Great House Update: Kitchen Sneaks

We’ve been busier than bees these past couple of weeks. Traveling to Wisconsin and back to visit family, yard work, planning a shower for tomorrow and hosting guests. It’s crazy!

But in a good way.

Today we are taking off in a little while once our sleeping girl wakes up to hit the local beach. It’s a family fun afternoon complete with dinner out so I’m hoping it’s a hit with our little one. I know I’m ready for the beach. In fact, I’m really looking forward to heading up north. There’s something about being at a lake “up north” that screams summer to me. Plus playing at the beach for a few days with Elizabeth doesn’t sound that bad either.

Hope everyone has fun plans for the their weekend. Ours is chock full with more of what you read above! In a few weeks we hope to have a berm started in our backyard and hopefully by September we will have grass…lol!

Here are some sneaks of our kitchen to get your ready for a post I hope to have up next week if I can just find my other camera lens:)

Great House Update: The Exterior part 2

oh my…it’s a doozie of an update.

It’s rare in our house, well at least for me, that something bothers me so much that I just have to have it changed. For my husband, on the other hand, when something begins to bother him, It must get done now.

WE ARE FINISHING OUR HOUSE! (haha, not everything!)

Just the outside! This summer we are planning on finishing our exterior project which means replacing all of the remaining original windows, siding, trim and front door. Our project list is beyond long and our summer will probably speed on by as we await our new exterior and a new baby.

My husband asked me, “New van or windows?” It wasn’t even hard. Windows. Having new windows in the living room and kitchen has made such a difference, not only for their newness but also for the beefier trim and coat of paint surrounding them. While our baseboards and doors throughout will stay put until it’s time to do the floors, our windows will look amazing. I really can’t wait!

Last year we met with a Landscape Designer from Southview Design, mainly to achieve some direction in what to do with our mess of a yard. When we bought our house, renters had been living in it for years. Basically they did not lift a finger to do any yard work. As a result our yard was in a less than desirable state. Our goal with our landscape designer was to come up with a plan that we could implement with a little help from them. We are pretty much novices when it comes to gardening and plants, so having some input was really helpful.

Here’s part of the plan they came up with for our backyard:

After thinking through our plans for the summer we decided to add and subtract a few things. We’d like to have our house re-appraised this fall so we are attempting to have the exterior looking a little more manicured.

Goals:

-Create beds in the back, assemble a berm along our fence line to deal with water issues, install our arbor from our wedding, and add plants/beds to the front of our house. The back is waiting for next year!

After thinking through our yard a bit more and making room for a play set (coming next year hopefully) we tweaked the plan to look a bit more like this:

We’ve been thinking over how to deal with the play set and what material goes underneath. We’d like to use mulch in the back bed and my initial thought was to match the color and switch to rubber mulch under the play set. We will see what our professional says about that! We are meeting with our landscape designer to tweak the new plan a bit more, his name is Bob Renaud and he’s now with Minnesota Green. He’s been fantastic!

We went to the nursery on Sunday after brunch and it’s overwhelming to say the least. We have a long list of plants we really like, especially flowering plants like peonies, and so we’ll go armed with our favorites inspired by the Landscape Arboretum and the nursery. Hopefully Bob will be able to add a few of them to the plan!

Needless to say this summer is chock full of work. We’ve been out playing in the dirt and pulling up weeds/trees/bushes everyday for the past week. Multiple hours a day. We were very excited for a rainy day to give us a break. Alex just planned out all the projects on our list and came up with work plan. From now until September we will be spending approximately 10-12 hours a week working in our yard. At least I’ll stay strong for labor:)

Wish us luck…since we’ve slotted this as our “forever house” as the Lord sees fit, every change we make helps this house feel even more like ours. All the sweat equity so far has been worth it!

THe Great House UPdate: Exterior

This post is a doozie. I’m going to try my hardest to condense this but our exterior was in dire need of an facelift. When we first moved in we welcomed a tan exterior with new brown roof. It was and still is in parts, a very drab house. The yard was not helping things at all as the previous owners rented the house and the yard was never taken care of. All of this and then the deck off back was poorly built and not in great shape.

(our house post storm in August 2013-pre new roof and lighting)

So basically if you’ve been following along, we bought a fixer upper that was livable.  All our house and yard need was some TLC and some cash in hand. Thankfully we’ve been blessed with both in different increments!

Our first year we lived in our house we painted our garage door, replaced the soffit and fascia, gutter and tried to envision what lay ahead. Being that our siding and roof were in good condition we didn’t see any need to put more money into those pieces. So we brainstormed an idea to make the most of what we had and leave those elements, even though we both truly despised them.

And then our area was hit by hail storms (see aftermath picture above). And miracle of all miracles, our roof was deemed replaceable. And we did a victory dance literally in our kitchen. We replaced our roof with a slate color asphalt shingle and then got to work on our plans. On our update list you will notice we decided to build a new deck and add an office off the back of our house for my Alex.

And in the process of building those two we gave ourselves a two tone house. Bet you didn’t think I was going to say that. This feeds into our “we only pay for what we can afford in cash” mentality and now the back half of our house is blue and the front, tan.

In the midst of our project just weeks before the siding needed to go on my husband came back from the store with siding samples. We knew that we needed to side the addition and the area where we removed a patio door and added windows. We had some leftover siding and were planning on just ordering more to match. UNTIL Alex came home touting that we could put new cement board siding (from Menards) on the back of our house for just a bit more than it would cost to order our existing siding.

Cue happy dance again. You can imagine we jumped right in the car to order that siding up and that’s what we did. Upon arrival at the store we surveyed the color samples. Of course our eyes were drawn to the safe colors like tans, greys, and neutrals. But then we just looked at each other and both picked blue, told the cashier, and walked out of the store still uncertain if we had made a mistake.

I’m glad to know that our crazy, let’s try something out of the box, spontaneity, won out. WE LOVE THE BLUE! We are hoping of course that 2014 can be the year we complete the siding job but we’ll just see how things pan out. Until then we’re business in front, party in the back.

(here is the exterior post projects…deck on left, office addition on right)

Along with new siding, we added new lights out front. Lighting is tricky because most often homeowners choose lights that are far too small for their space. I learned this from my husband. The length requirement he gave me when looking seemed absurd. But he’s the designer and boy was he right. We ended up choosing this light, in multiple sizes, for all of our exterior lights around the house. In total I think we bought 8. We were a bit worried that due to the price point they would look cheap but they truly surprised us. They’re a perfect fit for our wannabe craftsman in a dated split level body.

Also this past summer we removed 4 large old trees from our yard that were on the verge of either falling over or ruining our foundation, built the deck, and had our landscape company out to create a complete landscape plan for our yard. Needless to say we didn’t use our yard at all this summer because it was a messy, dirty, construction zone not fit for a 12 month old.

Future updates to come: grow grass, new wood front door and exterior hardware, finish the siding project, stain and seal the deck, paint the brick and eventually (ie-distant future) put stone on the front mirroring the stonework under the deck, resurface the driveway, landscaping.

It’s far from done but we’ve come a long way in the past two years.