House photos

Our plan, after we get our landscaping done, is to have our main entrance be the front door.  For now, though, everybody's using the side entrance.  The first thing you see when you come in that way is the laundry room.

I'm loving the laundry sink, the broom closet, and all the storage.  It's really a far cry from what we had before.

Anna's room and Connor's room are on the left as you come down the hall.  I didn't get a photo of those two, mainly because the kids were playing and had large messes of toys out in their rooms. :)

Their bathroom is on the right.  It's great having two bathrooms, and I'm so glad we finally have that.  Four people sharing one bathroom is just too much!

As you walk the rest of the way down the hall, you come to the open kitchen/dining/living area.  We love having it all open -- it works great for entertaining, and even every day.  It's the main hub of the house, and the place where we spend the most time.

The door you see in the corner of the above photo is to the basement.  The photo below shows the view back down the hall to the laundry room.

Our master bedroom is on the other side of the living area.  It has loads of natural light (just like the rest of the house) and has a large walk-in closet.

The master bath is attached to our room, and it's huge!! It ended up being much bigger than we realized, but well worth it. 

In this photo you can see my vanity area, which was an added perk I wasn't expecting!

Well that's it for the inside.  Basement photos have been hard to take because of the lighting, but I'll get some uploaded here as soon as I can.

We love the house, and as we approach our six-month anniversary there is nothing we would change about it.  Obviously, all our months of planning and decision-making paid off.  We ended up with a house we're totally crazy about! :)

What's This?? A House Tour?

You got it, folks!  I have 2 videos for you today.  The first is a virtual tour of the main level of our home.  The second is a tour of the basement.  (Keep in mind that the basement is still a work in progress!)

I shot these yesterday with our new HD pocket video camera.  I'm constantly moving the camera (obviously, since this is a walking tour!) so it's a little jumpy from time to time.  But if you haven't been able to see the house yet, now's your chance! :)

Hope you like it!

Mowing Already??

Yes, we are.  Well, technically Jason is.  He mowed for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and then again last Friday.  We had plenty of weeds growing up in the front yard, so Jas set the mower deck up as high as it would go and took care of the weeds.

Last Friday when he mowed, some of the grass we had planted had grown tall enough to be mowed.  Yay!  We still have a few small bare spots, but Jas plans to re-seed the whole yard this fall and take care of that. 

Now we're getting ready to start our patio and landscaping. :)  I can't wait!

So where have we been, you ask?

Well, I just posted today about our "lawn" adventures, but I realize I haven't added much to this blog in the last couple of months.  The house is mostly finished, but we've been working on little projects here and there.  Jas finished the downstairs, and now we have a large storage room with built-in shelves, a classroom for the kids and I to use for our homeschool, a room for Jas to have all his r/c stuff in, and the rest of the basement is a big open playroom.  It's divided up into an arts and crafts area (with easels, storage bins full of supplies, and a big craft table), a train area (with the kids' train table and massive Geotrax train set laid out), and plenty of room for all their other big toys.  As the saying goes, there's a place for everything, and everything in its place, and I am LOVING that! :)

Jas has also been busy caulking the crown moulding that he and Matt put up, so now there's no gaps and it looks finished and perfect.  What a difference crown moulding makes in a house.  About a month ago we added gutters to the house, and that was a nice day-long project.  Jas also installed storm doors on the front and back doors, which has definitely come in handy with all the storms and rain we've had lately. 

As soon as the grass comes in, we'll be installing a patio out back, redoing the stairs to the back door (the ones pictured above are temporary), and adding a landing and more permanent steps to the front door as well.  We also have to build a storage building for all the outdoor toys, bikes, and the lawnmower.  And we have plenty of landscaping to do:  adding flower beds, planting, mulching, you name it. :)

I apologize for the lack of step-by-step photos and descriptions, but since I've been the one helping Jason do the projects, I couldn't take pictures and help him at the same time.  And he really didn't want me just sitting there with the camera instead of helping out. :) 

However, as soon as the grass comes in enough so that we can start working outside, I promise to have more step-by-step photos.  Until then . . .

Little Sprouts

**I posted this on the family blog as well, so if you've seen it there you can skip this post! :)

About three weeks ago, we planted grass.  Our yard was in desperate need, as you know, of a lawn.  And after deciding on a type of grass seed (good old Kentucky 31), and a place to purchase it (Buchheit's in Jackson had it at the best price), we devoted a weekend to gettin' it done.

First up was to make many thousands of trips through the yard with various tractors and implements.  Jason spent the better part of two weeks (in the evenings after supper) working the ground up.  There was dirt to push up around the house, and then blade the yard so that everything sloped nicely.  Then he "fluffed" the dirt, so that it had lots of air in it and wasn't compacted. 

On Friday (April 16, for those of you keeping score), we purchased 300 lbs. of grass seed from  Buchheit's.  Yes, that's a lot of seed, but we had almost an acre to plant.  All the info we were given said that was how much to purchase, so we loaded the Explorer down with 6 50lb. bags and headed home.

Saturday morning's first order of business was to go to Rental Land and pick up a straw blower.  We decided to rent it for "a day", instead of four hours, because we could keep it for the whole weekend (as long as Jas had it back by 8 a.m. Monday).  It was less than $100, and definitely worth the money, especially with a yard the size of ours.  We stopped by Doug Gosche's on the way home to get some straw bales (14 of them, to be exact). 

Jason's dad had a pull-behind fertilizer/grass seed spreader which we hooked up to the four wheeler.  Jas had me drive it across the yard, while he followed along beside, making sure we were getting proper coverage.  We weren't.  So he set the spreader to "wide open", and I made quite a few passes across the front, but it seemed like we were hardly dropping any seed.  Eventually Jason took over, and went back and forth across the yard for another hour, but we still hadn't used half a bag of seed!  I suggested getting the walk-behind spreader, and Jas agreed.  He tried it out, and ended up seeding the entire yard (front, back, and side) in under half an hour!  So much for the pull-behind spreader being faster. :)  After that, we had to cover everything with straw.  I drove the truck, Connor rode with me, and Jas operated the blower.  He broke the straw bales into chunks, and then fed those chunks into the blower, which shot them out at a high rate of speed.  It was an awesome sight!  I made one pass through the front yard, and then another through the back yard after supper. 

On Sunday, I snapped these shots of the newly-strawed yard. 

We started watering Sunday, and it took almost an entire day to get the yard watered once!  Fortunately, by the end of the week it was raining, so we were lucky.

And in less than a week, we had little sprouts popping up!  Every day, we had more and more.  And every day, our yard looks a little greener.

Pretty awesome, isn't it?  And that's only three weeks worth.  Just think what it will look like in another three weeks!

Weekend Update

But not the SNL version! :)  This weekend my nephew Matt came out to help Jas put the crown moulding up in the master bath.  The bathroom is huge (bigger than the kids' rooms -- a fact I try not to point out to them!) with a lot of corners, so we figured it would take most of the day.  Wrong!  By lunchtime they had most of it done, with only a few pieces to go after we ate.  Matt left around 1:30, and then Jas and I started on Anna's room.  By 3:30 we had both kids' rooms finished, and now all that's left is the laundry room.  But dear Matt plans to come back out next Saturday and help finish it out.

This week Jas plans to work on building the first of the rooms in the basement.  After much planning we have decided to tackle the storage room first, and get all our stuff stored away.  After that, we can tackle building the classroom for the kids and I, as well as Jason's hobby/RC room. 

I'll do my best to post step-by-step photos of the storage room construction this week.  So stay tuned! :)

House Update aka Why Has This Blog Been Neglected?

If you didn't know this already, we have been without internet at our new house up until this past weekend.  So the blog posts have been few and far between.  So I'm here to update everyone on what we've accomplished in the last couple of weeks. 

Saturday, January 30 was spent on crown moulding.  Jas, with the wonderful help of my nephew Matt, got the crown up in the "main area" of the house.  (In other words, the living room/kitchen/dining room/hallway.)  They worked most of the day, and it was definitely slow going.  It's not that putting up crown is incredibly complicated, it's just very tedious and time-consuming.  Every piece ends up being measured and cut and trimmed several times, and so it takes awhile to get it done. 

While they worked on that, I began painting the master bathroom.  We chose Olympic Premium in Glazed Pears.  It's a very soft creamy color, and is much lighter than the other colors we've chosen.  But it looks very nice in the bathroom.

Jas helped me finish it up after he took Matt home, and we even did the ceiling since the color was so light.  We moved onto the kids' bathroom after that, and finished it up after supper.  A long day, but we definitely got a lot done!

Sunday we worked on our bedroom.  We used Valspar's Soft Camel (Susie had an extra gallon that she hadn't used.).  Amazingly, the color almost matched the Vanilla Brandy in the living room. 

Now all that was left was the laundry room, which we worked on Monday night.  I taped everything off and prepped the laundry room Monday afternoon, and then after supper we painted.  Now all the rooms are officially done. 

We still have crown to put up in all three bedrooms, plus the master bath and the laundry room.  Hopefully we can get those rooms knocked out in the next couple of weeks.  We've been working on plans for the rooms downstairs, and I want to get to those as soon as possible.  But the crown needs to come first. 

So that's what we've been up to.  Now that we have internet at home again, I'll definitely be able to post more updates.  And hopefully some photos! :)