Category: Dream House

We’re getting close! And I find it fun and great that only now in the crunch is when some of my plans are starting to gel for certain spaces. The master bedroom was spurred along by my need to choose a paint color for our painter that will come in the day after closing and do the few custom colors we want in the house (mostly bedrooms). In the old house we never really decorated our bedroom. And while it was fine and cozy and really served us very well for years, it never felt very put together (see above). So we want to actually do it up right this time!

First, the inspiring new color. It’s called Nimbus Gray and it’s a nice grey with just a subtle hint of blue (less than in this photo, IMO). I’m really in love with it.

Though it won’t be for a while, with money not growing on trees and all, I’d like to get some new bedding to fit in better. I keep going back and forth between something subtle and colorful (like the above from West Elm) …

Or white with texture (like above from Target) with some colorful shams. The white with different shams seems a bit more versatile and this specific choice ($80) would be more affordable.

One of the big things our bedroom was always lacking was nightstands! We always had one – first it was a 3-canvas drawer affair that actually came from my childhood bedroom. It finally fell apart sometime after Ben was born and then we pulled an end table that was actually part of the furniture when our house had been a model before we moved in that came with the house. I’m actually still currently using that at the rental house. Matt has never had a nightstand. So that is a priority for us. The one above from Wayfair is a definite possibility.

Either way, once we get the nightstands, we will have something to put on top of them. We picked up these cute little Klabb lamps from Ikea a trip or two ago. And of course we’ll need some fun accessories, like maybe a gallery wall of framed black and white images of us and the kids? And/or this awesome pour deux print from Society 6?

And we will be needing some kind of light fixture since we opted to not have overhead lights put in the master. We will have the option of using the fan from Ben’s old room (he is getting his new earth/globe/stars one). But we’re not sure it will be big enough for the room or provide enough light. So … we will need something. And in the simple, modern family, me thinks. I do like a fan, even though they’re not so much the thing.

So that’s it! Looking forward to having a “grown up” kind of bedroom.

This guy has been working his tail off.

He’s been in his shop (the teeny garage in the back yard of our rental house), at crazy hours, late on weeknights and quite a good percentage of our at-home weekends, working his magic. He’s been turning my sketches into reality – mud room cabinets! Continue reading “Mudroom Cabinets Part Un”

We are almost there! We close in 20 days!!

My close-quarters (799 sf, people!!) meltdowns have become more frequent. I spent a good portion of my afternoon on Saturday cleaning up the house – it hadn’t looked so good in weeks!! Only to have it completely destroyed yesterday when we had a sewer issue and the house had to be dismantled to get to it. We lost Tabby’s music book for two whole days when a bag of dog food got set on top of it. It was only on the floor because the 3M hooks I’d been using had failed … repeatedly.

So our shiny new house is my happy place. I am in love with this kitchen. I cannot wait to cook in there.

Our fireplace turned out great too. Of course someone has a giant TV to mess it all up with ….

And this shower … oh boy. Can’t wait to try that out!

It’s big! and it has two heads! !

And our porch is getting really close. It’s decked and has most of the trim.

 

Today we have our pre-flooring walk. Basically all that’s left to do is our carpet and wood floor. But in practicality, it’s more than that – drywall and paint fixes, some miscellaneous electrical work, and of course our landscaping. We have to take care of the backyard ourselves, but they put in fence and anything outside the fence they put in and the HOA maintains, including snow removal (yay!). It seems like a lot for 20 days, but the experienced crews and big equipment make the job much quicker.

And we’re getting ready to move in too. We filled my teeny rented Nissan Rogue (was in a little fender bender right before vacation and borrowed this while my car was being fixed) with flat-pack boxes from IKEA. Those are for the office.

We’ve also been considering lighting options. Fans and a chandelier for the dining area don’t come with the house and I think the pendants over the island are too small, so we’ll replace those. I like this one from Home Depot a lot, but I’m not sure where we’ll end up on that. We saved the kids’ light fixtures from our old house …

… but Ben saw a fan he was in LOVE WITH. It’s a bit on the tacky side for my taste, but what the heck? He’s only a little boy for a little while and he loves it and it really doesn’t fight with his whole treehouse bed decor. So we will probably take his fan (it’s a pretty classy mid-century modern affair) and put it in the playroom or our bedroom.

So the countdown is on! Matt is hard at work practically every evening making the cabinets for our mudroom in the new house. Estimates to have these done professionally ran over $6k, but Matt bought everything he needed to make them for less than $1k. Since they’re more typical cabinet configurations, the savings might not be as pronounced for our laundry room and bonus room, but we’re going to price things out to see what the best course is.

Once we close (on a Tuesday), we have a bit of work to do before we can move in (on a Friday) but we will be arriving to closing with our cars packed to the gills with everything we need to get to work on (IKEA furniture, for example) and enough provisions so that we can spend our first night in our new house. It’s getting so exciting!!

I really didn’t mean to go on this long without an update. I thought I would post while we were on vacation. But yea… that didn’t happen. We were just having too much fun hanging out. We had lots of long days beaching and sunning and practicing keyboard (not kidding). And we went to NOLA and had good food and saw cool stuff. It was rough, but someone had to do it. Updates on vacation later.

We got back Monday late and I offered myself up to the office if they needed me, but happily, they did not. So Matt and I spent the day catching up on all of those little things you have to do … and the house. They got quite a bit done while we were gone.

They painted. It still needs to be cut in and touched up, but painted it is, and I’m really happy with our color selection. Interior color is beige and really not too interesting, so no photos.

They finished all of the masonry, including the rock around the fireplace. LOVE IT.

And they did a lot of trim work including the fireplace area inside

And our railings. This was a piece we’d selected that I didn’t know how we’d feel about, but we’re SOOO happy with it.

And in continuation from what we saw right before we left, cabinets are all hung and we have hardware on them!!!

They have also started to tile on the bathroom walls but I couldn’t take a photo of it because the windows were all blocked off to mask for painting and it was DARK.

In a couple of weeks we have the pre-flooring walk and then 2 weeks later we have the final walk, followed a week later by closing. YAY!

 

After over three weeks of seemingly nothing happening on our house, we have movement! YAY!

Apparently the insulators were the sticking point, getting behind on schedule and holding us up. While they were elsewhere, they did do work – it just wasn’t highly visible work – they did frame in our fireplace and build some more of the deck and got everything READY for drywalling. 

But finally, after my threats to go in there and do it my own self, it is happening!! It is always amazing to me what the pros can get done in about a day’s time – like rocking most of an entire house. Despite how this photo looks, almost everything is done. And I’m sure what’s not done – namely one of the kids’ rooms and the office – will be done by the end of today.

Outside, the decorative masonry is going up as well and they have built the forms to pour our front walkway. It will be lovely to not have to walk on uneven ground littered with the (frequently sharp!) detritus of construction. It is full speed ahead on all fronts.

And that makes us pretty ham dappy!

 

It hasn’t been the easiest thing living so far away from our “home base.” The commute is brutal. But we’re getting there … and seeing the house take shape is great. It shows us we’re getting close!

We had our pre-drywall walk yesterday. It was pretty uneventful – just a couple of small things that needed to be added or corrected. They have to get through inspections and put up some insulation and the drywall dust will start flying.

Continue reading “House Update”

We are having an optional space built above our garage. They call it a carriage house, others call it a bonus room. It’s a nice space, sort of like a studio apartment. It has a room with a walk-in closet and bathroom attached. It has a small alcove for a built-in wet bar (ours will not have this, at least initially). In some plans, it has a walk out patio. We did not opt for this because we didn’t feel it would get proper use.

We didn’t have a clear plan for this room, but we knew it was way cheaper to add extra room now than it would be down the line. So we took our time deciding what we’d do with it. We thought a bit about using it for Matt’s office. It would work well for that since it would be away from the hubbub of the main house, but for now, it’s a bit too far from our kids who are home in the afternoons and are still pretty little and need some oversight. We also decided Matt and I having separate office spaces was a waste of space since I don’t work from home a lot. We thought about it as a guest room. That idea was nice too, but we didn’t really want to dedicate any one space for guests* since we don’t host people overnight very often and it seems a waste to pigeon-hole that much space to only be used for a few days every year. Others suggested it as a kids’ family room or a media room, but we’d rather keep those activities a bit closer to the main activity of the house.

Continue reading “Style Book: Workout Room”

I really need to do a post about Tabby turning 7 and some of the other things that have gone on, but photos are stuck on my camera … due to a lack of time rather than any sort of electronics malfunction … and I am not going to stop blogging just because of that little fact. There’s time to tell the tale later. Maybe tomorrow? Let us hope.

The office is sort of a new space for us. Not that we don’t have an office in our current house (when do I start calling this the old house, BTW?) – we actually have two. Matt had his office in Ben’s room and then we moved it to the basement. My “office” has always been in our master sitting room which seems like a good place for an office, but was really more wasted space because being really far away from the family never worked for me and all of the lovely built-in bookcases looked lovely but were too deep to be practical for actual storage.

But now, instead of these two spaces about as far apart as you can get, we will have one office on the main floor … so we will be sharing the office. It could potentially be a disaster, I suppose. Matt’s not quite as neat as I tend to be, and I tend to chuck first and ask questions (like “where’d that go??”) later, but I think we can work it out. In many ways, sharing an office makes sense for us. We have a lot of shared equipment like the printer, scanner, camera, etc. and we work different hours or together on a bigger project.

So after some fairly careful consideration, we have decided that the office will have a few main functions:

1. Work-from-home office for Matt.
2. Storage for the stuff for making: construction paper, felt, googly eyes, markers, camera, wrapping supplies, etc.
3. Occasional office for me … when I really need to plop down my laptop and work in peace and quiet.
4. Family work space for bigger projects.

We’ve really liked a lot of the pieces we purchased from IKEA for the kids desk in their playroom and my office. They are well-constructed and functionally sound. So we set off to the exulted mecca of cheap furniture and looked around their office department. As luck would have it, they had an office pre-designed that is nearly perfect for us. As a bonus, we already own a few pieces in the room that we can recycle into this.

We will have a bank of cabinets, uppers and lowers, that will function as excellent storage for all things office and a little counter space for works in progress and other stuff you need to have out, like a printer. Matt will have his desk space. Not sure we’ll do uppers above his space. They made the space feel a little confining. Maybe open shelves. Maybe nothing.

Another central feature will be a large work desk, very similar or the same as this office has. You can see it a bit better in the first picture. It’s great to have a really large surface for laying out big projects or … wrapping gifts. I’m debating about having some racks to hold about 3 or 4 rolls of wrapping paper. We do this right now in a manner of speaking –  I just keep on hand 3 or 4 fairly neutral good for most occasions rolls of paper so whenever the kids are invited to a bday party I don’t have to shell out another $4 for a bag and some tissue – and I think I would like the pop of color on the wall.

This room is really most decorated by the things that are in it, but we might also have Tabby’s ski portrait hung in this room. Then we need to have one done of Ben to add into the mix!

Another key part of our “design” for the office is the lack of door. We will not be having the builders install a door to this room because we will be installing a barn door when we move in. Stylistically we’ll probably go somewhere middle of the road of these two – no cross beams ala a real barn, but not so rough as the one on the right. We didn’t want to close off such a large part of our open floor plan with a bunch of wall and tiny opening for door, so this way we can have  a relatively big opening and then close it off when needed with a door that won’t intrude into the foyer.

And there you have the plan!

Our new house won’t be much bigger than our current house. Most of the additional square footage will come from our “bonus room” above the garage which is going to be our workout room (style book on THAT later). But, due to various reasons (like the fact that our dining furniture came from IKEA almost 12 years ago – guess how awesome it looks now!), we will need some new furniture.

One of the biggest reasons we decided to sell was for more entertaining space. We love to have people over. It’s never formal (we will, again, have no separate dining room from a kitchen eating area), but it’s always fun. We all enjoy having a big group over to share a big pot of soup or a bunch of homemade pizzas.

This kind of informal entertaining brings to mind a long table with benches on either side. I love this look and it seems just about right for the kids. I’ve found some great benches with tables, but I wonder if we would miss the backs on the chairs.

So another option we’ve been looking at is to buy a fairly simple dining table – the one above is from Crate and Barrel and then put a mish-mash of chairs around it. The kids currently sit on folding chairs I spray-painted funky colors, so I thought bringing in a couple of Marais A Side chairs from Industry West in similarly funky colors could be fun and finish it off with some pretty simple chairs on the cheap from IKEA. Or maybe we’ll do both. Jury is out.

We also need to replace our 12-year-old IKEA side bar. It’s been through two moves and is pretty crumbly by this point. The simple industrial look of this piece from PB Teen caught our eye and we found it on a great deal a few weeks back and bought it. It’s getting sent to the old house and will move to storage with the rest of our surplus furniture. I like that unlike our sidebar, it will hide away the STUFF.

Lastly, we will want to accessorize a bit. The dining area is open on one side and has lots of windows and the cabinet is fairly tall, so we probably won’t have much on the walls. Just maybe some typographic art. But we will need window coverings. I’m thinking fairly standard panel curtains in a nice mellow graphical print. We may also elect to swap out the provided light fixture for something a bit more fun … though certainly nothing we have to do immediately.