Laborious Labor Day :)

The home of our dreams has left much to be desired in the way of a back yard but we have dreams and visions of it becoming a place where we love to host parties, watch Crew play and just hang out. Unfortunately, hosting much of anything has proved to be difficult since the home never had so much as a slab of concrete to house the beloved grill.

We were able to make the space work for Crew's blessing party, thanks to a tent rental, but I hardly doubt my husband will let me rent a tent every time we want company over.

So when we saw that a neighbor was extending his driveway, my excavating-skilled brother would be in town for a few weeks and we had a long weekend to dig... it lit the fire under our butts for getting started on a patio.

So here is a little "before" action for ya. We spent Saturday marking out what we wanted, moving all those rocks from underneath the stairs and rototilling a beatiful 13x13 section of our lawn.

Don't be fooled, people, the ground above looks all soft and ready for digging but you are wrong. Beneath the first 2 inches of dirt lay a hot mess of white clay. As an Oklahoma gal, I am used to working with this hard and stubborn stuff but what a surprise to find it here in Utah!

We opted to run a slow sprinkler over the ground on Sunday evening so that the ground would be ready for us first thing Monday morning.

And then we dug,


and dug,


and, seriously, dug some more.

By the end of Monday, we had a beautiful 8-inch deep hole in our back yard. Next we have to get the framing up and fill the first few inches with gravel. But first, we need a few days to regain feeling in our backs and shoulders. :)

My neighbors always question what we do with Crew while we are working. Have they met my kid? He took two amazing naps and chilled in his pack and play under a tree while he was awake. Love him!

Lazy Saturday Afternoon

After a couple extra busy weeks of work, chores and places to go, we enjoyed a Saturday afternoon at home. Crew and I were able to lay out a blanket under the shade of our biggest tree and just relax.

I love watching him taking in new things that he has never seen before.



Don't you just love how the shadows bounce around his little face?


He has been very excited about sucking on those little fingers lately. I am a little worried he may choose to take after his dad. Any guesses on how long Cole sucked his thumb? (love ya honey!)

My neighbor Liz came over to share this yummy watermelon. The perfect summer treat.


Oh, and did I mention that while we were sitting on our tushies Cole insalled the coolest new house numbers for us?

The duct tape was our super classy template. I plan to show them off once we finish a few other "front door" projects.

I <3 Saturdays.

The Prince's Pad

One of the funnest parts of being pregnant was planning Crew's nursery. I had hours of fun pouring over blogs, magazines and Web sites dreaming about what colors he might like, theme vs. no theme, how to get furniture I liked without paying an arm and a leg, and so much more.

Because I had so much fun, this may be the longest home improvement post I have ever written. If you don't need the play by play, see the two collages below. If you want the nitty gritty, keep reading.

and


Hope you enjoy; this is our favorite room yet!

Just three months ago, our designated baby room looked a little like this:

and this


Amidst months of home renovations, this room became the perfect "catch all" for Christmas decorations, out-of-season clothing and home decor that still needed to be unpacked and put on display.

Once we cleared out all of the bins and such, we got to work prepping the ceilings and walls for some much needed color. This included patching the walls and removing literally 10 ceiling hooks like these:

While we appreciated a good hook as much as the next guy, our most recent theory is that the room served as a green house of hanging plants for some previous owner.

Once the walls and ceiling had been prepped and primed, it came time to choose the wall color.

Knowing that we wanted fun colors and visual interest, our weekend of paint sampling resulted in the following finalists:

It was a tight race between the green and dark blue but we played it a little bit safe with the wall color knowing that there were a lot of colors and patterns to follow. Because of the bold nature of the blue, we used it as an accent wall and finished off the other three walls in a cream that had just a hint of blue added.

Uninspired by any of the bedding I could afford, I took my mom up on an offer to help me with a bumper pad and crib skirt. I planned to round out the bedding with a homemade quilt by yours truly. After weeks of combing local fabric stores, I fell head over heels in love with this collection by local designer Riley Blake:



With our basic inspiration in line, it was time to tackle our storage issues. The closets of a 1960's split level leave much to be desired. The addition of a baby didn't change the fact that Cole would continue to need the baby room closet for his clothes.

Thanks to the "Billy" closets at Ikea and a little brainstorming by Cole, we were able to come up with a storage solution that gave us bukoos of storage, cute shelves for decorating and a kind of swanky built in storage look.



Cole started with two six foot bookshelves and mounted them to the wall. He then added the half sized shelves in front of the original bookshelves and bracketed them to each other. We finished each new storage unit off with doors and beautiful pulls from Anthropologie.

Butting the two shelves together gave us a really deep space for drawer length containers that now hold Crew's clothes, accessories, bath necessities and everything else he needs.

With the storage dilemma solved we added the recliner and changing station.


The recliner was a no-brainer once we realized that we would end up paying the same amount for a quality wood glider as we would a gliding recliner. Plus, the cheap-os in us love the idea that when we no longer need the chair for rocking little ones to sleep, it is neutral enough that we can use it in another room of the house.

Normally I think changing tables are just another piece of expensive furniture for new parents to buy. However, since we plan to try reusable diapers (once Crew is big enough to fit into them) I figured it would be a good investment to have a designated station for all the diapering "stuff."

The matching changing table for our amazing find of a crib was going to set us back a whopping $450, so we opted for a similar styled table with a dramatically smaller price tag (gotta love online shopping).

Favorite finishing touches like the letters

these curtains

and stocking the shelves


proved to be the perfect projects for Stacy (Cole's mom) and I as we patiently waited for the lil man to make his appearance.

Of course lengthy descriptions aside, this finishing touch was the only thing I needed to make the nursery complete.


We just love this guy!

A La Basement Bathroom

Although this project has been done for a couple months now, I still thought it would be fun to post a few pictures of our finished basement bathroom. For those of you who don't remember what we started with, the bathroom used to consist of a vanity and a sadly misplaced toilet. We decided to add an oversized shower and replace both the old toilet and vanity and tile the floor. Add a bright splash of color to the walls, super sexy glass tiles and a few white towels/accessories and, Wallah!

Before:

After:

The Feel of Carpet between Our Toes

Oh glorious carpet!

Yesterday we installed carpet in our basement family room, guest room and hallway. Cole and I wasted no time enlisting a friend to help us drag in our TV and couch. "Lie to Me" (DVR'ed) was never quite so enjoyable. I look forward to vacuuming it again tonight, just because I can.

Feast your eyes on our flecked beige carpet, perfectly butted with our now-finished baseboards and trim. We are itching to entertain our Thanksgiving guests with our comfy new floors.

Movie Night Anyone?

Up on the Countertops and Dance!

Ok. No worries about that happening here, but we were really excited to see our counter tops installed this week. Our contractor worked with North Salt Lake Marble/Granite and we are really pleased with how they turned out.

See below for a few befores and afters. The plumber will follow later this week to put in our final plumbing and faucet.

Work Weekends 6, 7 & 8

Despite the lack of posts on the topic, we are still very busy working on the house.

In the last couple weekends we added all new windows (separate post to follow), finished tiling and sealing the grout for the basement bathroom, installed all of our closet doors and trimmed out the entire main level. Cole has also been busy trimming trees, moving rocks and generally clearing all the little areas of stuff around the yard.

In addition to the planned efforts, we had a few surprises. Our roof has a little leak, our furnace is original to the house-not three years old, and our mortgage was sold to another lender which delayed getting some of our cash to work on the bigger projects.

That being said, we are rolling right along. We love sitting back and looking at a part of a room that is almost there. In these tired moments we get a glimpse of how worthwhile all of this will be.

Since budgets (and FHA) dictate this handrail must stay, Cole gave it a good sanding, two coats of black spray paint and a beautiful matte finish.

Please expand larger. Please ohhh, please ahhh!

As previously mentioned, in 1961 there was no such thing as "standard pre hung doors." Rather, folks used their own handy skills at cutting door holes and filling them with semi-custom doors in sizes that don't exist any more. As years went by, people continued to paint and reuse the same doors until the poor doors looked something like this.

Luckily, my dad is a genius and was able to frame out all the doors to an almost standard size, we found a door place that didn't charge an arm and leg to help us mark and cut special doors, and this weekend we hung some doors.

Snow is a good reminder

that at some point Cole and I needed get the furnace checked out.

When I was scouting out a good price for a furnace tune up this morning I came across this Utah Diva Deal.

http://www.utahdealdiva.com/2009/09/incredible-deal-on-furnace-inspections.html

$50.00=cleaning, lubricating, replacing filter, carbon check, green sticker and the peace of mind that heating our house this month won't result in burning down our new home.

The few companies I called this morning were quoting me upwards of 100 bucks, so check it out.

You just have to schedule an appointment before EOD tomorrow.

Projects of WW 5

Work Weekend 5 has been a beautiful continuation of work week 5.

During the Week:
Baseboards and Casings - Our pre-primed baseboards and casings were delivered to our driveway on Tuesday afternoon. Cole and I were able to spend every evening this week painting these babies so they would be ready for my dad this weekend. (Too much painting; no time for photos)

Kitchen Cabinets - The cabinet guys arrived from Idaho on Thursday afternoon with our java colored kitchen cabinets and bench. By noon on Friday morning, you could kind of get an idea of what the room is going to look like.

Weekend Projects:
Basement Baseboards and Casings - Where to start? If you are following this process, then you are aware that our house may not have a single square corner, level floor or straight door jam. Despite that, my dad was able to make really good progress hanging door casings and baseboards in the basement. This project will span the next week or so, but it felt good to get so much done downstairs.


Basement Bathroom Tile - When we first toured our house, the basement bathroom really stuck out as an oddity to us. The basement bathroom is almost the exact same size as the upstairs bathroom but had only a sink and a toilet. The last of which was positioned almost in the middle of room.

We immediately decided to add a tub and replace the linoleum with tile. After recommendations from parents, contractor and plumber we re-opted for an over-sized shower.

With rough in plumbing and sheetrock done, mom and I decided to get started on that tile. Photos taken about 10:30 p.m.


Entryway stairs - A seemingly small project that has spanned the last several weeks. The area quickly lost the nasty carpet, but upon removal we discovered more than four layers of paint separated us from the beautiful pine floors. We have lost count of the number of layers of paint stripper, the hours of chiseling, scraping and orbital sanding, not to mention the number of people who have braved this chore. To everyone, thanks. We are finally ready for some stain.

After all the projects, I am so grateful for a quiet Sunday of relaxing!

Adventures of Tiling a Kitchen

This weekend we were able to prep and lay all the tile for our new kitchen floor. With cabinets on the way this week, we knew we would have to get this one done quickly and right so's not to hold anyone up.

We spent the previous weekend combing about seven different tile/flooring stores in SLC and settled on five or six finalists that made it back to the house for final judging. On Thursday night we laid them all out in the kitchen. Using our counter and cabinet samples, we systematically eliminated tiles based on color (too dark, too red, too wrong) and finish (too shiny, too many grooves, too wrong) until we landed on the undeniable winner.

We also spent Thursday sweeping, vacuuming, and swiffering every square inch of the floor, a week of drywallers will leave you with loads of dust.

Snap shot of floors, in all their tar and felt glory, prepped and ready for the next step.


Given the nature of the original surface and that fact that floors in old homes are rarely level and walls are almost never really straight, our next order of business was to lay backer board to help even the playing field.


Because we settled on a diamond pattern for the floor, we knew that we would need several half and quarter tiles for around the edges. Janice anticipated this and only had to cut two more tiles last minute.

Then the process became chalk the line, line one up, spread the mastic, place the tile, adjust the tile, add the spacers, grab a "second set of eyes," and continue. Cole, a tile-laying virgin, was a model student and within a few tiles was laying them like a champ. Randy was amazing too.


Lest you think Janice and I were slacking on the job, we were busy priming and painting the kitchen walls, moving the sprinklers every 30 minutes, handing spacers and prepping next week's work space...


But until then, there is a looksy at the kitchen tiles ready for grout on Monday.

Work Weekends 1 & 2

What a busy two weeks we have had! Cole was out out of town in NY for work, I was here with a trade show down at the Salt Palace and somehow, with a massive amount of help from my fam, we still managed to accomplish so much on the house!

Weekend #1 consisted of a lot of demo. My dad and brother pulled out all the ugly old 2-inch tall baseboards and moldings around the doors and the five humanly-removable layers of kitchen floor. Mom and I stayed busy cleaning everything in view, patching and sanding walls, removing porcelain tile window sills, and prepping and painting ceilings. There we are in action....

During the week, my amazing mother painted pretty much the entire house. Thank heavens for the borrowed paint sprayer! Plus, the contractor came and demoed the entire kitchen, so at this point, we really have to do this thing.

During the last two days, we pulled up all the carpet and got to sanding the wood floors beneath. I have to be honest, we were pretty scared about the condition of the floors (see nasty oil stain below) and the fact that none of us had ever refinished floors before. Regardless, hours of sanding, bleaching, vacuuming and repairing later, we are so excited to get some stain on the floors this next week. Stay tuned!