Outside looking In

So, here's the money shot. Friends from all over have been asking what it really looks like on the outside, so here's my house. It's gray vinyl siding with white trim and blue shutters and front door.
One thing we aren't looking forward to is figuring out what to do with the yard. Right now (with 100+ for the heat index every day) it's all we can do to keep the grass alive, so we're probably going to wait at least until the spring to do much with the outside. If anyone has any good suggestions (Shaun... I know you sometimes see this) they're welcome to voice them.
You can kind of tell, but the house behind us doesn't have grass yet. Hopefully in the next couple of weeks they'll put the sod down and then our grass will get some of the runoff water. As for which windows go to which room, the 3 down in the front are the living room, and the 4 above are for the Master bedroom (which is HUGE). The window over the garage and the one on the side are Rachel's bedroom.


Here's the view from the back. The patio door comes out the kitchen. The 3 windows next to it are the family room, and the last 2 downstairs are the office. Upstairs the windows on the left are Alice's room and the ones in the middle are for Karen. It's hard to see, but the dining room and kitchen both have windows on the side of the house. There's also a huge window well next to the patio (which we're getting a cover for as soon as we get Joe's summer teaching pay). It's like 6 feet deep, and lots of little frogs keep getting in there.

Another view of the back yard. Our neighbors have a fence already (they have a large but nice dog). We were thinking of doing a garden next year by the AC compressor and the office windows. It gets a lot of sun there.





Here's Joe's birthday/father's day present. It wasn't a surprise or anything, he picked it out himself and it's great that he sometimes cooks the dinner now :).






Here's me and the girls hanging out in the pool on the 4th of July. Alice totally HATED the pool that day, but the other girls had fun. They were a bit scared of playing on the grass though... They've definitely gotten over that now. Alice even played in the pool last week. Even though we're not out there a ton right now (due to large numbers of mosquitos and severe heat) we LOVE having a yard. It'll be even better when the grass is in really well and I don't have to spend 2-3 hours watering every day.

Hall Bathroom

This may be the smallest room in the house. It's the kids/guest bathroom in the upstairs hall.

Here's the view looking in the doorway. It's hard to tell, but the walls are a light blue except for the one to the right of the door which is a light green color. It's a fun froggy bathroom for the kids. They really like it, and I really like that it's a kid thing without princesses everywhere.




The actual toilet/shower part of the bathroom. In a few years it will be very helpful to have separate shower and sink areas, but for now it's not that big of a deal. You can see the frogs better as well as the blue paint.





Joe is always interested in what he can see from various locations... so here's a picture from the shower looking out. It's hard to tell, but the toothbrush holder and soap dispenser on the sink are all frogs. The toothbrush one is actually like a bobble head; when they put their toothbrushes away they wiggle. Thanks to grandma Howes for that; they get a kick out of it. The soap frog used to croak when you got soap out, but the kids enjoyed that a bit too much. After about 2 or 3 weeks it 'croaked'. :)


Not pictured (very well) in these are the frog cross-stitches that I made a couple years ago, the frog rugs, the frogs on the wooden stool in front of the sink, or the frog towel holders. It's a very green and blue room. All it needs is a picture of a pond framed on the green wall and it'll be just about as froggy as they come! Hopefully it'll be sunny at some point today so I can take pictures of the outside of the house for tomorrow. It's been raining almost nonstop for about 2 or 3 days now. It's great since I don't have to water the sod as much, but it does make it harder to get good outside pictures!

Master Bath

Sorry it's been a while since the last post. In the past week or so we've been all over the midwest- literally. From Omaha to Akron, Ohio and back again, it was a great trip but we're so done with driving now! And so I'm back to blogging and painting and cleaning. Also, our sod was put down on Friday, so I can take outside pictures now! Hopefully it'll only be a couple of days and they'll be on here...

Here's what you see when you walk into our bathroom. To the left are the sinks and to the right is the shower and tub. In the little room with the closed door is the toilet, and straight through is the closet.





Here are the double sinks w/ vanity. They are amazingly spacious after years of sharing a sink. Joe got to choose the cabinets and handles in the bathroom (but he didn't take good pictures of them); they're oak cabinets with dark finished handles. The paint is a grey-ish aqua color. I really like it, but it's a little dark for the space. I need to bring some more light (white?) in, but I'm not exactly sure what to do with it. Any suggestions?





Here we have the split. I LOVE having both a shower and a nice bathtub. The shower is nice (except when I have to clean the water spots off the doors), and I'm just beginning to enjoy the tub. It's really deep but doesn't have the fancy jets or any of that. I like the tile too (it just came that way, I didn't pick it)




And last (but certainly not least!) is the master closet. It is HUGE! It is definitely bigger than some of the bedrooms we've had over the years. The picture only shows about half of it (or a little more). We've got so much space in there we're not exactly sure what to do with it! We've joked about a baby's room, or a dance studio, etc, but for now it's just mostly empty. Anyone have a million bucks I can spend on clothes? :)


Well, that's the post of the day. As you can probably tell, it's one heck of a nice bathroom. We spent more money upgrading this room than any other space except the kitchen (and basement...). I love having a nice space to 'chill' in after a long day of painting, but I'm also learning that it's a pain in the butt to clean! That's one thing I was really trying NOT to think about when we were picking out all the stuff for the house; now I'm kinda regretting it. Oh well, it's fun for sure. I'll have something else to show and tell tomorrow!

Laundry Room

Hello all! Sorry if things don't make the most sense today; I didn't get a lot of sleep (mixture of caffeine and allergies...) and am less coherent today because of it. However, I did get a few more pictures of rooms for your viewing pleasure!


Here is the laundry room looking in from the door (duh). The color is called 'intuitive'. All of the paint is from Home Depot, and it's Behr brand, no primer, satin finish. I decided that since I'll be spending most of one day a week (at least) in this room I would make it fun for me. I must say, the color is a little more overpowering than I thought it would be but I still LOVE it!


Here's the view from the other corner. In case it's hard to read, the vinyl lettering on the wall says "Wash Dry Fold Repeat". It was a gift from my sister, and it totally sums up the purpose of the room. I've had a couple people suggest that another word needs to be added: 'Forever', and I suppose that would fit well too. But I'll take it as it is.



That's about it for this room. Eventually we'd like to build some shelves or a folding table or something in the empty space, but it's not a huge priority. I might paint them pink or yellow (leftover from the girls' rooms) when they're done... but that's it for now. I've got a couple pictures of some more rooms that I can put up... maybe after I've finished more of my to-do list for the day I'll do another post.

The Basement

After my post yesterday I got a lot of comments from people saying I was so mean to give a teaser on the house but no real pictures. So, here's a better taste. Although I'm sure some of you won't be satisfied until you see the whole thing (mom, Calista, Tabitha....) it's going to go a little bit at a time.

The biggest single upgrade we did when building our house was finishing the downstairs. We figured that, being right near a major highway in the middle of the country we would probably have a lot of friends and family traveling through that might want to stop over for the night. And this would be a good place where they could stay (even though it's pretty empty right now). It's a good thing we did too, because we had our first friends traveling through stop just this morning. It was great to see them and have the kids all play together for an hour before they kept driving. They should have stayed here last night, but were unsure just how much space we have. They know better for next time!


Here's the approach as you leave the living/dining room to go down the stairs. Yeah, not much to see yet, I know...










And here are the rest of the stairs going down... As a side note, all the walls that are white are the color that came with the house. Any walls with a non-white color I painted myself (Joe helped with tape-ing, kid watching, etc). Nothing in the basement has been painted yet.








Here's the view around the corner at the bottom of the stairs. Not too much to see. In that closet is the Sump pump. For those from Ut or other dry places, I've learned that that's what pumps the water out when it rains so it doesn't flood your house. There's actually a pit down there (which is covered) and the pump gets the water out of there when it rains so it stays dry. The banana chairs are down there for their own safety. Karen and Rachel have a good time jumping all over them.

On the far left in this picture you can see the corner of a banana chair. That's trying to show that this is one big open room downstairs with a queen size bed in the corner with a dresser to be our 'guest room'. It's more of a guest corner right now, but the same idea applies.





Closer view of the 'guest corner'. The bed frame is the one my parents gave us for our wedding. The mattresses came from the Rennells in NC. The dresser is from IKEA Charlotte, the little table from Walmart (as is the comforter).




The only part not pictured is the storage/utility room and the fixtures that are roughed in for the eventual downstairs bathroom. It'll be a couple of years at least before this gets done, but we'll eventually have a real bedroom and a bathroom down here for an older kid or visitors.

Hopefully we'll get at least one more post done this week, because I know next week there's not going to be any time for it. I'll have pictures of the master bath and laundry room for sure by tomorrow; let's see if I have time to blog them for you. I hope this is less un-fulfilling for you (if that's even a word...) than the last post was.

My House

Sorry about the long break again. I wasn't planning on that, but having the computer in the same room as the baby didn't work so well once she learned that the typing sound she heard while asleep meant that someone was in her room. She kept waking up at the most inopportune times, so I lost a lot of my computer (and blogging) time. However, we are now in our house (YAY!!!!) and the computer is in the office, not sharing a room with a now 1-year-old. I've been REALLY busy the last few weeks getting everything settled, painted, etc. but now we're starting to calm down a bit. My next few blogs will be about our house, since that's been the big focus for a long time. I thought I'd start by putting in a few things generally about the house in this blog, then put up pictures as we get rooms 'finished'. Not that any of them are perfect yet, but when I get to the point where it's 'good enough for now' I'll show it off.

I thought I'd start by addressing some of the comments we've gotten over the past 6 months or so as we've built the house (they broke ground exactly 4 months ago today, by the way). The biggest question/comment we've gotten (or noticed people trying really hard NOT to ask) is "How can you afford to build" given our 'large' family size, only one person working, and so forth. Well, after looking carefully at our finances and the housing market in the area, we realized that to get the house we wanted and be able to afford it, we'd have to build. With the incentives from the builder and lender, we were able to get more of the things we 'wanted' along with the floor plan that we (I) loved best by building instead of buying. There are/have been 2 houses on the market with the same floor plan as ours in the past few months, but we couldn't have afforded to buy them.

The second question is "why would you build instead of just buying something else?" And the reason we decided to build is allergies. Joe has terrible allergies to almost all plants and animals. In several of our apartments (including the last one), he would get awful rashes on his legs just from walking around without shoes on. We wanted a place where he could come without having to worry what had been in there and may be lingering in walls, floors, and air ducts. So far he's been able to get through the worst of the allergy season without extra trips to the dr. Hopefully it will continue... (fingers crossed here)

Those are really the biggest questions. And the only other answer we would give to them is that we want a space that is only ours. We've been living in apartments for 8 years now, and are just fed up with dealing with other people's left-over problems. Granted, that's part of renting; you don't know who or what was there before you, and you (sometimes) feel really bad for the people you know are coming after you are gone. We just wanted a place of our own that didn't have anyone else's messes left in forgotten corners. That isn't to say that I can't appreciate your historical house or anything, it's just not for us right now. I respect your choice, now please respect mine.

Now, on to the fun part. Here are a few pictures of the house, with explanations.
Here's the picture of my front door from the outside. It's got the vented screen door on the outside and the windows on the side.









Here's the door when it's open. That way you can see the cool glass details a little better. It's kind of hard to tell with the lighting, but it's a navy blue color of paint on the outside.











This is what the interior doors look like. They're all white with white frames and all that jazz. They look really good, and are a nice change from the basic 6-panel door you usually see.








Here's the doorknob closer up. They aren't the ones that came with the house. The builder wanted a crazy amount for the 'upgraded' knobs when we were making all the final choices back in January. So we bought all of these at Home Depot for less than the ones we were thinking about getting. And I like them better. Joe spent a whole day switching them for me, isn't he just great? And if anyone needs a bunch of silver door hardware, I've got about 20 doorknobs in a box in the basement! :)






Well that's longer than I thought this post should be, but there it is. I've got more pictures and things I'll try and do later. But for now it's back to laundry, lunch and crazy munchkins!

Keeping busy

Here are some things I've been working on lately (since we moved here for some of them):



Cross-stitch for my sister Calista's new baby Tessa (she's a real cutie, look at these pictures!) It's 11x14 finished size. This is what I do when I watch TV, to feel like I"m still doing something 'productive'. That way I feel less guilty watching things like football, American Idol, 4 seasons of Big Bang Theory... and so on.


Here's Rachel's Birthday cake (sorry it's not rotated... my bad!) She told me she wanted the castle pink, the roofs yellow, and the windows and doors blue. So that's what she got... more or less.

I included this picture because I took it while I was talking to my mom and grandma on the phone while I was doing it. I said it looked funny only partially done and they said to take a picture for them to see, so I did. I think the finished product is more fun (and more busy so you don't notice the individual crazy parts of my frosting. Someday I will take those Wilton classes... just not yet.)
And here's the cake I did for Valentine's Day. Not too fancy, but very chocolatey and delicious! Now I just need to get my hiney moving to work off all that TV time and cake!

Joe's Graduation

So, I know I'm way behind on my blogging. But at least I acknowledge the fact, right? Anyway, today I will become slightly less behind.

Just before Christmas we took a nice (read: LONG) drive back to Charlotte, NC for Joe's graduation. We stayed with some of our totally awesome friends and then went to Indiana for Christmas with Joe's family. Here are some pictures from graduation. If I can find the ones Kitara took for me I'll put them up too, since they're a lot better than these. (I've been leaving the CD out for months so I could do this post, but today I can't find them anywhere!


Me and Rachel trying to be happy together

Thank goodness for Grandma and Grandpa Allen, or we would NEVER have made it through the ceremony! (the large bag of gummy bears helped too of course...)



Joe walking to get his hood and diploma. The guy behind him is Dr. Rogelberg, his adviser who did the 'hooding' (and made him write over 20 drafts of his dissertation...).

Rachel pictures

Since yesterday was Rachel's third birthday, I thought I'd put some pictures of her (and her sisters) up. She's such a cute goofy girl!Rachel and Alice. It was in the 'Thanksgiving' folder, so sometime in November. Note that she's not looking at the camera; this is a normal thing for her. She can't stay still long enough to actually take the picture. She also LOVES her baby sister! (sometimes too much...)
This was from Thanksgiving in Utah. We had so much fun visiting with all the Zillner family that day!!!!
Despite the football shirts, this is actually us at the BYU v. Creighton basketball game on Dec 1. The girls all LOVED it, even if we were in the nosebleed section!

This is Rachel's 'house' that she built with daddy out of legos. If you don't recognize the cute blond in the corner it's Haylie Tufts. Yep, this is when we were in Charlotte for Joe's graduation in December. Rachel wants us to be in a house so badly. When she built this she was convinced it was going to be big enough for our family to live in and we wouldn't have to go back to our apartment. She had a really hard time when we had to put it away (read: total and complete meltdown).

That's a small taste of what we've been doing the past couple of months! (but more is still coming, I'm just working on it...)

Our House

For 7 1/2 years we've been looking forward to the day that we would buy our first house. In that time we've lived in 9 apartments/small houses. We've lived in 3 places in Provo, Ut; 2 different times in Indiana; 3 apartments in Charlotte, NC; and one in Papillion, NE. However, we are now pleased (more like ecstatic!!) to announce that we are buying our first house!!!! We won't be moving until sometime in May, but the paperwork for our purchase agreement was done yesterday. This is what our house looks like right now:
Yes, it looks like a muddy, grassy hill, but now it's under 6 inches of snow, which is much more pretty. We're builiding in this subdivision! Our house will look something like this, but an elevation 2 and the garage on the other side.

The upside to our new house: it's in a great location with great schools in a big LDS ward. The downside: it's farther from Joe's work and in a different ward than we're currently living in. We're just hoping that our new friends will forgive us and still be friends even if we live on the 'other side' of the line.

I know this post doesn't even cover all the things I've missed in the past couple of months, but I've got a list to work from and have resolved this year to do better with my blog. Hopefully I'll make it past January with the goal still intact, but for now I'm out of time!