Home Improvements

We've worked on quite a few more improvements around our new old house.  We've been here four months now and are almost unpacked.  (I know--not impressive.  I did absolutely nothing for a month before the baby came.  And, to clarify, when I say "we have worked on improvements," I mean: "my dad came to town and did a ton of projects for us.")

The first thing he worked on was painting our wood panelling.  We had the paint all ready to go and we did our part by taking the four boys out of the house for a few hours!

 Dining area before.

Living room before.

Apparently, a fact I didn't know about my father (that my sister did) is that painting is his most detested job of all!  But you really can't deny the huge improvement painting the panelling was and how much it will, seriously, improve our standard of living in this home!  So, thanks Dad.

Living room after painting.  (We tried to choose a color that would go well with the brick fireplace--we're pleased with how it turned out.)

Dining nook after painting.

This wall separating from the kitchen was wood panelling as well.  The ivory paint is such an improvement.  We had only lived here two months when Dad painted but it was such a drastic change it took a while to get used to it!

Another idea that I dreamed up while we waited for the house to close was this bench.  It allows us to push the table much closer to the wall which really opens up the route to the kitchen and laundry room.  There is nothing we can "do" with the additional space--it just helps everything to not feel crowded.

Right now it is painted the same color as the wall, but I had envisioned painting it a certain robin egg teal blue color that I'm incorporating into my kitchen.  When I was telling that to a friend the other day she suggested I could paint my chairs the same color.  I hadn't even thought of the chairs and think that would be really cute.

When my dad first arrived I gave him a tour of the house and basically told him all the dreams and ideas we'd thought of for the house.  Short term/long term, big/small.  Other than the painting and kitchen bench, the only other thing I really wanted him to help work on while in town was the tree fort.  But he latched on to one of the crazy ideas I told him and decided to do it right away.

This is the infamous "stripey wallpaper wall" in the room that is off the front entry way on one side and the kitchen on the other, and is apparently intended to be a dining room, but is fully carpeted, and--frankly--not really dining-room shaped.  Right now it's main use is for homeschool.  Sometimes I call it the "reading room".

When we bought the house we still didn't know if we were having a boy or girl, and we thought that if it was a girl she would need her own room eventually and so we could convert this room.  Since Peter is a boy he can share with his brothers, but we still liked the idea of having a bed in this room for guests to stay in.  We considered a daybed to double as a reading couch, but also thought the stripey wall (that has no window because the garage is behind it) would be a good candidate for a fold-up murphy bed.

My dad agreed and built it right away so that mom can have a nice bed to sleep in when she comes to help out with the baby.  They sell expensive hardware kits with pistons and things, but we just used some heavy-duty door hinges, and made little swing-down legs on the side.  The bookshelves to either side really help integrate it and are super-useful.  And my dad left a nice big display shelf above the mattress.  We now have our double mattress in there all ready for my mom's visit.

We've done more outside the house as well, but I'll share that another day.

New House: Month One

We moved into our first home one month ago.

It's a nice little home for our family.  We chose a home well-within our current means with the idea of not taking 30 years to pay it off.  Also, with the idea that, since we finally have a real income, we'd like to be able to have some of that income available to make plans with and do things along the way to paying off the mortgage as well.  

That said--the home is a bit of a fixer-upper.  It's totally livable and we are so happy to have it.  We just also have lots of ideas for improving it.  

The project that I din't think would be first, but ended up being first, was some stripey wallpaper in the extra room.  

On day two, Jeremy said, "That's gonna be the first thing to go!" 

I was surprised, as I never dreamt of keeping the wallpaper, but hadn't realized it bothered him so much.  

On night three Owen was sitting in the reading chair in that room and said, "It's making me dizzy." And truth be told, it was sort of like one of those mind bender puzzles, "look at the dot in the center and watch as the outside begins to appear to swirling around the center point like a washing machine!"

So right then and there I started peeling off the wallpaper.  It took two nights and left a completely unfinished, unplastered, drywall with joint-compounded-seams wall. After a few days I searched the shelves in the garage and came up with some beige paint plus primer, and started painting.  

It looks much better now--in that "different colored accent wall" kind of way.  And it's perfect for waiting out further plans.

Then I tried hanging up our flower alphabet cards (as this is our "dining-turned-computer/school/reading room off of the kitchen), but since living in Texas requires ceiling fans running at full blast, half the cards fell down by the end of the first day.  It's now been two weeks and the rest have stayed put, so. . . apparently I need to come up with a plan to get the first ones back on the wall.

But the wallpaper removal and painting are all we have done so far inside the house.  We've done a lot more outside the house, though.

We have a 1/3 acre lot.

That's one of the reasons we bought an older house as well.  Newer houses are on much smaller lots, and have HOA's--Bleh!

The lot was one of the most important factors in choosing a house for us.  And we ended up finding a home on a third acre, mostly open lot.

After watching the neighborhood hummingbirds fight over our feeder of imitation nectar, we figured we could put in an actual pollinator garden for them.

This is the beginnings of that (with cardboard mulch to kill the grass) and I have already seen a hummingbird at that tall one in the center with the small orange flowers!

Speaking of killing grass. . . I layed out three beds for raised garden space.  It's time to be planting already, but I have plenty of experience with fall gardening and season-extending, so I'm not worried about it yet--just being patient.

This is the beginnings of our permaculture swale and berm food forest.  (More on that another day.) Jeremy and I placed our first order from a Texas nursery for trees and other edible perennials last week during a free shipping sale, but they won't come until planting season--probably November.

And this is the beginning of a homemade play structure.  We kind of planned something out, and Jeremy went and bought the wood, but came home with a bit of sticker shock.  So we looked up the cheapest play structure on Walmart.com and proved to ourselves that we were indeed doing it significantly cheaper as a DIY.  

The plan is to erect it under this oak tree, so that it is not really a "tree fort" but a fort up under the canopy of the tree--still fun?  We hope so. 

And those are our accomplishments of month one as homeowners.