Remodel Recap...

Well, where to start?  We have been BUSY for the past 6 weeks.  Crazy busy!  We were able to remodel the living/dining areas, small area off the kitchen that is our office, the boys' bedroom, most of the bathroom, and Sierra's room all in the last 6 weeks or so!  All rooms got some minor wall arrangements, new tape and texture, paint, flooring, window blinds and organization.  

My favorite improvement was this wall section getting changed up some.

Before there were two partition walls with openings in them (as you can see in the "before" pic).  The walls weren't large enough to be able to set furniture against them and I didn't care for the openings in the walls.  So we decided to take out the wall section right by the front door (behind the step ladder in the before pic above).  Then we decided to extend the wall in the foreground so we could put furniture against the wall and be able to install the wood stove on the other side of the wall in the future.

The next thing I love is the new flooring throught all the remodeled areas!  Oh it is so nice.  What a huge improvement to the look of the house.  You can see in the picture collage below we put a wood look Allure flooring in the living areas and boys' room.  It is called TrafficMaster Allure in Pacific Pine color.  We really like this flooring, it was so easy to install that the kids and I ended up installing a lot of it.  In the bathroom and kitchen we put in a tile pattern of the same type of flooring.  It is called Traffic Master Allure in Cordoba color.

We tried to choose flooring that would hide dirt and dog hair well and we set actual dirt, mud and dog hair on all the samples and these two were the best. 

We have a lot of finishing touches to do, especially trim work, but we are holding off on that stage until we have the shop done enough to be able to finish the woodwork out of the weather.  So for now, it is totally comfortable and we are enjoying the upgrades.

Don't Know When to Quit...

The remodel has expanded, and expanded some more.  Maybe it was the progress in the bathroom that inspired us.  Seeing those new walls all nicely painted and the new flooring so nice and new.  We expanded the remodel efforts to Sunshine's room a week or two ago.  Mind you, the bathroom still is not finished, it is 2/3 functioning though.  The tub/shower and toilet are functional, but the countertop is still not done and therefore the sink is not functional.  We will get there, but first we decided to expand the remodel to not only Sunshine's room but the hall that connects the bathroom and her room.  Then we figured why stop there?  Within the next 2 days we were starting in on the living room.  Then we realized it made more sense to keep going into the original dining area while we were at it.  Then since that area connects into the kitchen we will have some blending to do into the already remodeled kitchen as well.  Which means we will have to repaint the kitchen since the feathering out of the joint compound and texturing to blend the transition will require some paint touch ups.

We've possibly  bit off more than we can chew. Ha Ha   Well maybe not, we are gnawing and chewing as fast as we can.  It is coming along really quickly thanks to a VERY motivated and energized Mr Wonderful! He is on a mission and working late into the night several nights already. Thankfully his work schedule has been fairly light lately so he is able to put some more focus into the remodel than he'd have normally been able to.

We are currently on the 2nd coat of mud (joint compound) on the walls.  It feels great to be this far and I can't wait until the end result.

We extended one wall out to give us more options in arranging furniture in the living area, on the backside of the new wall we want to install a new woodstove at some point down the road.  We took out a short wall that had openings in it that we didn't care for.

BEFORE:  The wall behind Tobers got tore out back to the door.  The wall Tobers is working on got extended a couple feet and the opening was filled in.  You can see the "lovely" two tone paneling and painted wallpaper covered sheetrock board walls.

DURING (sneak peek):  You can see the short wall section by the door is now gone, and the other wall is longer and the opening is filled in now!  Woodstove will go behind this wall, so the wood mess isn't facing the living room area.  The sheetrock is up but we hadn't started the joint compound quite yet.  We added bullnose corners for something different.

While we were doing the remodel we realized we are going to need to replace the flooring in both the living area and kitchen.  The living room carpet is very cheap (short fibers and light colored and shows every stain).  The kitchen floor is sort of a disaster because the old old floor is showing in areas where we had to move base cabinets to make the kitchen larger in that remodel project.  So we have some rugs carefully placed to cover those bad spots, they catch all kinds of crud in those areas where the flooring gaps so it really needs replaced.  We were making due and being patient while we saved up the funds to replace it.  We decided to go ahead and get it done sooner than later after we finish redoing the walls.  We had the time and we couldn't work on much else with the cold weather and snow we've been having.  We filed our taxes and know what our refund will be when it arrives.  So as soon as that is in we can order our flooring.

I will keep you posted and hopefully we will have some final after pictures to share soon.

Tomorrow is Spud Man's 13th birthday!  I can't believe we will have two teenagers now.  Looking forward to many good times ahead and fun adventures as these kiddos grow into adults.

Aerial Adventure...

 Three of the kids got to go for a flight last weekend!

Getting all buckled up, and puke bags ready just in case!

 Sunshine and my dad up front.

Headed toward the runway.

Fly away home...

An aerial shot of our place!  You can see the bees in the lower right corner.  You can also see the large garden area behind the house too.

The hay ranch, I've made many fond childhood memories here.  We used to ride the horses from our house up here as often as we could.  It was a long ride, but worth it.

The area I grew up.  North Fork of McKay Creek.

South Fork of McKay Creek in the upper section of the picture, North Fork in the lower section.  

It's a wonderful place to grow up!

Hope you enjoyed the aerial tour!

Kitchen...A Frugal Overhaul

When we looked at this home we knew the cabinets needed some freshening up.  We planned to paint and possibly change up the hardware and add some smoother drawer slides.  I was excited about a quickie makeover for once, after such an extensive kitchen remodel at our last house.  We finally got the keys to the house and we did the first walk through after the previous owners things were out.  I remember being discouraged because everyone that saw the cabinets were pretty much grossed out, myself included.  

There were spills inside and of all kinda of mystery stains, the cabinets were in much worse condition than I remembered, I realized they were hollow core cheap press board doors instead of more solid ones that could be painted.  It became apparent we needed new cabinets.  Not to mention we had to do something about the really scary range hood and the dingy wall paper.  Yikes!  

It was all a little much at first.  Also there was a peninsula cabinet up high that I really didn't care for, it blocked the view into the open living area and I have always disliked those type of cabinets.  The first thing we did was tear out that cabinet, mostly so we'd never have a chance to miss the storage it would have provided!   We didn't even wait long enough to take a before picture of that thing.

We priced new stock cabinets and counter tops at Home Depot and figured it was going to cost approximately $2,800 if we did everything ourselves (installation and demo of old kitchen)   We had just moved in, we couldn't really afford that much so soon after scraping up the largest down payment we possibly could.  Since it wasn't an emergency we couldn't justify taking it out of the emergency fund.  Although it did feel a little like an emergency to be honest.

Why I originally thought a simple coat or three of paint would fix it I am not sure.  I actually think it was God that softened all the "eye sores" for us so we'd go ahead and purchase it and not get bogged down with the little stuff.  He knew we needed this place, he also knew we'd get bogged down with worry and get stuck in it if he didn't soften some of those things until after we'd moved in.  Once we moved in and had fallen in love with the place and saw all the potential right in front of us it was easier to jump in and fix what needed done.  That is our theory.  Looking at this picture I am thinking God must have blindfolded me completely to have walked willingly into that mess.   It is a really good thing I have the ability to imagine how it could look with some TLC.

Tobers grins for the camera with a cordless drill in hand just waiting on the next demolition order of business.

Told you is was gross!  Spud Man is in charge of demo...just happens to be right up his alley of expertise.

Sunshine helps remove staples from the wall where the trim boards were attached.  Demo is such a messy job but we knew it would be worth it in the end.  The counter section she is kneeling on we left as long as we could to maintain water in the kitchen as long as possible.  Don't you just love the wallpaper?  Pft, yuck huh?

We decided to not put any of our kitchen things in the old cabinets and set up a temporary kitchen area in the small dining area next to the kitchen.  We left only the sink base cabinet so we could still do dishes and get water.  Everything else we gutted.

We slowly worked on what we could afford to.  We took off the wallpaper seam trim and primed the wallpaper (the wallpaper was factory applied over 3/" sheetrock so we opted to leave it and prime it well then we added tape and texture along the seams.  We textured with an orange peel finish, did another primer coat, then we painted a nice neutral light beige color.

My Dad had some basic birch cabinets that he had salvaged from an old school demolition that he offered us.  We went and measured them and determined we would be able to make them fit.  Granted it would take a lot of work, creativity, and tedious retrofitting to get a workable kitchen.  We are so grateful for this resource as it did save us about $2,000!  The trade-off was, we'd spend the next 4+ months working on getting them retrofitted, refinished, and installed.  The progress has been slow but satisfying.

Here are the cabinets before we started retrofitting them.  In an off-topic note, you can see in the foreground of the picture we are drying some morel mushrooms from a recent camping trip in the mountains.  Yum!

I really like that these cabinets had another life before arriving here in my kitchen.  The likely history is that these cabinets were built by prisoners for the schools.  They are made of high quality thick veneer over pieced solid wood, what little plywood there is, is high quality.  These are solid and well built.  They stripped down easily mostly because of the smooth profile.  They sanded nice and smooth and they took stain beautifully.

We are also very grateful that my parents helped pay a portion of the cost of the new countertops.  We only had to come up with an additional $100.  So overall we have only put about $500 into this kitchen remodel.  We used our sweat equity of time, skill, and patience.

There are things we still need to do, we need to enclose the new standard range hood to look more custom (this is not shown in the photos, we've made some progress since these pics were taken), we need new flooring, and to finish it all off we need some trims and finishing touches to make it look more custom and less utilitarian.  Trim does a lot to add character for not much money.

Ways we kept costs way down:

#1 Not letting emotion get us in a hurry.

#2 Being patient with the process of doing it the harder, but cheaper way.

#3 Being content with the idea that it doesn't and won't ever look like a showroom.

#4 Embracing the idea of re-purposed items and being creative with your materials to make things functional.

#5 Losing the sense of entitlement, thinking "I deserve this because I've worked hard."  You only get it if you have the cash to pay for it.

#6 If at all possible, don't move certain fixtures that would be expensive to move....sinks because of plumbing, and stoves because of electrical and gas plumbing issues as well.  Moving these items a few inches or even 1 ft either way might not cause any issues but major rearranging of the kitchen layout adds up fast.

This isn't really a before and after post.  It is more of a before and in progress post.  We think this improved kitchen will serve our family well for years to come until we can one day build our own custom home.  We figure all of these projects serve as a very good practice for our future dream home.

We have a few drawer fronts to install under the sink area as well as to the left of the stove.

The new flexible track lighting.  Oh and see that nice looong section of countertop?  We love that area, it is where some serious sandwiches can be built, or dozens of cookies made, or pie crusts rolled out.   Then with the raised bar right there the kids can sit and visit with me or help me while I prepare something.  Or when company comes over it is fun to prepare dinner while chatting.  It is the best part about the whole kitchen!

I hope you enjoyed the tour of our so far progress in our kitchen.  I look forward to many projects around this place. Thankfully, we enjoy a good before and after enough to keep plodding away at projects as we can afford to dive into more.

Keep watching for another update, with some more trim work and finishing touches, we have a ways to go but we are optimistic that maybe this summer we can get a few steps farther.

Dreams Come True...

I can't believe I am finally able to say this....we bought acreage!

So much went into our purchase of this place. This has been the culmination of 15 years of dreams, successes, patience, frustration, work, and the Lord's continued blessings.  We had a few potential purchases fall through for various reasons in the past couple years and it was frustrating, but in hindsight I am so glad they didn't work out.  What we have here is so much better in so many ways.  God is so good to us!

Let me take you back in the journey just a bit and tell you what we were looking for.  We were looking for acreage anywhere from 2-20 acres.  It really depended so much on what it had to offer as far as terrain, water availability  and layout.  We wanted usable land, not something too steep or too rocky to use.  We wanted a home with a nice layout, but we expected a fixer-up because that was going to be highly likely because of our budget.  Plus, we don't mind a challenge, we wanted a diamond in the rough that we could make our own.  Fertile soil was important because we wanted to be able to grow things, water rights were a very definitely a plus.  Water rights are hard to come by in our area and when a place with water rights can be found it is expensive (many times it put a place $100,000 out of our budget range) so we had to stay flexible on this item!  We wanted to be in the country, but not so far that the fuel to get to and from town would be too expensive.  Speaking of expensive....we had a max budget of $200,000 the further under that number the better.  To say there are VERY few places in this range in our area would be an understatement....most had some very big issues that would have been hard to work around.

So with that criteria in mind this is what we ended up with.  Five beautiful acres that are gently rolling with deep fertile soil.  A small, comfortable home that needs some work and character, but is efficient and well built.  Let me clarify a little....the structure is well built, it features 2x6 exterior walls and it is well insulated.  Other things like fixtures and wear surfaces are not so much (typical of a manufactured home of this era), but at least those are easy to upgrade and fix in time as needed.   There is a 22x50 covered carport/hay shed pole structure (an unfinished shop) that has an insulated roof but no walls yet.  The former owners didn't finish it, but that is fine, we get to finish it how we'd like to.  There is another small shed for storage with an attached shelter area for animals.  The best part?  The property has water rights with the irrigation system all set up already!

Here are some pictures of the property the weekend we moved in, enjoy the tour.

Back yard area with our little chicken coop already moved and situated.  Everything needed a good mowing and the hay field was more than ready to be cut when we moved in.

Looking northeast, the backside of the property which is a hay field. 

Standing under the carport/hayshed area (soon to be the shop) looking toward the white shed/animal shelter. 

Standing in backyard looking at east end and back of home which faces north.

Front of home faces slightly southeast. 

As you can see we have a lot of work to do, landscaping, painting, updating, character to add, and customization to do.  We feel like we found the very best place for the money....we paid less than we were going to pay for another place a year before we found this place.  We managed to stay well under our max budget as well.  This was mainly due to the fact that it was a hard to finance property because it wasn't on a typical foundation, but we had the ability to work around this financing issue, and to have the foundation certified by an engineer, our excellent credit score and down payment amount played a part in this as well.  

We feel so blessed to have found just the right piece of property for our family.  One day we hope to be able to build a new home on this place, but we have a few kids to get through college first.  We'd like to pay the place off and build the home ourselves with cash (that is a ways down the road, for now, we are making it feel like our home and enjoying it.)

We have already done some improvements to the place and I hope to post that progression as well.  In the coming posts I will show you before pictures of the inside, specifically the kitchen, that will be interesting.  Did I say interesting? I think I meant to say a little disgusting....I'll let you be the judge.

Sunshine's room.....

So since I am a sucker and anytime anyone mentions something I once did I feel I must indulge them. hee hee. Now I want you to understand that I am not bragging, I am moreso embracing what I used to be capable of. The thought of doing a wall mural or some other artisitc feat these days leaves me feeling overwhelmed and numb with lack of creativity.

Anyway that is the only reason I share these today, so that maybe just maybe I will again aquire some creativity and energy to act on that. The mural mentioned in the comments is actually not a true wall mural (in the sense of paint anyway). Though, I do have a mural style quilt that I made for Sunshine several years ago (back before 2 more boys came into our lives and sucked the majority of my creative braincells out of my body upon their birth evidently). Also I painted a partly cloudy sky on her ceiling, then we put a neat horsey wall border along the wall as well.

The whole quilt is supposed to represent childhood dreams and a little girl's dream playhouse.

You can see a little bit of the ceiling in this next pic.....

The next one is some appliqued flowers, these were really fun flowers to make .

Also I love sunflowers to I had to put on in here....along with a sweet kitty on the swing.

Everyone could use a little sunshine sometime....

Here is her wall border. Could someone please load me up that sweet mare in the middle and bring her to my house (along with the 10 acres I don't have, and the dream home we didn't just build.)

Here is the ceiling with a little more to see...tough to capture on a camera though.

Thanks for hanging in there, the photography was bad.....I need more practice and my camera has some major limitations in low light conditions.:(

Disclaimer: The room was not able to be captured in it's entirety, due to dangerous conditions within the parameters of the encounter. One particular child may have been harmed during the making of this tour.

Welcome To My Kitchen.....

Welcome.........come on in. I thought I would give you a little tour since we had just been talking about my kitchen mural. So sit back and have a cup of tea and lets pretend we are sitting around the kitchen table chatting together. Please don’t look too closely…..I gave it a once over but that’s where the neatness stops…you saw my freezer earlier.

That reminds me we (read: Mr Wonderful) really need to get that micro vent enclosed with trim. Yet another to~do thing around here.

Every kitchen must have an undercabinet radio, really....it is required in my house if I am to endure the laborious hours of work to be done in my kitchen.

Now on to the fun side of my kitchen. The mural…..

Please excuse the cat, he thinks he will die without nourishment in the next 3 mins. The utility room…thru that door was beyond the scope of my little cleaning session. It is the site of Mt. Washmore my famous laundry pile, trust me you don't want to see that!

Now it is time to get up close and personal with some of the characters….

“Gang, meet Robin.”
“Robin, meet the gang”

Our resident flock of sheep and a few of the flowers.

My flock of sunflowers, I really like sunflowers.

Delphiniums, daisies, and hollyhocks…......I must remember to finish putting up those pickets, this area used to be hid behind my computer cabinet back when I had a desktop so we could not reach to apply the wooden pickets. Oops…add that to the to~do list as well please.

Ahhhh…yes the single most inspiring thing on the wall, I love barns, I love the smell of hay, I love long lingering barn talks, I love haylofts…..speaking of hay lofts I really, really want to go here….. The Anniversary Inn (The Hayloft Suite) oh sorry back on topic….. anyway sometimes I envision hanky~panky happnin' in that hay loft....just kidding. Did you know that as appealing as that sounds...it really is not a good idea, in hindsight for very prickly reasons.;)

Well hello there Mr. Butterfly….

And last but not least, every momma Robin needs a nest!
Hope you enjoyed the tour! Would you like some more tea?

Disclaimer: This clean kitchen is subject to change within 10.2 seconds after the last counter is wiped. Unpaid help cannot be held responsible for any actions upon discovery of said changes.