Old Home Summer Tour!

Thursday, July 3, 2014

We are officially moved out! Everything went as smooth as can be on settlement day so on Friday, June 27th, Emma's 5th Birthday, we officially became new home owners!

Because the house was as clean as can be for pictures for going on the market, I thought I would post them here as a house tour of our old home. So here we go!

I always thought out home was pretty cute. It definitely needed a new coat of paint on the shutters but we left that up to the new home owners. We didn't do anything big to the front outside of adding the stones around the garden, maybe making a wreath or two and spray painting the mailbox to give it a little freshening up.


Coming in the front door, there was the dining room on the right, playroom on the left and a long hallway back towards the kitchen. We ended up getting new flooring this winter, and added the board and batten in the hallway a few years ago. I still LOVED it and we used the hooks all the time for all the kids stuff. We usually had a bench right below the hooks that housed all the kids shoes and hats and gloves, etc, which worked great! We painted all of the trim and doors a bright white (Frost by Behr) and replaced all the super sweet gold door handles with some more modern ones through the entire house.


Here's the kids playroom, basically in the best shape that it ever could be in. It was NEVER like this pre-market believe me. Here we painted a few times, made some DIY artwork for the kids after we changed if from a playroom (originally had it as a living room) but didn't really make any major changes to this room.


We added the door casings a little while back. I never did get around to hanging anything above the bench on the left. Oh well!


The dining room was one of the first things we repainted when our style started to change. This was one color that I still loved the day we moved out. We added crown molding, painted the ceiling, added door casings, and a new chandelier.


Behind the playroom was our little family room, which worked out great. In here, we added the ceiling fan, painted a few times, had some curtains made (by my mom) and added molding and a mantle to the fireplace.



The family room then connected to the eat in kitchen, which was probably one of our favorite places. I had big plans to paint the cabinets white, and add molding to the top, but seemed like a lot of work to turn around and sell. My mom made us some valences, we added hardware to the cabinets, installed new flooring, painted and updated the kitchen faucet.





Upstairs was three bedrooms and two full baths. Our master bedroom was always the last to get updated and was probably the worst looking room in the house (update wise). My mother in law flew in and painted this baby in a day which made a world of difference. We added the ceiling fan and that was about it!



In the master bath, we painted, removed the builders standard light above the sink and added two new lights and mirrors, added tiles behind the mirrors (thanks to my MIL again on that one) and painted the cabinets and ceiling.


We also added a small line of the same tile around our tub.


After we redid Emma's room when she got her big girl room, I always loved the color combination but I think never really did "finish" her room. I would have loved to have added crown molding, paint her ceiling, add new curtains and some more fun decor, but overall, loved her room. We did all the painting and added the molding as one of the very first DIY projects.


Jack's room was one of my favorite places in the house. I have loved the stripes since the day he got them but truly loved the orange and blue decor we added for staging. The rug used to be in our playroom but matched perfectly (probably wrong size though). The life vest was from my Dad's garage along with one of his oars. The pictures were a DIY PowerPoint addition and my mom added the orange stripe to his bed-skirt. On the other side of the wall that you can't see, are Jack's great-grandfather and great-grandmother's fishing rods hanging over his dresser.


The kids bathroom was another one that we pretty much didn't touch until we went on the market. We really didn't do anything in here outside of paint the ceiling and the walls white just to clean things up.


So there you have it! More to come on what our new house looks like now that we are all moved in!

Work Hard & Play Hard

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Over the past nine months, we sure have had our share of working hard. Whether it was working hard to just get through a tough day, or staying late at night at work to complete a project, or working hard on our house to get that baby on the market and sold...it's been a lot of hard work. But, just as I mentioned in my post last week, you have to remember to have some fun. So even though we worked hard, we sure did our best to play hard too.

You have already seen some of the fun we had at Halloween and getting our Christmas tree here, but there was so much more that has happened that you didn't see over the past nine months that it would be hard to write about it all. So in the meantime, here's a little summary through pictures, of how much fun we have had lately. There have been a lot of smiles that I couldn't have done without.

Papa came to visit for Christmas, and we all had a blast. By the end of his visit, Papa had Emma's new princess game down pat!


The kids ripped right through Christmas presents like usual...



...and we celebrated Birthdays with the big cousins...


...and had Wacky Wednesday's at school.


When we were snowed in for five days straight, we had Valentine's Day parties in the dining room...


...and despite Mommy's chemo brain and her inability to select the correct size mattress and box spring initially, we got big boy beds for big boys who were about to turn three.


We had Mommy/Daughter breakfast dates filled with chocolate chip pancakes and snuggles...


...and we celebrated The Squishy turning three with one sweet Ninja Turtle Birthday party.




 We had a blast dying Easter eggs...


...and going Easter egg hunting in the back yard with a Popcorn bucket...


...and an insulated lunch bag.


We made silly faces at Mommy when she was trying to take a nice picture of us...


 ...but then eventually we kind of sat still.


We played in our first ever season of soccer...


...but mostly just played with the grass.


Sometimes we would kick the ball, but most of the time it was the child that wasn't actually playing in the game...


...and the one that was playing in the game, was usually just taking it all in.


 We had lots of fun on Mother's Day playing in our swimming pool....


 ...and gave Mommy some sweet poses for pictures.



We went to the carnival when it came to town and we photo-bombed our big sister...


...and we had a great Memorial Day cookout at Mimi and Pop's house, complete with swimming and fishing...




...and of course filled with some more super sweet poses by The Squishy.



We celebrated Emma Kathryn as she graduated pre-school....




 ...and had one sweet cookout of our own, complete with slip-n-slide.


We celebrated Father's Day by running a muck in Raven's Stadium...



...sometimes getting stuck in the stands...


 ...but mostly running a muck.



And that pretty much brings us to today!

So as you can see, despite everything going on, our smiles sure outnumbered our frowns.
 
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