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!