Ode to A House and a New Adventure

When we bought this house five, almost 6, years ago, I remember thinking this could very well be the house I died in—and I was fine with that. (How’s that for a ray of sunshine?!) Most of my childhood was spent in one house (where my parents still live), and I imagined raising my kids in the same way–in one well-loved, just-right-for-our-family house.

I know a house is just a house, but I really do love this one. It has sweet memories for me, and I have envisioned, many times, our kids growing up here and as adults, bringing back their own families (filling it to the brim!). I have a soft spot for this house because it really has been a refuge for our family in many ways. I’ve loved spending my days here, chasing babies here, filling the walls with art and the house with furniture. I have felt calm (for the most part!), happy and blessed to live here. I truly love this house and now that the end is near, I am nostalgic  and have a lot of mixed emotions. 

But, the truth is, you just never know what God has planned for you.

So we have bought the Warner's house next door to my parents. We have rented the Warner's' house (I am going to have to stop calling it that) to the Graumanns for 18 months. We will live with Mom and Dad until they find a home in Jacksonville. 

And, so a new adventure begins for our family. . . in 18 months, along with a lot of projects.

Our Kitchen

When we moved into our house, the kitchen had rose wallpaper in it.  It is a big kitchen but not our style. 

So, when we moved in, we painted all the doors, cabinets and trim white instead of the natural wood.  We painted the rest of our house in neutral colors so I wanted a fun color in the kitchen. I choose green. I thought it was fun and it made me smile for the first few months but after a while, I got REALLY tired of it. 

Its a fun green (I don't remember the color) but I really wanted something more neutral and that would reflect the light that we have coming through the windows. 

JJ & I spent about a month discussing colors and decided we wanted a gray. A true gray. No blue gray or beige gray. Well, we had a very hard time finding what we wanted. 

Everything looked pretty normal on the swatch but as soon as we got them on the wall, they become crazy colors! Like that Tucker Gray from Benjamin Moore (second from the left). That looked like a dark gray and then we get it in our kitchen and it is blue. I know that we are putting them on top of green, but you get the idea. 

After a long time of looking at and talking about colors we settled on Revere Pewter from Benjamin Moore. 

Saturday we primed the wall. JJ really didn't want to but I told him that putting gray on top of green would require a lot of coats if we didn't prime.  We primed in the morning and then spent the rest of the day relaxing and watching football (FSU won!). 

Sunday we had plans to go to church, go to my cousins birthday party and then paint afterwards. Well, the kids had other plans. Both kids woke up and decided that was the day they were going to act out. Then, JJ had an allergy attack and I thought that I had pinkeye. So... we ditched all of our plans and stayed home. To distract myself from the kids and keep my hands away from my eyes, we decided to paint the gray. 

I am so happy with the outcome. The kitchen feels brighter and bigger. After we finished painting is when JJ decided to let me know that he HATED the green the whole 4 years we had it on the walls. Why did he wait that long!!!!

Anyway... our kitchen is painted and we could not be happier. 

Now on to paint H's room white and our room Navy. 

Happy Wednesday!

Kelly

The day I pretty much RUINED our hardwood floors...

So, when we bought our home, the living room looked like this:

It isn't bad but the green carpet and yellow walls just weren't our style. I personally feel that green carpet with yellow and red walls shouldn't be anyone's style. (I say this and I am sure that tomorrow I will look on Pinterest and see an ah-mazing room that has green carper and yellow & red walls). 

Before we moved into the house, we had all the carpet taken up and hardwood put down in the living area. When we moved in, the house looked like this:

My husband kindly painted the living room while I was out of town and just forgot/didn't feel like doing the cut-in. Try not to be jealous of the classiness we have going on here (and at Christmas time to boot). 

If you look closely enough at those pictures you will see that our floors are clean and shiny.  They were beautiful! Then we had H.... that kids spills anything and everything. He spills stuff I didn't even know could spill and he spills it out of spill proof cups! It is a great skill that he was just born with. 

Before we had kids, we could polish the floor a great floor cleaner but you had to do it on your hands and knees. It didn't happen often before we had kids and it hasn't happened since. Who has time to go over the whole house on their hands and knees?

So, when I saw this Pin for natural hardwood cleaners and polisher, I had to try it. 

Via

We have 2 kids and a dog, so I figured I would try to "heavy duty" floor cleaner with white vinegar and baking soda.  I waited until the kids went down for a nap and mixed everything together per instructions. First off, the stuff didn't mix together no matter what I did so the baking soda appeared to sit at the bottom of my bucket and 1 Litre of water didn't appear to be enough. But, I am a rule follower, so I went with it. 

I swept the floor to make sure I got as much loose dirt up as possible.  I moved all the furniture so that the floor space was completely clear and then I took my mop and cleaned the floors of the whole house.  I didn't really notice anything crazy until it started to dry. I noticed white marks on the floor and a sandpaper-y feel to the floor. Oh my word, it was awful. 

Do you see that grim on my wonderful hardwood floors!!?!?!

H (a 2 year old) woke up from his nap and as soon as he saw the floor he said "messy. nasty." My 2 year old, who has played with his own feces, thought the floor was nasty. To say that I was freaking out would be an understatement.  I tried to invent games to play on the floor in hopes that walking on it would take the grittiness off it. Nope. You stuck to the floor like crazy. Poor H was so used to moving around on hardwood that he fell like 4 times because his feet and socks would stick to the floor. 

Seriously... when a 2 year old calls the floor dirty, it's dirty. 

Luckily JJ had a work happy hour so he was going to be home late. I was hoping that I could either fix it or that he would come home with enough alcohol in him that he wouldn't notice. That last part was just wishful thinking because to not notice the floors he would actually have to be so drunk he was passed out somewhere other than our house. 

When I had calmed down a little bit I looked at the sight again and saw a different way to clean that was also supposed to polish the floor. So, after I put the kids to bed, I mixed my lemon and olive oil with water and said a little prayer. 

Right away I could tell a difference. I was able to feel the lemon and olive oil cleaning off the baking soda. It was actually kinda nice to get instant gratification while mopping and being able to not only see but feel were I had already mopped. 

You can totally see the difference in the 2 photos above. It was so nice not to see all the grime.

I mopped the whole house and it looks better. It is still a little dull but at least we won't stick to the floor.  I think that I am going to have to suck it up and get on my hands and knees and polish the house to fix what damage I done. 

Now my floor looks like this:

The floor is pretty again!

I never thought I would be so happy to see a dull but clean floor. 

Lesson learned. I am not an au-natural person to begin with. I should just stick with what I know (the stuff that comes in the bottle) and call it a day. I was trying to be environmentally safe and it almost killed me and my pretty floors. 

Now my floors and living room look normal again!!

Have you ever had an experience like that? How do you clean & polish your hardwood floors? Clearly I am open to trying anything as long as it isn't on your hands and knees. 

KK

Should I stay or should I go???

(That song has been playing in my head for a week now)

JJ & I have started kicking around the idea of moving. When we bought this house we had only been married for 6 months and weren't planning on having kids so soon; much less 2 kids within a 21 month span. 

Look at our lovely house! The front of the house just makes me smile. It is 1900 sq/ft with 3 rooms, 2 baths, a spacious living room with a fireplace and a small room off the kitchen that was used as an office but is now the playroom.  This was perfect when we moved in. 

A few months back we decided to put H in swim classes. We discovered, for the most part, that H doesn't like water. My personal belief is that is because he isn't really exposed to it. We don't live in a neighborhood with a pool and aren't members of the YMCA, so he isn't in large amounts of water often. Both JJ & I had pools growing up. Some of my best memories with my family were hanging out in the pool after dark playing and watching the bats fly around. The pool provided endless amounts of entertainment and a way to cool off for my sister and I. So, I got it in my head that we NEED a pool. So, after months of badgering JJ, he started to agree and then stated that it would be more cost effective to move to a house with a pool than to build a pool. By cost effective, he means that we will never get a monetary return on the pool. 

So, last week we started looking at houses for sale in our area. Ok, just to clarify: we are not moving specifically for the pool. I want a bigger master bath, another bedroom so that we can have guest stay with us and a half bath so our guest don't have to use the small bath that the kids use. We were not impressed. We know that we want to stay in the same area and that we passed the peak buying season as people get ready for school. None of the houses we saw had wood floors or a floor plan that we liked. 

So, JJ floated out the idea of building an addition. This was something that hadn't even crossed my mind. To get the type of house we want, we will have to spend another $150k-$200k.  For JJ, this seems kinda ridiculous just to add 400 - 500 sq/ft and a pool.  We have measured and can add a master suite off the office/playroom area and a pool for less than it would cost to buy a house. Also, interest rates are rising and we already have an incredibly low interest rate on our current house so not only would we be doubling the amount that we bought our current house for, but we would be adding more interest every month. 

Luckily nothing has to be decided now. We are going to take some time and get some estimates on how much it would cost to add on, build a pool, and redo the kitchen (might as well do that while we are at it). I want to get a Realtor in talk about what we want to do and see if it would make sense to do that in our current neighborhood. One of my fears is that we will over-improve for the neighborhood. 

So, that is what is going on in my head right now. I love the bones of our house but we need more space so we will see. 

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

KK

Yard Update

So... grass is starting to grow in the backyard. I know that this doesn't look like much but this is very exciting for us!

The grass is such a dark green and seems like it is going to be very soft and cushion-y. 

We had sod delivered on Friday for the front yard. H was enthralled with the delivery process. The whole time he was talking about grass, big trucks, tractors and helping daddy once he gets home from work. 

It kills me how he stands with his arm behind his back. Is that not the cutest thing!

The guy who delivered the grass was great. He honked the horn on the truck & the tractor for H and H was eating it up. He also let H ride on the tractor with him. I don't have any pictures of that because it scared the crap out of H. It scared him but he could not stop talking about it after the delivery was done. It was the first thing he told JJ when he got home from work.

Hope you have a great day!

KK

Working on the Front yard

Front Yard

When we bought our house, it was in an area that we loved and near schools that we wanted our kids to go to. I actually did not love the house. JJ did and convinced me that even though it needs work, all the work was cosmetic and that "the bones" were good. 

We have slowly been working on the house. Mostly just painting and getting bookshelves installed. Now that the cosmetic is mostly done with the house, we are working on the outside. As noted in the previous post, we have started to work on the backyard. 

On to the front yard....

When we moved into the house, the front yard was nice manicured. It had jasmine under a beautiful oak tree as well as bushes around the house. We didn't really like any of the plants or jasmine so we decided to completely redo the landscaping in the front yard. 

Here is a picture of our front yard when we bought the house

I don't know if any of you have dug up jasmine before but it is really tough work and there was about 2000 square feet of it. To dig up the first 1500 square feet JJ would cut patches out and then use a shovel to get up under it and pull it up. This took about 2 years of working intermittently to complete. The last 500 square feet was a lot easier because he decided to spray week/plant killer on it. What a fantastic idea! It was so much easier to get up and only took a few hours to finish. 

Once the jasmine was out, we put in a hedge of boxwoods to outline the house and garage in the front. 

We got a load of top soil delivered about 2 weeks ago and worked all weekend to get it spread out. JJ originally planned to use the same hybrid grass seed that we have in the backyard since the oak tree provides so much  shade.  I was not the biggest fan of this as we have St Augustine grass in the side yards so we would have different types of grass in the front yard. 

Luck was on my side. A day after he spread the seed, the rains hit Florida and I mean hit. It rained for 5 days straight and so hard and fast that a lot of the soil washed away and all the seed is completely gone. 

JJ came home from church this past Sunday and announced that he is not spending more money on seed that might not grow under the oak tree. We are going to put St Augustine sod down in the next few weeks. I can not wait to have green, squishy grass in the front yard.  I know that our neighbors will be excited seeing as our front yard is an eyesore right now.

Unfortunately for them, our front yard is going to look like this for the next few weeks until we can get the sod in.

Just not as pretty as it looked when we moved in

To Do:
* put down grass
* add some color via flowers
* add a swing to hang from the Oak Tree


Hopefully I will have an update soon because H is tired of not being able to play in the front yard or backyard. 

Have a good day!

KK

Working on the backyard

Backyard

We bought our house 4 years ago this November. We loved the bones of the house but knew that it needed a lot of work. We have slowly worked on the inside of the house and are now getting to the point where we have to work on the outside. 

We have 2 young kids and I want them to have a place to play. 

When we bought the house, the backyard was described "park-like". An elderly couple had lived in the house before us and clearly knew that they didn't want to spend a lot of time with the upkeep of the backyard so they created their own little park. It had a walking path, benches, trees, palmetto bushes, etc. It looked great but really isn't the style of a young couple in their 20's. 

So, we slowly started to work on the backyard. We took out most of the bushes and about 4 trees. There was a clump of palmetto bushes that my brother-in-law, Ray, loving took apart for us one week. 

This past winter, our son really started to show an interest in playing outside and would always come inside covered in dirt because there was no grass. So, my husband got some temporary grass that would die away as summer came. That really helped cut down on the dirt that was brought into the house. 

About a month ago JJ tore down screened in porch that is in the left side of the picture.  This is a huge improvement to our backyard. The screened porch roof leaked and it became a place for roaches to die. We can now sit in the backyard and listen to the birds chirping and enjoy being outside. 

The one thing that has kept us from putting down sod is all the trees we have. We have mature trees surrounding our property. This is great because we get a lot of shade but is not that good for growing grass. 

JJ did a bunch of research and decided to get some hybrid grass seed. There are about 5 different types of seed so the hope is that one type will grow. So this past weekend we put down top soil and laid the seed down. 

(H was a huge help in getting the top soil moved.) 

It rained a lot right after we put the seed down so we will see if any of it survived. We have high hopes that this will solve our grass problem. I have visions of our kids being able to play and roll around in the grass and that is not happening right now. 

Next up on the list is a pergola, stone ground coverage and a fire pit. 

To Do:
* get grass down and grown
* Landscape (add color)
* firepit
* pergola
* Pool!!!