Lucky Me & The Little Things

This weekend the weather was nasty, gloomym and cold, and so I figured it was prime time to pick an in-house project to complete and distract me from looking outside, before my mood started to match the weather. So we tackled Nolan’s bedroom. We still had Ikea shelves we’d meant to put up in his room in the old house! So this was a project that was definitely past due. And now that we’ve completed it Greg and I find ourselves walking back into his room every hour or so to enjoy a finally finished big-boy-room.

I thought it would be fun to post the pictures as the old ‘progress updates‘ I posted way to few of after we moved into this house almost two years ago, can you believe it? I can’t!

So, here’s a memory refresher of the shape we found this room in, and the work we did on it.

This is the state we found the room in. Compared to the rest of the house, it was actually in most decent shape.

After a nice lick of paint and ripping out the disgusting carpet.

Remember that aweful shape the hardwoods were in? We were so fortunate to have original hardwoods throughout 80% of the house, but some knuckle-head had used them as a drop cloth before covering them up with awful carpet.

(hear the angelic *aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh* ? I do every time I look at this picture) Refinished hardwoods. Heavenly.

His room today after our weekend of putting shelves up, putting things away, taking things off the floor, cleaning out outdated toys and furniture. Lovely

Nolan has been loving rediscovering books and toys that were stored behind doors and inside buckets. He probably feels like he just hit the jackpot and got a new room and a slew of ‘new’ books and toys. Little does he know he had this all along, just a set of lazy parents too.

No son of Greg is going to grow up in a room without a sports wall, so we (he) tries to blend it in. I pretend not to notice.

This is my personally least favorite angle, except for that it shows his easel! We like the easel.

And next are my new little favorite spots:

I love this little shelf. Fortunately Nolan can’t reach it (yet) so I have reserved it for my own little display of Nolan’s things, from past and for present.

This I love because we made use of the huge mantel for part of his enormous collection of books. This way he can just stand on his bed to pick one out, and then plop down and read it right there. I also love the two maps above one another in colorful Ikea frames. Thank you tall ceilings!

And no ‘big boy’ room would be complete without at least a small collection of dinausaurs.

So I can now finally take that room off my house to-do list. Greg and I are now totally re-energised after finishing this little project, and are already thinking of which room to tackle next.

Come Monday this piece of lovely will be replaced with a brand spanking new stainless steel flat top stove. I have tried to work with this guy, despite the fact that I strongly suspected the insides to be stuffed with old food and dead bug parts, I was trying to rise above that, until the day Nolan almost burnt himself on the stove top one day when I was baking something in the oven and we figured out that the ENTIRE stove was hot to the touch from the oven being on, EXCEPT for the outlet area, the area where the access heat is supposed to get some relief, which was cold as stone.

I was then put on ‘don’t ever use the oven again’ high alert, which subconsciously caused a cooking strike in our house, which in turn made for a lot of boring sandwich dinners and a very empty fridge. So this week we bit the bullet and bought a new stove, one that matches all the other pretty new appliances in the kitchen and one that no doubt is going to send me into a frantic cooking binge. I look forward to that, and I am sure so do Greg and Nolan.

Today we finally primed the shed- twas one of those things we saw on our to-do list, but it was just plainly too dang hot to do anything about it. Lately it’s been cooling down some though so Greg bit the bullet and got going on it.

Me, and even Nolan thought we’d lend a hand and got nice an sloppy in the process.

I think Nolan’s been getting inspired by all the biking we’ve been doing. He doesn’t usually touch his bike, but he was all into it today.

Given these choices which would you pick:

Nolie is growing up fast, and we need to find him a twin bed. He still sleeps in his race car bed which holds a crib mattress. Poor guy.

So, I’ve had a picture in my mind of the bed I want to get him, but the budget has made me narrow it down to these choices. #5 is most like the bed I had in mind, but that one is really more than I want to spend on it. I am leaning heavily towards #6 because it’s a lot like what I have pictured, and more along the lines of the amount I want to spend on it.
But while searching for the perfect twin, I came across these other lovelies choices too that are making me wonder if I want to stray from my original oak wood bed idea.

Which would you get? Comment with your pick!

I’ve been having to listen to some complaints that I have stopped updating about the progress of the house after we moved in. And you were all right. This house just feels like such an ever on-going process that I kept telling myself ‘let me just get this, that, and that done, and THEN I will post some pictures of it.’ Well, I now realize that we will probably never really be done , because right when we finish everything we initially set out to do we will want to change it all again. ‘Cause that’s what we like to do, we like to torture ourselves like that.

So, this is me kicking off a tour of the house, in it’s current state. Starting with the living room.

For the extra effect I’d like to refresh your memory by showing you the state of the room as we first saw it, and it’s various stages after that.

This is the room as we first got it, the disgusting stained emerald green carpet, boring white walls, and cobwebs galore.

By now Greg has pulled up the carpet, which revealed the horribly paint splattered original hardwood floors, and the room has been painted. This is the room that gave Greg his nickname ‘sloppy’ which Nolan has since taken to a new level. If you have not had the pleasure of hearing about this, ask Nolan. The room still needs a second coat to this day

The glorious hardwoods have been finished! I believe this is the day before we moved in.

And here we are, today, the furniture has only been repositioned about 34 times, and we are getting to a place where we think we may be only 5 re-arrangements away from settling on the layout, at least for a year.

I am about to take the blinds that were there when we bought the house down. They have a nice thick crust of hardwood floor sanding dust covering the layer of dust that formed on them during the years this house was a rental.

Oh. My. God. What a difference some curtains make. Chucked the blinds, and replaced them with some pretty awesome sheers, and cotton duck curtains.

I am wondering with all the green in the room; couch, chair, plants, sheers, curtains, maybe I want to keep the sheers, but exchange the curtains for some in cream or chocolate brown? What do you think?

And one final angle of the room to complete to tour-de-livingroom for today. We still have lots of things to do here, put shelves up, art, speakers, etc, etc. But we are already super comfortable as it is here.

Nolan loves almost nothing better than spending the day on our big new front porch, watching all the cars come by, people walk by, and chatting with the neighbors. As I am inside unpacking boxes, I occasionally hear a squeaky “Hey Chester!!” or a “How’s it going Scott?” from the front and I know another neighbor has come home, or is hanging out or working around their house.

Right now we just line up folding chairs at the top of the stairs leading up to the porch to keep him from running down and playing too close to the street for our comfort. We will have to think of a more esthetically pleasing solution for this soon.

Yesterday we managed to move 99% of our things from our old house to our new house. And let me tell you right off the bat- as somebody mentioned to me a few days ago; there is nothing like a move to let you know you have TOO MUCH STUFF! So much more than we need, it’s ridiculous. The amount of boxes and things we pulled out of all the crevices of our house made us look like a bunch of little hoarding, matchbox-collecting crazies. We definitely plan on spending the next couple of months going through it all and doing some serious purging. Not only because we don’t nearly have the storage space in our new house as we did in the last, but also because we just. don’t. need. all. this. stuff!

We each have our own issues when it comes to hanging on to things. Greg has various boxes of things he hangs onto for their increased value over time, things he hopes to pass on to Nolie one day so he can do with it as he wishes. I am thinking it will come in handy when college tuition is due.

I have the unavoidable curse of the crafter. When I have anything that can potentially be used in a craft of any kind at any time I will hold on to it for dear life, and I will not let go of it until I use it. Because you never know- if I throw it out and 5 years from then I am working on a craft that I need something like it and I will have thrown it out by then, WHAT WOULD I DO?!?

Then together we hold on to stuff like kids toys and clothes, my pregnancy (and after pregnancy) clothes, just in case we have more kiddels. But with all the pregnant and kids-having people around us we decided that we just needed to give it all to them, and surely when and if we need it again in the future we will probably get tons of it back.

So back to that move- Greg and a whole bunch of wonderful friends ended up having to make two trips in the 28 foot truck we rented, and as we were loading the second load into the new house, we suddenly heard tons of sirens, and saw a billowing cloud of black smoke from only one block south of our house. Most of us walked around the block to see what was going on, and lo and behold- a house was on fire! Many people from the neighborhood had come to watch what was going on, and after asking a few people who were on their front porch across the street from the burning house I found out that somebody had actually SET the fire, and the house was known as a ‘drug house’. The fact that we have drug houses in the neighborhood is no surprise to us, but somebody lighting a fire to one was not something we expected. Not this soon anyways. The story has been on the news, and you can read more about it here

We spent last night on our new house for the first time, and it was great. Mid move, when we had finally finishes packing up all the loads at the old house I was getting very tired and worn down. But as soon as I walked in to the new house and saw all our stuff albeit piled in boxes and paths barely visible between them from room to room, I got so excited about finally moving into this cool old house, in downtown Raleigh, with all the painted walls and refinished floors, that I was entirely re-energized and was able to move boxes, unpack boxes and build beds as if I had just been on a 3 week vacation.

Today, however it’s a different story. I am sore and tired and all I want to do is sleep. A lot. Possibly this has more to do with the four beers I drank on our wonderful new front porch at the end of the day.

Back in the day Greg was quite the tiler- a craft he learned from his late stepdad, and helped him with on many jobs. In all the years I have known Greg I have not yet seen him lay a tile, but I’ve heard about how he’d love to again many a times. Finally with our new house he can flex his tiling muscle, starting with the guest bathroom, and get nice and warmed up for all the other projects I will have in mind for him when I see what he can do!

The bathroom floor is getting prepped. The gross old toilet is tossed into the back yard and the vinyl is gone. Imagine the possibilities!!

I can not WAIT to see how they will look when they are finished!

Rooms/areas finished painting- 7
Rooms cleaned- 2.5
Exciting project of the day: The floors are getting refinished!

Today and Monday through Thursday next week our hardwood floors are getting their extreme makeover. Over the weekend I will finish painting the remaining bathroom, master bedroom and kitchen. Yesterday I finally really scrubbed half of the kitchen and both bathrooms, I am so much more comfortable in them now!
When cleaning the kitchen I pulled out the shelf beneath the stove (the one appliance that came with the house) and was faced with oodles of dust bunnies, spider webs/nests, dead spiders and dead bugs, among more un-identifiable crap. I thought I would have been able to live with this stove as it wasn’t new, but also not too old, but after getting a glimpse of this and only being able to imagine what was living (or dead) in all the stove crevices that I can’t see gave me the heebie-jeebies big time. Now I may want a new stove!! This kind of sucks because we are already buying a fridge, washer/drier and a dishwasher (all eco friendly and energy efficient mind you), and I had been kinda glad that we didn’t have to also buy a stove. But seeing so much gross in an instrument with which I cook our meals makes me want to take the materialistic high road, which I never thought I would do.
Then again, this may be a great excuse to get a gas line added and finally be able to have a gas stove, which has been my dream ever since moving out of my mom’s house. Heck we are spending money as if it’s water at this point, might as well keep going, right!

In other news- I see a lot of packing in our future, I suppose I had better get started.