elk.

The sellers wanted to leave the armoir and the gigantic, heavy, ancient big screen TV.  You know the TV I'm talking about...the first generation big screen that is as thick as it is wide...circa 1995-ish?  It still works, and is perfect for Xbox, Disney Channel, and High School Musical videos, so we said OK, leave it.

One girl bedroom at the end. 

Another girl bedroom and a bathroom just to the right of the stairs.

When the painters we hired to paint for 2 days had everything done in 1 day, we had them do the stairwell and loft.  Best.

Then we moved all of our leftovers up there.  Why get new matchy-matchy stuff when it will mostly host crazy, giggly slumber parties and loud, bounding wrestling matches?

Honey's dad came for Thanksgiving. He likes projects when he comes to visit.  He's not one to sit and stare out the window.  I'm not one to let a project volunteer sit idle.  I sure did line up a project.  He and Honey and Bubba spent Black Friday putting up the barn wood wall.

So now the loft looks like this:

The girls had lots of fun peeling off the animal stickers that were "just too boyish, Mom."  I've had the green/white striped chair and ottoman since college.  The brown paisley chair used to be in our living room.

There's a floor plug near the stair railing.  I think it's the perfect space for a Ms. Pacman table top game.  We had one when I was growing up.  Some day.

As it turns out, the wall with the barn wood is very long.  Very. Like 28 feet long.  My first idea was to cover it with pallet wood.  Honey freaked, because, well, that is a lot of pallet wood.  

Last spring while we were visiting Honey's parents, we came across some wood on their property left over from their barn built 34 years ago.  We were able to bring most of that home and about half of the wall is covered with that.  

Honey also found some old fencing on the property at work and was able to salvage that.  We ended up buying a few more pieces to have enough to cover the wall.

We cleaned it, but I didn't want it cut any more than we had to.  I love that it doesn't fit together perfectly and that there are gaps and notches.

Honey and his dad put their family's brand on a piece of the wood.  How fun is that?!  I'm so glad we didn't use pallet wood.  I love the sentimental value of the wall and how it was pieced together with love.

Now that I have my wall, I have to figure out how to style it.  What do you hang on a barn wood wall?  suggestions?

#widn

We started redecorating and moving the beginning of October.  We worked straight through Thanksgiving. 

And then I said stop. 

Let's take a break. 

Let's enjoy December and Christmas and snow and the sports break in our new house.

So we did.  Work ceased.  Unpacking was put on hold.  Honey felt free to spend some time cleaning and organizing the shop because it's a little harder for him to just "stop" cold turkey.  We did little things here and there, but not a lot.

The break was good.  It gave my brain time to catch up with everything we'd done so far.  I was able to nest, clean, put away, organize, move furniture.  I felt free to just putter around and envision and dwell. 

I put some stuff on the walls.

And now it's March and "the work" hasn't really started up again.  But, I've started thinking about it.  I've made some decisions and started to get some direction.  Mary Tutu and I FINALLY agreed on a color for her room.  I have an idea of what I want to do with the master bedroom.  The rooms where I felt stuck are feeling more unstuck.

I'm spending today tying up a loose end...so my brain can feel free to move on to something else.

Remember the sun room?

If you stand there between the chair and the couch and turn around, you see this.

Right outside the sliding doors on the right is the hot tub.  I plan to train everyone to enter and exit the hot tub through those doors.  I also plan to train everyone to use the beach towels for the hot tub and not my good bath towels.  We'll see.

It didn't take long to realize that one of the things we needed to address was having places to hang wet stuff, especially when there are more than 5 people in the house.  I feel like the wall of hooks will solve this problem for swim suits and hot tub towels.  It's sort of like a pool house in wall form.

Just to the right of the sliding doors is this:

And that is the picture of the loose end I mentioned before.  It's the pile of stuff that was abandoned when I said stop back in November.  Today I'm cleaning, sorting, and dealing with that pile.  It will be done today. 

And when I'm done, I'll probably take a picture and post it on Instagram.  Because that's what you do when you accomplish a goal, right?

I get by with a little help from my friends

Y'all, there really wasn't anything wrong with this house when we bought it. 

See?  The before was really pretty.

A couple of months before we moved in, we started working on our redecorating budget.  We had some money to spend on the house up front, so we focused on projects that would make the most impact and would be easiest done before the big move.

Number 1 on our list was paint all areas of the house but the bedrooms.  We ended up hiring this out and it was THE BEST redecorating decision we've made.  There are a lot of tall walls, aspen ceilings and square footage to deal with.  We left it to the professionals, and I'm so glad we did.

paint = BIGGEST impact

Number 2 on our list was to re-tile the kitchen back splash.  Since the biggest common area of the house is the big rectangle with the kitchen attached to one side, we decided that after the paint on the walls, the tile on the walls needed to go next.

I fell in love with the clean texture of glass subway tile.  It has just enough reflection that you feel like there's sparkle without actually having sparkly things.  I've been in love with some shade or another of aqua for forever.  So I chose an aqua glass subway tile.

Honey took a week off work. The first part of the week we planned on working and painting.  The second part of the week, my parents and brother came and we planned on moving.

The very first minute we were in the house, I took before pictures of the kitchen.  While I finished photographing the rest of the house, Honey started tearing out the old tile.  We also took out the corner appliance garage to give us a bit more counter space near the cook top.  You can barely see it in the before picture, but removing it did give us what we wanted.

Our goal was to demo day 1, lay tile day 2, grout and move on to something else day 3.  Because it happened to be Homecoming weekend in our little town, that didn't quite work out, but we did finish in about 5 days.  We recruited a friend that is a professional to lend us his tools, help us get started, and rescue us from the hairy spots.

I've decided that another big impact thing can be changing light fixtures.  Months before we moved, I purchased new pendants for over the bar and I finally got to see them installed.

So, here's where we are today, minus the fall decor.  This picture was actually taken the first part of November, but we haven't done anything since then.  No, I haven't painted the other black bar stools to match the aqua one.  I will eventually...

Also, while planning for the new house, I fell in love with the two tone kitchen.  Mainly, the white upper cabinets and stained lower cabinets kitchen.  The cabinets in this house are all custom, wood, hand built and stained and installed.  Am I crazy to want to paint the uppers white?

The big rectangle

It's amazing how much just changing the paint color will change a room.

When we first started talking about our plans for making this house feel like ours, we prioritized by which projects would make the most impact.  In my head I knew that paint changed everything, but I didn't really know it in my heart until I actually saw it.

Our entry, dinning, and living area is basically a giant rectangle, under a cathedral ceiling, with a kitchen stuck on to the side of it.

Here's a picture of our living room before:

I'm standing in the dinning area near the kitchen.  When it's tile v. hardwood, tile will win every time.  It's just so easy to clean. When you live in the trees and the hills and the snow, you clean floors a lot.

Yes, tile is hard...and cold.  But right about the first time we got snow, I made friends with it.  Because I wasn't worried about how tile would hold up under melted snow, mud, and wood chips.  We're good now.

Here's what the living room looks like today:

I know, right?!  It looks so different!  All we did was paint.  Well, and move our stuff in.

The closed stained door in the middle is the laundry room, to the left of that is the master.  Then to the right are the stairs leading up to the loft and the girls' rooms, then the Ks are sort of in the entry way.

The wood leaning against the wall is actual barn wood left over from when my in-laws built their barn in 1978.  We don't have a mantle, so at Christmas, we hung our stockings on it.  It's been leaning against the wall in random places ever since.   

The basket on the floor by the couch is our electronics basket.  It has a power strip inside, and All The Things are plugged in there at night.  All The Cords are inside the basket and when I don't want to look down into the basket and see them, I just gently lay a pillow inside and cover it all up.  Honey drilled a hole in the side of the basket big enough to put the power strip plug through.  I LOVE IT.  When I find random electronics, cords, ear buds, charger cords laying around the house, they go directly in the basket.  LOVE.

Do you have a charging station at your house?  How do you corral All The Things when they need to be charged?

Let's start with one of my personal favorites.

Hey!  It's been a while hasn't it?  Bear with me while I find my voice again.  I don't know if I remember how to write or not.

In October 2014 we bought a house.

It's our little house in the big woods.  I told Honey when we started our home search that if we were going to leave Texas and live in Colorado, I wanted trees, and hills, and to know that I wasn't in Texas anymore.

He listened.  And took my words seriously.
When I look out the windows, I see trees, and hills, and sometimes deer, and for the last several weeks, snow.

We've been spending the last few months making the house feel like ours. (And gathering firewood to keep us warm in the winter.)
Little projects here and there.
Just cosmetic stuff.
There's nothing wrong with the house.  We just want to put our stamp on it.  Hairdryer-ify it.

We are definitely still unpacking, putting away, going through, and settling in.  It's a process, and I'm not in a hurry.

The master bedroom has a sun room attached to it.  It's my favorite room in the house.  There is so much natural light and the view may or may not be what sold us on the house.  It's the sort of view that pulls you into the room and makes you want to stand in front of the windows all day.

Here's the sun room before we moved in.

See what I mean about the windows?  Love.

Behind me on the wall is a TV.  There are patio doors leading to the deck for the summer, and a pellet stove to keep it cozy in the winter.

Here's what it looks like today.

Even though you have to walk through the master to get in here, we don't consider it a private room.  It's an extra TV space, a craft room, an office, a puzzle room, a quiet room.  Brooke and Mary Tutu love it in here.  When we were still unloading the moving truck, Brooke disappeared.  I found her in the sun room, no furniture, with a jigsaw puzzle spread out on the floor just enjoying being in the house.

The hutch behind the couch was Mema's china hutch.  She gifted it to me several years ago.  It holds all of my scrapbooking stuff.  The built in cabinets and shelves hold the rest of the crafting stuff.

I slid a skinny folding table in behind the couch.  The crate holds all of the girls' pens, pencils, markers, paint brushes, scissors, etc.  They usually move in here to do homework or color or loom.

Hello windows.
The left corner of the built ins serves as our desk.  It's where I pay bills and balance the checkbook.  Just to the right of the chair is a cabinet door.  The sewing machine is stored in there.  It can pop up to counter level when you need it, and then be lowered back down when it needs to be stored.  Love!

Do you have a favorite spot in your house?  What do you love about it?