4 Year Housiversary

Here we go! Let's see what we accomplished this year!

[Year 1, Year 2, Year 3]

Four years in our home! I made GIFs this year to show the transition from year to year to year, but if they go too fast just click on the headers of each section that will link to permanent pages for each room.

This year was really about the basement. Hoping to do some kitchen updates over the next year.


OUTSIDE 

Completed this year:

• Paved the driveway from the street to just past the garage. Which hadn't even been on our to-do list, but we are SO HAPPY to have had this done.
• Added a couple more plants in the flower beds around the house. 
• John cut a path through the trees that separate our house from the street for Charley to drive her little pink car on. 

To do:

• Finish the girls' playground. We have a second slide and platform we want to add.
• Build a lower deck & update the upper deck.
• Build an arbor around the garage doors.
• Build a surround for the garbage and recycling cans so they aren't such eyesores.
• Add some more flower/shrubbery beds around the entire house. (We did add one little section this year, but need to finish it all the way around the house.)
• Furnish the rest of the deck.
• Stain the deck.
• Replace the rocking chairs on the front porch.
• Finally decide on a paint color for the front door.
• And maybe one day, replace the whole front door/sidelights with something more attractive. 

OFFICE

Completed this year: 

• We now have nothing on the wall above the computer. I just can't decide what to do on that wall.
• Many of the crafty things that were stored in here got moved down to the new craft area in the basement, so I reorganized the shelving in here. 

To do:

• Find nicer office chairs.
• Crown molding. 

DINING ROOM

Completed this year: 

• Nada.

To do:

• Crown molding.
• Find a rug for the room.
• Maybe recover the chair cushions.

KITCHEN

Completed this year: 

• Painted all the walls blue.
• Added recessed lighting and removed the spaceship looking light fixture.
• Redecorated somewhat.
• No more high chair!
• Had to toss that $5 rug finally. (not pictured - this has happened since the photo was taken)
• Changed the curtains.

To Do:

• New counter tops.
• Back splash of some sort.
• Possible cabinet refinishing.
• Get some bar stools already.
• Replace the builder's basic sink/faucet.
• Maybe build an enclosure for the fridge - it sticks out a bit since it's not a counter depth fridge.
• New rug for under the table - it looks so naked now!
• Wallpaper or paint the pantry walls.
• Crown molding

LIVING ROOM

Completed this year:

• Painted the walls.
• New furniture and moved the old stuff to the basement. 
• New MUCH bigger rug.
• Bought matching baskets for all the toys on the bottom shelf of the wall unit.

To Do:

• We have new curtains for this room, but haven't hemmed and hung them yet.
• Crown molding.

CHARLEY'S ROOM

Completed this year: 

• Rearranged a bit to give her more floor space for playing.
• Moved her play kitchen to the basement.
• Replaced the curtains.
• New bedding.
• Updated the fabric in the embroidery hoops to match the new bedding. We got rid of all of the red accents in her room.
• Added and painted a couple more IKEA spice rack shelves for Charley to keep her favorite books and knick knacks.
• Added a TV (only works for Wii) and some wooden crates for cord hidage/entertainment center-ish/storage purposes.
• Added a million command hooks to the side of her wardrobe for necklace storage.
• Got rid of the floor lamp and got a cute table lamp.

To Do: 

• Crown molding.

LANEY'S ROOM

Completed this year: 

• Moved the rocking horse to the basement.
• Removed the diaper storage baskets from the dresser. 

To Do: 

• I suppose a big girl bed is in order for this room before the next housiversary post. :(
• Crown molding.

GUEST BATHROOM

Completed this year:

• Nothing.

To Do:

• On the wall above the light switch, I've swapped out art several times already and I just can't find something I love in this spot. I'll keep looking.

MASTER BEDROOM

Completed this year:

• Replaced the ceiling fan with a new one and moved the old one to the basement.
• Added a large mirror to the wall by the entry door.

To Do:

• Crown molding.
• The large mirror leaning against the wall by the entry door that needs framed out and secured to the wall. 
• Maybe replace carpet with the hardwood floors we have elsewhere in the house. And then we'd need a rug, of course. 

MASTER BATHROOM

Completed this year:

• Still nothing.

To Do:

• Replace the linoleum with tile.
• Take out the shower stall and make a larger tiled shower instead.
• Paint.
• Decorate.
• Update the giant builder's basic mirror by framing it in or replacing it. 
• Replace faucets and light fixtures.
• Replace towel bars.
• Add some chunky shelving over the toilet and decorate the tiny room.

LAUNDRY ROOM

Completed this year:

• Nothing at all.

To Do:

• Get one of those fancy fold-up ironing boards or figure out some other solution for where to put our ironing board.
• Build or buy a counter top over washer and dryer.
• Paint. Something fun in here. Stripes or something. Maybe wainscoting or wallpaper.
• Replace linoleum floor with tile.

BASEMENT


So, I think we will now have to break out the different sections of the basement since there are legit separate rooms in the basement now.

REC ROOM

Completed this year:

• Finished flooring, shoe molding, etc.
• Purchased pool table, shuffle board table, dart board.
• Purchased bar height table.
• The whole drink fridge/bar area.
• Moved the couch and rug from upstairs down here.
• Bought, assembled and decorated the shelving.
• Hung curtains and added blinds to the windows.
• Bought TV.
• Decorated.
• Moved the girls' play kitchen and grocery store here.

To Do:

• There are a couple of places that still need decorated. 
• We will continue to add to the beer sign wall until it is full.

GUEST ROOM/CRAFT ROOM

Completed this year:

• Paint.
• Carpet and the flooring under craft area.
• Cabinetry and pegboard at craft area.
• Moved our master bedroom ceiling fan down here.
• Reassembled the bed that has been in the storage room so we finally have a place for guests to sleep.

To Do:

• Decorate!
• Paint the peg board and ADD ALL THE THINGS TO THE PEG BOARD! Pretty excited about that part.
• Need some more furniture for in here too. 
• Curtains.

STORAGE ROOM

Completed this year:

• Moved the bed out.

To Do:

• Use some of these decorations to finish the guest room.
• Straighten up. Several of those bins are now empty, so need to use them and donate some stuff too.

GYM

Completed this year:

• Bought a new smart TV for the room.

To Do:

• I actually do want to decorate the room a little. But it's probably last on my list so I wouldn't expect to see anything done in here anytime soon.

BASEMENT BATH

Completed this year:

• Nada.

To Do:

• Everything. 

The Weekend

It was a good one!

Not a whole lot planned but we seemed to get a whole lot done, despite the house still being messy as we go to bed tonight. But we were on a major project kick, so anytime we weren't playing with our girls we were working on projects around the house. I feel accomplished!

So, I really have to give John so much of the credit. While I come up with things I'd like to do or buy, he really is the 99% doer. While I know my task is important too (keep the kids alive and the house in order-ish so one of us can work on house stuff), his really takes the cake when I think about how much that man can accomplish in such a short amount of time. Y'all - HE. DID. NOT. STOP today. Until around 8:45 when he headed to my sister's house to watch The Walking Dead with my brother-in-law, he worked. And man. Let me tell you - I am THANKFUL. Truly.

So. Lets do a paragraph 'Day In John's Life'. Wake up when Charley comes in our room around 7. She gets in the bed to snuggle, so he goes ahead and gets out. Makes coffee, realizes we don't have much for breakfast and heads to the store. Comes back, makes breakfast and feeds us all. Goes to the basement and brings up our end tables that he put the last coat of paint on last night. Reassembles the drawers and puts them in place. Then we go to Home Depot to pick out tile for a little project I came up with last week. Stopped by my parent's house to get a tile saw and got straight to work on that. Thinset, tile placement, cuts, etc etc. Gets the entire project done and says we'll have to wait 24 hours for grout. Then goes outside and cuts the grass. I left for one hour and while I'm gone (both girls were sleeping) he hangs up a porch swing I scored at a garage sale. I get back home and we test out the swing and it squeaks a little, so then he gets the ladder and tools back out to fix the squeak. Comes in, makes dinner for all of us. Feeds Laney her dinner and then eats his. Then, realizes he can actually grout today, so mixes up some grout and finishes that. Wipes it down, invites me to admire it (I LOVE it!) and then cleans up all the tools. Throw in doing the dishes a couple times and then leaving to go to my sister's house and that's basically his day. Insane, right?

So! The tile project. I was trying to think of what I wanted inside the mantel surround in our bedroom. I knew I didn't want to do the same thing as we did in the living room with the log pieces, but I just couldn't figure out what to do. Finally one day at work last week it came to me and I emailed him - tile! We went and picked it out today and I really couldn't be happier with it. It goes so well with our freshly painted walls (thanks to John from last weekend).

 

Charley's desk was starting to always be a total disaster. We had upgraded her little desk we started out with to a larger desk that we scored for free, but it just wasn't functional still and remained messy at all times. I came up with a couple ideas to help it be more functional but just needed a couple things from IKEA to make it happen. We went to IKEA yesterday morning to get those things, and then spent a good chunk of time afterwards hanging stuff up and reorganizing.

We used the curtain wire hangers to hang up artwork above the desk where a shelf used to be. (Oh yeah - yesterday when we took the shelf down John patched the holes and repainted too. Ok, ok. I'll stop.) And then we used a couple of IKEA spice racks on the inside of the desk to hold her paints and glitter and all. I really needed a place for coloring books and paper so I took a peruse around our storage room in the basement and saw these flower window boxes that I got at a yard sale a few years ago and hadn't used yet. Those were perfect, so we hung them up to store that kind of stuff. I love it! It looks a tad cluttery, but it is tucked away in a corner that you don't really see and it already is so much more functional for Charley. She plays at this desk every single day so I'm hoping it continues to be functional for her.

It wasn't all work all weekend though! We also spent a lot of time outside yesterday and today. Yesterday my sister and brother-in-law had a fire/hot-dog cookout at the property they bought next door so we hung out and played over there for a couple hours.

We had hot dogs and s'mores, and then we played with a Chinese jump rope we got at IKEA earlier in the day. Then we used it as a limbo bar until dark.

That is John limboing in that last picture. Proof he didn't work the whole weekend away! We had a lot of fun though and we were home before 8:00! Perfect evening! But it did make me want to go camping ASAP. So, we are planning something soon!

Oh! So that porch swing John hung. Last weekend I spontaneously decided to check out 2 yard sales (we don't go in the winter usually - no need to get up early for only a couple sales) and one of them was SO GOOD. I ended up getting a really nice porch swing for $40 and then an iron kid's bench for $5, not to mention TWO really big nice woven rugs for $5...FOR BOTH. They were moving and were just trying to get rid of it all, so they had some awesome deals. They didn't include the hardware for hanging up the porch swing, though, just the chains and actual swing. When I got it home John remembered that last year I came home with swing hardware still in the package from another yard sale that I got for just $1 because I thought it might work for the swings we hung under the deck. It didn't, though, but he hung onto it anyway. It was actually just what we needed for this swing though! How crazy, right? So that is now hung, and there is a tiny spot for my two little loves to sit, too. 

Man, I love a productive weekend. On top of that I finished up tagging stuff for a consignment sale and dropped that stuff off today. As crazy as it sounds though, there was still time for tire swings and just having fun.

But now? Now it is time for bed. Remind me how thrilled I was with our productive weekend when I'm struggling through the morning at work. 

Silhouette Portrait

A year and a half ago I got the Silhouette Portrait cutting machine for my birthday. I was really excited to use it to make birthday banners or whatever but I truly didn't have much of a clue what all it could do much less how to actually use it. And that's no dig at the people that gave this to me for my birthday (my parents) because I purchased it myself with their credit card and handed it to them for them to wrap it up and give it back to me. That's a true story - my mom is not much of a shopper so she welcomes anyone to do the shopping for her, but don't you go messin' with tradition! You WILL receive your gift wrapped and ON your birthday. Don't go trying to get it early just because you already know what it is! Anyways - that wasn't the point of this at all.

So. I got the machine and tested it out a couple times and saw some of the things it could do on Pinterest and whatnot. I even watched the entire instructional DVD that came with it right when I got it. But, none of that really stuck and the machine got very little use for the first 14 months I owned it.

One simple project I was able to figure out - cut the bunny and tree out of striped wallpaper and framed them in Laney's nursery.

UNTIL.

Until it was Father's Day 2015 and procrastinating Lacey still hadn't gone to the store to get a card for my dad. Typical. We were headed to my parent's house for lunch shortly and I had no card to give. I really didn't feel like running to Target to browse the picked over cards with the rest of the procrastinators. I had a gift (which I believe was either cash or a gift card) but no where to place it with no card so a card was definitely a necessity this time. So I decided to break out the Silhouette and figure this thing out once and for all. And I did, sort of. I cut some shapes and glued them onto a card and it was very easy. The card didn't end up looking like I had panicked and threw it together an hour before lunch so it was definitely a win. I was determined to figure out what else this machine could do after that.

The next thing I attempted to tackle was something I was straight ripping off of Pinterest. 

This was mid dining room update and I needed some large cheap art to put on either side of the china cabinet. [Cheap because a) I'm cheap and b) I'm cheap.] I picked up two large frames ($10 for both!) from a yard sale this past spring, spray painted them, and was ready for some cheapo art to go in them when I saw this idea on Pinterest using paint chips from the home improvement store. Let me just say - even though they are FREE and I have no problem taking many samples when I'm legitimately trying to pick paint colors, I truly felt and behaved like a thief when taking them for this project. Full on looking over my shoulder, sneaking them into my purse, etc etc. I'm glad they didn't question me for shoplifting or I may have just crumbled right there in the store. 

Anyways, I didn't originally set out to use the Silhouette to do this project but after cutting the first few triangles and seeing how just the slightest error in cutting would really screw this up I decided to give it a try. But this was a much more complicated project for the Silhouette than I had tackled before so it took some time for me to figure it out.

Basically I had to change the paper size to the size of one of the paint chip samples. And then set my triangle on it just so so that the printed paint color name wouldn't be a part of my triangle. It was a little bit of trial and error and the most I've used an actual ruler for measuring since elementary school but finally I had plenty of perfectly cut triangles ready to use. 

The frames I was trying to fill were big - like, 16x20 at least, maybe even bigger. So once I started cutting triangles and placing them on a piece of cardboard to fill up the entire space I got a bit overwhelmed with how many paint chips I was going to need to "steal" to complete this project. So, I scrapped it and moved on to find another way to make some large artwork for this room.

Instead, I ended up buying these two teapot shapes at $.99 each from the Silhouette store and using some leftover black vinyl that I purchased years ago and cut the teapot shapes from it. I made them as big as I possibly could with the size of the cutting mat. I also had a ton of burlap that I never used for another project that was scrapped last year so I decided to use that as my backing fabric. Placed the vinyl cut outs on the burlap and framed them up and voila! Cheap art! They cost me a total of $11.98 for both not considering the vinyl and burlap and spray paint I already had on hand - but even if I didn't have those things these would still be really cheap to make. I am pretty pleased with them even if they weren't what I originally set out to do.

So then I had a pile of little triangles on my desk begging to be used for something, so instead I went with the same idea and just used much smaller Ikea frames that I also already owned and were just hanging out in the basement waiting for a home. I have a lot of crap in my basement. Anyways, this is on the wall opposite the china cabinet wall and I like how these turned out too!

At that point I was on a roll with this machine and have been cutting out shapes for any and everything. I ended up replacing the art I originally made in Laney's room that I wasn't all that fond of with her monogram cut out of gold glitter card stock over some wallpaper I got from the Habitat for Humanity ReStore.

I also made Charley's birthday invitations with it which added a new skill to my Silhouette repertoire. I learned how to PRINT on the paper first with our home printer, and then send that paper through the machine to cut out the shapes. It was actually really simple but I hadn't attempted it yet prior to this because it didn't seem simple in my head. The only other difficulty of this little project was that the tower shape straight from the Silhouette store (again, only $.99) had the tower roof and bricks as all one big piece, meaning the roof would have been the same color as the bricks. I didn't love that idea so I learned how to alter the shape to make the roof a separate piece. I love how they came out!

And then finally I used the machine to make Charley a birthday banner for her party - which was the main thing I planned on making when I got the darn thing in the first place. Again, really easy and just used brads to hold each little piece together.

Am I starting to sound like a Silhouette machine saleslady? Well funny you mention that. The first 10 people to comment will get an exclusive coupon code for 10% off a purchase with the coupon code LACEYSAWESOME.

Just kidding. I have no hookups like that and hopefully you haven't already closed out this window thinking this was yet ANOTHER sponsored blog post.

I just really love the darn thing now that I've started to learn how to use it and wanted to share. Get you one! I (I mean my parents) got mine on sale (shocker) for $118 and all the shapes you could even imagine are for sale in their online store for just $.99 each! That just screams to my little deal loving heart when I know competing machines (and the darn cartridges that they need!) cost way more than that.

Buy you one and make me a card. You can see some of my address up there in the invitation picture I did a crappy job of editing. Just guess at the rest of the letters & numbers. It may end up at my house, it may not. It's like the landlocked version of putting a note in a bottle and tossing it in the ocean.

L is for: Laney's Nursery

And not Late, but Later than I would have preferred, And Lovely.

 

It is (mostly) done. Hallelujah. I just need my seamstress to sew a couple of new pillow covers and my painter to spray paint one more frame for me and I think that would be it. (Can you  believe that my landscaper Juan is also my painter and seamstress? Man of many talents.) Oh, and if a little round accent rug that I actually like finds its way into my hands/shopping cart that would be lovely too. But I'm at least at a point where I feel like I can share it.

(If only I loved the pictures as much as I love the room. Turns out I'm a horrible room photographer. Just awful. And then trying to get the coloring right in Photoshop was horrible too. Just take the average coloring from every picture and find the common denominator hue. Those are the actual colors. Maybe I'll get the newborn photographer to take a couple of pictures for me since I am incapable.)

Anyways, this room took me a while to figure out exactly what I wanted. I originally started out just knowing I was going to start by mimicking this picture from MODGblog's playroom.

Even on my Pinterest board, I kept coming back to this peach/gold color combo so eventually I was settled on that. I went ahead and picked a wall color and got that ingrained in my head. 

Oh look! There's Juan there!

With that out of the way, I started pricing those star decals (not cheap! or easy to find!), or deciding if I was going to ask Juan to stencil those for me. I thought about that for a long, long time. So long that when I finally got inspired to move on to other areas of the room, I had long since forgotten about them and ultimately decided against using them at all. 

The next thing I got inspired to do came from some basement cleaning. At one point about a year ago, I started buying any and all letters I could find for an Etsy idea that never came to be. I have no idea how we were able to do the bird mobiles for so long and do so many of them! I never even made a good attempt at getting the letter business off the ground. So while cleaning the basement and seeing all of these letters sitting there unused, I decided to see how much of the alphabet I already owned since I had seen that idea on Pinterest a million times. I mean, use what you've got, right? Turned out I only needed to buy 6 more letters to complete the alphabet, so I decided to go ahead with that project.

I bought about 6 different pieces of scrapbook paper that I liked and modge-podged the tops of the letters while painting the sides gold. It was actually a very easy (and cheap!) project. Then those got hung over the crib (instead of over the bookcase like I had envisioned) after some mild panicking about furniture placement and it not all fitting. Sure, would have made more sense over the bookcase but I loved the finished product so much I wanted it to be on the focal wall when you came in the room, so over the crib they went.

And the room stayed that way for several weeks after that. I couldn't decide on anything so I just did nothing. But then. THEN! Ideas started coming all at once! I found some wrapping paper I liked at Marshall's, and then a roll of wallpaper I liked for only $1 at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore, and curtains that didn't break the bank from a pin on Pinterest and, and, and, and!! It just all started coming together and rolling in.

I used the wallpaper to cut some silhouette shapes for a few frames I got at Marshall's and to cover a couple of books I used on a shelf and I framed pieces of the wrapping paper for a triptych I made to go over the bookcase. Basically just doing my cheapo decorating as I normally do.

And then I came across this mobile on Pinterest that I loved and was sold on Etsy anywhere from $150-$175. I wondered if I should splurge on this since I'd yet to even spend $30 on this room.

I considered that for negative 2 seconds (meaning not at all, no way, no how) and instead Googled DIY instructions to make it myself. I came across a couple of YouTube videos on the flowers themselves, and then this blog with a tutorial that I roughly followed (except I for sure did not make a pattern for every flower - I just free handed those.) It was definitely time consuming, but I felt like I wanted to make Laney a special mobile too since we spent so much time making (and the duplicating 200x over) the one we made for Charley so it was my first moment of "let's make everything fair for my kids". I love the way it turned out so much though. And it cost me maybe $15 total.

There was one other last minute project we completed over the weekend, but again, I just cannot get a good picture of it. It uses an IKEA Lyrik Pendant lamp shade (with the Hemma cord set), a pack of $1.50 paper flowers, and a roll of jute string I got for $1 at a yard sale forever ago. Oh, and for the bracket John went to the basement and found this wirey photo frame thing that I had planned to use in our bedroom one day if we ever got around to it. It was one of two swirly wirey pieces that connected, and had 4 frames hanging down from them. But he saw its potential as a bracket instead and once I agreed that it would be perfect, he re-engineered it to hold the pendant up. I wrapped the cord in the jute string to make it a little more visually appealing since it ran down the wall and added paper flowers to the pick-ups in the lamp shade. 

Okay okay enough. Let me just show you the whole room. 

And a few little details - somehow bunnies kept finding their way into everything, so bunnies it is! Charley has even already picked out a bunny lovey for Laney so I guess bunnies are to Laney as birds and owls were to Charley.

I love that I know what is functional for me this time when designing a nursery and that I can get to as many burp cloths as I could possibly need (the basket on top of the dresser closest to the glider), the laundry hamper to dispose of those burp cloths and the switch for the lamp all easily and from the comfort of that glider. I spent a lot of time in that glider with Charley and foresee doing much of the same with Laney. And I love that I'll get to spend that time with Laney in a room I truly love!

I bought very few things new (shocker!) so I'm not going to bother with a source list, but if there is something in particular you want to know about feel free to ask! My biggest splurge in the entire room was that crib sheet - it was $39 which is insane for a sheet that will just get peed upon and spit up on. But, if that was the most expensive item in the whole room, I think I did okay.

And just for fun, here is the link to Charley's nursery. I like looking at them both and seeing how different they are! They have definitely been some of my favorite rooms to decorate.

Unfinished Business

I thought about updating this post from last May on what house projects we've accomplished in the last 8 months and then almost laughed myself off of my chair. Of the 73 potential house projects I outlined, we've completed 10 of those things. A mere 14%. Pathetic.

We have done some house things around here lately though, but nothing it seems like nothing is finished. We 1, take forever to do stuff (ahem - house projects are spendy!), and 2, jump around so much that things sit halfway finished for a while. I'm sick of waiting for everything to be finished. Here are some works-in-progress.
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Last August I started on a gallery wall and shared with you here my rough start. I got so many good suggestions from y'all and ultimately decided to repaint just a few of those frames in a mint green. I did that almost immediately.

Then, I started rounding up stuff to go in the frames. I don't really love family pictures as decor, so my plan was to come up with a ton of other stuff to frame a la Young House Love. (sniff, sniff. Miss those guys so much.) First I printed a couple of pictures of our trip to Venice, and found a card from our wedding that I really liked, and gathered a map we used in Paris and framed all those up. I framed around the doorbell and added a key to a frame that I didn't have glass for. I also even printed a couple of things with WORDS, which is so unlike me as you know. I just thought those might be nice to break it up a bit. Then I pulled some stuff out of magazines and books we just use for decor and had filled maybe 20% of all the frames on the wall. And then those empty frames sat. And sat. And sat. For five long months.

A couple weekends ago I'd had enough. SOMEthing would look better than nothing, and I was really hating the couple of WORDY prints so I trashed those. Finally, I went to mPix, went through all of our pictures and printed a picture for every frame. Why do I bother trying to take good pictures if I'm never going to display them? But I set this rule for myself that I was only displaying pictures I took - nothing from a photographer we had paid (although one from a pro did make the cut after all). I do like to make things difficult.

 

Anyways, even though the idea of pictures instead of art is growing on me a little bit, the wall just looks 10x better with just anything in the frames. (And you all collectively say DUH LACEY). I'll replace pictures as we go with either more pictures or art I find that I like and one day it will be just as I pictured it when I started it last August.

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This next project actually WAS on the list from last May. What really got the ball rolling on this one was from a comment my brother made at Charley's birthday party, though.

So, my brother hasn't been over all that many times (usually we see each other at my parent's house instead) and while we were hanging out in the eat-in kitchen area he asked, "what is that room?" pointing to the opened french doors coming off of the eat-in kitchen area. I get why he asked it because it was already something I had wanted to change since I'd put it on my list of changes back in May. Our Master Bedroom was through those french doors and it was just wide open into the main entertaining area of the house for anyone to see. It's not that there was anything to hide, but, usually you don't see someone's master bedroom when you are at a child's birthday party, you know? I don't mind the layout at all, but the french doors didn't lend themselves to much privacy.

So after that we started working on replacing the doors with a pocket door. And by we, I me John of course. That's not really in my range of know-how.

It also took some time, but finally it was mostly done and it is so much better. I believe John said the wall needs one more round of patching and repainting, and the molding and actual door haven't been painted at all so it still needs that too. And then, of course, the plate collage looks pretty goofy now that the wall is so much larger so I need to reconfigure that as well.

Yay for unfinished project #2!

It slides all the way in - I just pulled it out a little for effect. Effective?

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Okay I don't have an official before picture of this one, so we'll use this:

Our well is in our front yard and the well installing people provide you with this very lovely fake rock to cover up the actual well components. That is the fake rock in the background up there. You have no idea why I'd want to replace that, now do you? Looks totally real.

Anyways, so I wanted an actual well house instead. My dad happened upon some leftover siding in a pile of discounted lumber one day and the siding matched our house exactly so he snagged it for us. I knew that I wanted to use that to cover the well house I was envisioning.

Not long after that, my dad - and then John (don't ask) built the well house and replaced the rock. I love it so much! All it needs is a pulley so it looks like an old functioning well would look and a couple of hanging baskets on either side of the pulley. I'm hoping to find something like that this spring.

I especially loved hanging lights on it as well at Christmas.

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Hey! This next one might actually be a FINISHED project! I just can't say the same for the flower beds alongside it.

So, last Memorial Day weekend we had friends over at our house, many for the first time. This gave us the fire we needed under us to get some things done prior to their arrival. You may be thinking we spent the day making sure the kitchen was clean and the floors were vacuumed, but no. Instead, we went to a building materials place that sold stone so we could finally make a walkway to our front door.

We asked the guys working there what type of stone we would need to create stepping stones for a walkway and he pointed us in the right direction - or so we thought. From those we chose our favorite stones, purchased them, and then went home to lay them all out. Once we got them laid out we dubbed the sidewalk "THE SIDEWALK OF DEATH". The stones were not flat at all like you'd expect from stepping stones. They were all slanted and were ALL tripping hazards. I am going to say that there was probably a 90% chance of you tripping on one of these jagged stones and busting your butt had you tried to walk on that pathway. But then, it was time for the party so there was no undoing it just yet. We just had to make sure all guests did not actually use THE WALKWAY OF DEATH in fear of a lawsuit that night.

The next day (or maybe next weekend, can't remember) John picked up every last stone and packed them back up to return them. Turns out the guy told us wrong and sold us the stones you'd use on your home instead of the ones you'd use for a walkway. Idiots. The new guy then showed him the correct type of stone we'd need and he purchased that. He then laid the sidewalk back out again, leveled them properly and then we had an official completed project. It's a miracle and our UPS man thanks us.

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Ahhhhhhh the spare bedroom. It started as this mess...

...which slowly evolved into a playroom for Charley.

& now the room finally will have a purpose as Laney's nursery. Although far from finished, I'm really loving it so far.

I took both of these pictures with my phone while it was dark out, so the color isn't accurate, but I'll take better pictures later when the room really starts coming together.

The walls are a peachy pink, and I plan to do some gold accents too. Not totally decided on other accent colors, but I bet they will go with the colors I used in creating the letters above the crib. Besides modge podging and hanging those letters, John painting, and Charley and I sorting the books by color and then size - that's about all we've done in here. But I have lots of stolen ideas and I'm hoping my trip to IKEA tomorrow can help some more of those come to life. You know I will blow up all social media outlets with every step along the way too. I can't help it - decorating nurseries or kid's rooms are my absolute favorite!

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I also had big plans back in May about refinishing the dining room table we got at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore and refinishing the chairs as well. I never really could make up my mind HOW I wanted those all refinished, but was leaning mostly towards distressed and white. SHOCKER.

Well, that refinishing never happened. And then one day this popped up on a local Facebook swap page. Table, 6 chairs and a china cabinet for $250 already in a distressed white finish.

I didn't bother cleaning up the craft supplies prior to taking the picture. REAL LIFE.

Sold.

I obviously still have tons of work to do in this room including paint on the walls, choosing a new fabric for those chairs, styling that china cabinet, and likely even replacing (or maybe just changing the color) on that chandelier but it's a ton better than it was with the old table and chairs that all needed refinishing. Speaking of that old table and chairs - they are all in my basement now and I'd be happy to sell them to whomever may want them!

So yeah - still a long way to go in this room but much better than it was before! I'd say we are 15% there. If we consider the starting point 8 months ago, take the completion percentage now which I estimate to be 15%, this room should be finished in a mere 45 more months. So I'll report back on this in October 2018! Moving right along aren't we?

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And sadly, that's about it as far as the more major house changes go. Sad, yes? Besides the obvious (nursery), where oh where should we start and halfway finish a project next?!