we made it!

goodbye old house...

we made it to our new house! well, not quite everything, but we do have all of the things needed to stay there and we've been able to spend the last 5 nights there and it has been great.

baby girl's nursery is almost done and the boys love their new room. we've been putting them down to sleep separately and then transferring ethan into his bed once miles is asleep, so they start the night in separate beds, but who knows how they wake up. miles has taken very well to his big boy bed for night time. we still have a crib for naps since he tends to play for a while before going to sleep. even dorothy the fish likes her new home in our kitchen.

we still have stuff left in the old house that we are slowly transferring over, but it has been a good move overall. here are a few pics from the past week (they will also be part of my week in the life project so they are kind of a random assortment of pics). i am sure i will have more to share when the house actually gets decorated and put together, but who knows when that will be!

moving day!

it is finally here!

i am excited, but in a way i am a little sad.

this was the house i lived in when i became a mom. the house i brought ethan and miles home to. the house where i nursed in the middle of the night while looking out the window to see who else was up at 4AM...more people than you would think. :)

this was the first house lance and i really lived in together after we got married. this was the house that lance came home to after being in iraq for 8 months. this was the first house that really felt like "our" home.

there are so many memories here. i know that we'll make more memories in the new house and i can't wait to bring baby girl home to her new room. it is just a little bit harder than i thought it would be to spend the official last night in our house.

kind of bittersweet.

but i am excited for everything new house has in store. i love that the boys will be officially sharing a room. i love that i was able to decorate a room especially for baby girl. and i love that the boys will be able to run across the yard to grandmother and grandfather's house. i'm especially excited about our new fridge...gotta have my priorities straight!

construction update: week eight

LOTS has changed in the past (almost) 3 weeks! it really looks like a house now! it should be ready in the next week and i am getting really excited. the pics below are from last week, so things have changed even more since these were taken...

kitchen and breakfast area pics:

tile backsplash in the kitchen...i LOVE it! i searched around forever to find a cheap enough alternative to the 1x1 mosaics and luckily this arrived at one of our local building supply stores right before we began construction.

baby girl's room! the blue is absolutely perfect!

main hallway in the house. i love the feeling of a kind of gallery-type walkway through the house. lance always hates when there is wasted space on plans (hallways especially) but i just really like the open feeling this creates.


one of my favorite features! thanks to lance, who is the king of ebay buying, over the course of a month he found enough of these digital dimmers to put in the house. i love, love, love them! you can set them to certain levels and with one touch of the button they'll come on to that level and if you hit them twice they come on full. a few of them even have a remote. i've already spent a bunch of time playing with them. maybe they are a bit over the top, but oh well!

on the schedule for this week...

1. trim 2 - this includes installing door hardware, cabinet hardware and bathroom hardware.

2. delivery of our appliances! CANNOT wait for the new fridge!

3. sheetrock and paint touch-ups

4. final grade, landscaping and sprinkler system install

5. trim 3 - install specialty items like curtain rods and non built-in shelving

6. carpet!!!

7. polishing of the stained concrete floors

8. final clean-ups

8. install shower doors in master bath

and hopefully after all this (and any other punchlist items) we'll be able to have a final inspection and be move-in ready by sometime next week! fingers crossed!

happy earth day: our container garden

i made the leap and am trying to grow some of our own food this year. i decided to do a container garder to keep it small and also since we are moving in a few weeks, easily transportable. i'm not normally the best with plants, so i didn't start off with much...and i know it won't get any easier once baby #3 arrives in june.

we're doing strawberries, tomatoes, basil and cilantro right now. maybe, maybe i'll add a few things later on in the season, but we'll see. ethan has been very excited about the one strawberry we have right now and as soon as it is ready to be picked, i am going to let him do it. he goes out and checks the plants every morning before we get in the car.

i have great plans of putting the compost from the worm box onto the plants...i just haven't worked up the courage to get it out of the worm box yet. it isn't bad smelling (just smells like damp dirty really) and is actually doing well and already producing good compost...i am just not excited about sifting through the worms to get it. maybe that needs to be a job for lance and the boys.

hand prints!

it has been a while since my last post. things have been so busy between packing up our old house, a doctor visit and working on the new house.

today they poured the driveways and walks at our house. we tried some rolled concrete (similar to stamped concrete, you just use a large roller to get a texture when the concrete is wet rather than stamps) on the front drive. first time we have done this and i am eager to see how it looks tomorrow when it is dried.

we had a little pad beside the garage, where the HVAC units will go, and the boys got to put their hand prints down. so cute! they both did well, though ethan immediately said, "my hand is dirty" and wanted to get clean as soon as possible. so glad lance had us come over so we could do that.

construction update: week five

the house is moving along very quickly. lance has been doing a great job with the scheduling and making sure everything is running as smoothly as it can. we are looking at an early to mid-may move in date if all stays on schedule. ahhh, a couple of weeks to relax before baby girl arrives, what we will do with ourselves? :)

progress pictures:
living room view from the kitchen - there will be built-in bookcases with cabinets below on either side of the fireplace and a tv space above the fireplace.

standing in the family room looking back towards the kitchen. the window on the right overlooks the backyard.

standing in the main hallway in front of the living room looking back towards the kitchen.

baby girl's room!

the dining room, though for us we will be using it as a playroom. sooooo excited! we haven't had a playroom yet and i am very eager to have all of the toys stored somewhere other than our living room.

standing in the main kitchen work area looking towards the breakfast area and then the family room behind.

upcoming construction will include wall texture (should be happening this weekend), exterior and interior painting, install cabinets and trim, finish minor brick work, install granite and tile and begin HVAC, electrical and plumbing trim-outs (means putting in switches, plate covers, grill covers, light fixtures, plumbing fixtures, etc) it is going to start looking a lot more finished in just a week or two! we will also be pouring the driveway and exterior walks.

i have been busy, busy figuring out furniture layouts, picking out curtain rods and other extra items like that that we'll need to have hung by our trim guy. it is making me think a lot more about things earlier than i thought i'd need to. it is hard to figure out where you want a shelf in a room if you don't know how you are going to lay it out! i guess that is a good thing though so it will be done earlier rather than later...or realistically never getting done.

i've also been in the process of packing up our house. luckily when we put it on the market (a long, long time ago...i think miles was only a few weeks old!) we cleaned out a lot of our extra stuff and put it in storage, where it has been ever since. so i don't have all that stuff to deal with. and it is nice that we are only moving a few miles away and we don't have a buyer on our current house yet so things don't have to be out by any certain date. but i am trying to gather things up that i can so i'll feel a little bit more organized because i know it will only get crazier when baby girl arrives in about 2 months.

construction update: week 3

here is our progress after 3 weeks of building! i am so excited with how well it is moving along. even after sitting on this house plan (and making MANY changes) for over a year, we found there were a few more to be made during framing. i was away visiting my family, so lance and i talked over the phone and we decided to add a bonus room upstairs...there was just too much good attic space to let it go to waste. plus in our current house we have an attic area that we can walk right into and it is wonderful for storing things in, no small, steep ladder to navigate with large boxes, so our the new bonus room is allowing us to do that here as well.

so over the past few weeks, we've finished framing, started plumbing, sheathed the house, started electrical and started roofing the house. unfortunately the windows have been held up, so we have to wait until those arrive before we can start bricking, but that isn't really holding anything up inside since the house has been dried in.

it was very exciting to come back after a week away and see how much got done!

hard to really tell in these pictures, but this is a view into the living room. there will be a large window into the backyard and covered porch.

this is the covered porch. i am sooo excited about it! we have a very small porch right now and i am looking forward to having one big enough to put a table and chairs on. we'll be able to walk out onto it from the kitchen and master bedroom.

this week, lance and i walked the house with the electrician and laid out all our lighting. i forget how much there is to think about with electrical and lighting! and i'll be picking out our light fixtures and plumbing fixtures. i also found a GREAT deal on the 1x1 mosaic tile for the kitchen backsplash...i've really wanted this, but it is just so expensive. one of the local building supply stores just got some in. it isn't glass, but it has a very similar look and doesn't have the crazy price tag!

on schedule for the coming weeks: finish roofing, windows, cornice, framing modifications, continue with plumbing and electrical and install fireplace box. i love the early stages of building since things move so quickly!

construction update: week one

so far, so good!

the weather held up enough for us that we were able to get all the piping placed for the radiant heating. unfortunately it rained on monday (the day we were supposed to pour the slab) but it was clear on tuesday. we rented a pump truck, a first for lance, since it was going to be too muddy to get concrete trucks into the yard. the slab was poured and glass embedded in the kitchen, breakfast area, laundry room and bathrooms. we are waiting on the concrete to dry enough that we can go back and start cutting it down - this is part of the process for the stained concrete.

some pictures of our progress so far:

the first few are of the tubing for the radiant floor (blue) and the cables for the slab (green)

our littlest superintendent checking out the construction:

pouring the slab:

my hubby in his concrete work boots...normally he doesn't stick around for the entire pour (we've used our concrete subs for over 2 years and they are really good) but with all the extra tubing in the slab, he wanted to be there to make sure everything stayed in place.

we're finishing up this week with staining the concrete and up next week is FRAMING!!!

we're on our way...

to a new home! the rain and snow of this winter have not been pleasant to anyone, but it has been incredibly hard for me to stay relaxed about it when we are trying to build our next house before our little girl arrives in june. we've had the lot prepped for over a year, but decided to wait to see if we could sell our house. well, that didn't happen, so we decided we needed to make a move on it before our family expanded to 5. of course once we decided to start the rain and snow came out and didn't ever stop long enough for the ground to dry up enough so we could begin construction. finally this past friday we were able to get started.

i know it doesn't look like much yet, but there are the forms set for the foundation of the new house. i'm very excited about this house. lance and i have put lots of thought into this one and made it a home for us specifically instead of just another spec house we'll live in for a few years. i think i am most excited about the fact that we'll be trying radiant floor heating. the house we stayed at in colorado had it and it is amazing! we're giving stained concrete floors a try too and we've done a few mock-ups that have included broken glass to give it the look of terrazzo floors. and the best part, a room perfectly sized for ethan and miles to share and a brand new nursery to decorate for sweet pea!

i am so excited that we get to start on this journey and am looking forward to seeing how everything comes together.