Dream House - Mudroom

This is a pretty small space but I can't even begin to tell you how much I love having a place to hang jackets and put away sneakers. In our first home you walked directly into the living room and both Matt and I grew up in houses where you walk directly into the kitchen. A mudroom was on my "must have" list for the dream house.

For my birthday I asked my super talented in-laws if they could make me a mail station with chalkboard. The end result is just perfect and I love it. With this one special feature completed I just had to paint and finish the rest of the space. I chose a sandy color for the walls, and then decided to paint the entire garage this color also. I had Dingle sand and poly a few pine 1x2s so that I could make two coat racks. So in love with the kids being able to hang their own coats! Lastly, I filled a few new frames with pictures of the kiddos. For once I think I can say that a project is 100% done!

This is the last of the house updates for now...but the bathrooms are calling my name! 

Dream House - Garage

As is par for the course I completely forgot to take a true "before" picture when we started our garage makeover. *sigh* You'd think one of these times I would remember, but apparently this was not it. In any case I do have a picture of what the garage looked like when we did our inspection. To be honest this is as good of a before picture as any...this just isn't our junk! 

The door opens into the mudroom which I will reveal tomorrow...spoiler alert, there are no before pictures of that either! 

Our house in MA was a perfect starter home in that it didn't need a lot of work, just a lot of updating. We painted and got our feet wet for slightly bigger projects like replacing electrical fixtures and tiling the kitchen. When I told Dingle that I would really love to have a deck in the garage I think his exact words were something like, "well, we've never done that before." "That" of course being really building anything from scratch, you know, like out of wood. We took measurements and priced out the project (in the end the materials cost us about 200 dollars including paint). Before sending him to the hardware store we watched a This Old House episode on how to build a small deck. I am not kidding, that was the entirety of our education. 

We got this!

First we removed the old stairs and saved them to reattach to the new deck. Next we built the frame and added the joists and brackets. Matt made all of the cuts, I wielded the hammer. A boy in a pair of butterfly wings acted as our site manager. 

After the first day of construction we had the entire deck built and all that was left to do was add the railing and attach the decking. 

I'm pretty sure it was at this point that I realized that the new deck was going to look so beautiful and the rest of the garage looked terrible. Obviously, I would need to paint the walls that surround the deck. And if I was going to paint the walls surrounding the deck then we should probably build a bench on the deck...and paint that as well. 

Oh hey...those wall surrounding the deck look amazing! Look how terrible the rest of garage looks!! Better paint those too...

Let's finish this project! Hang some hooks, organize the rest of the garage, and have a beer! 

So it's finally finished...well almost, I still need something for the wall to the right of the door (damn you last 2%, haha). It is SO nice. Now the kids have a place to take off their coats and kick off their muddy shoes. Dingle did an amazing job making my vision a reality. Of all the projects we have done, this one might be favorite! 

Dream House - Master Bedroom

We have been busy with a few house projects that were long overdue. I wanted to wait to reveal each project until it was 100% finished...it's always that last 2% that gets me! The walls in our house are a mix of split logs and drywall. When we moved in, every single wall that was not split log was white. We do not like white walls! It has taken us quite a while to get the ball rolling, but once again, I am a painting fool!

The new curtains for the master bedroom finally arrived last night (and I totally need to steam them, damn you last 2%).

I thought it would be fun to post the pictures of the house from our inspection...







and when we first moved in...



and before we started painting....

...and now that the room is finally us!

Lily's Bedroom Reveal!

This post is so long overdue, cheers to me for checking something off my "to post" list!

When we first moved into the dream house Matt and I both agreed that any and all major projects would have to wait. For one, we put our entire life savings down in order to make our offer the most desirable to the sellers and the bank, so putting money into the house right away just wasn't an option. (This was compounded by several thousand dollars in unforeseen expenses that come along with home ownership including but not limited to buying four dump trucks worth of gravel for the road.) Aside from not really having the money for big renovations we didn't have the time or the energy. Matt was still commuting to the city every two days and I was six months pregnant with two toddlers under foot all day.

After a couple of months in the house things settled down, Matt started working from home, and I finally stopped having heart palpitations every time I looked at our savings account balance (sort of). I had started to bug Matt about redoing the kids bedrooms but he didn't really seem all that eager. To satisfy my own itch I decided that I would make Lily's curtains and a matching comforter. I own a sewing machine but had only ever used it to hem skirts and other small tasks. Since there isn't anything you can't learn on youtube I decided to just go for it. I went to the fabric store and spent over an hour choosing "the world's most perfect pinks and purples" per Lily's request.

I used a couple of different websites for step by step instructions to make Lily's roman curtains but the one I found the most helpful was this one. I didn't take pictures of my progress as I went because there are so many great tutorials on pinterest. I am a novice seamstress at best but I have to give myself a pat on the back because I really do think they came out awesome.

After the curtains were finished I moved on to the comforter. I looked up the basic dimensions for a twin quilt but aside from that the design and pattern were made up on the fly. Again, I am not an expert seamstress and if you look carefully it shows...BUT I absolutely love this quilt. I am really proud that I made something so "Lily" from scratch. The quilt took me a loooong time and the learning curve was steep. Making the boys' quilts will hopefully go more quickly...with less cursing. I had enough scrap fabric left over to make two pillow shams too. What can I say, we are just that fancy!

The paint...ah the paint! Matt has a love/hate relationship with the colors I chose. For one they are very "Lily" but they are also very bright. He would have preferred I chose something that complimented the wood a little better but again, they are very Lily, and this is her room. We knew when we chose the paint that we were expecting a boy so it was okay to really just give the girl exactly what she wanted. The purple stripes were a little harder to keep straight and 'sharp' than we anticipated (read: never again are we painting stripes!), but in the end I was very happy!

My sister is so crafty and I am so not...but I am working on it. For her birthday Kate wanted to make Lily something for her room. For as long as any of us can remember Lily has had an elaborate bedtime routine. Every single night each person in attendance at bedtime must give her "a kiss, a hug, a big squeeze, and a snuggle." To immortalize this ritual Kate printed and framed these phrases to hang on her wall.

Last but certainly not least I wanted to add a little something to the empty wall space. I looked up a few ideas before deciding on growth charts for each of the kids' room. Kate and I did the projects from start (going to Lowes for wood) to finish (painting the numbers) in about 24 hours.

In the end I am just so excited that Lily has a bedroom that looks put together, is easy to clean and organize, and most importantly is a reflection of who she is at the magical age that is four!