We finally finished the addition to our house....and then it happened...

6 years into our 9 month project we can finally cross this one off the list.  We completed our punch list and, most importantly, passed the final inspection and received our occupancy permit.  Here are some pictures of the interior of the house.

Ainsley's room

Ainsley's room

Wythe's room

hallway to kid's rooms

dining room

dining room

Living room

kitchen

kitchen and desk area

hallway from kitchen to master suite

library in master suite

library in master suite

master suite

master suite

master suite

master suite

master suite

closet in master suite

closet in master suite

master bath

master bath

master bath

master bath

cabinet in master bath

cabinet in master bath

So, now we have finished the work that consumed our time for years. And five days after we took these pictures we packed up and moved to a different town. But that's a story for another day. 

 (The pictures of my closet and the bathroom cabinet weren't taken until after the move, I assure you they were packed to the gills before!)

'til next time....

This is MY soaking tub....

As many of you know we worked for years on the master bedroom addition.  Literally.  

During those years of hammering, sawdust, sheet-rock mud the one thing I looked forward to was my ginormous soaking tub. I would dream about how nice it was going to be when I could have a nice long soak at the end of a long day. Those dreams have come true. I have enjoyed nice, hot soaks at the end of long days, I even wrote about it here.  Although, I have had some lovely soaks, ones that looked like this,

I have come to realize that the only way to truly enjoy the tub is to take a bath in the middle of the night, when everyone is sleeping and the house is quiet. Taking a bath while the children are awake is a joke. It is the same problem that all moms have, as soon as you enter the bathroom you become the most fascinating person ever.  Even if the kids are happily playing with dad they will lose all interest in him the minute you close that bathroom door. 

Recently I tried to take a bath during the daylight hours on a weekend when the kids were being watched/entertained by dad. Within moments my bathroom had been invaded. 

A few minutes later the traffic picked up. 

This is not what I had in mind when I dreamt about my soaking tub. 

'til next time...

There is nothing like a good soak...

This past winter the new bathroom in our addition was complete.  Even though this gorgegous soaking tub was ready to use it remained dry.  We would walk to our new bathroom and admire the open shower, the tub, the copper sink.  But the bathroom for the most part remained unused. 

For my part, I wanted to wait until we were actually moved into our new bedroom.  I was afraid that if I started using the ammenities we would never finish this project. At this begininng of last month we moved into the long awaited new bedroom.  It was an exhasuting, exciting time. But still we barely used the new bathroom, instead we kept using the old bath.  My excuse was that I had not yet moved my toiletries into the new bath and therefore it made sense to stick with the old bath.   My husband was the first brave one, he started taking showers in the open shower, the fact that we don't have blinds on the window did not bother him.  I admit I was a scaredy-cat, I was worried that after all this work and all this time I might not like our new bathroom.  It was easier to not use it and pretend everything would be wonderful.  

But one day I decided to take a bath, I started running water in the tub.....an hour later my bath was ready.  I then realized a few things;

one - I was going to love this tub

two - if we had to pay for our water by the gallon I would only be able to use the tub once a year.  

three - if we are in a drought there probably will not be enough water in the well to fill the tub

Since that initial soak it has become a guilty pleasure of mine. And since it takes so much water and so long to fill up I figure it would be foolish to take a quick bath, instead, this tub merits a long, long soak. The kind of soak that requires a cup of coffee or tea, or a glass of wine and a good book to read. 

As I told my husband, "this tub eases the pain of the past three years!"

'til next time...

The joy of moving without actually moving...

If you take a vacation but don't go anywhere they call is a "stay-cation" so what to you call it when you move but don't go anywhere? A "stay"?  Instead of "we've moved" would you just say "we've stayed"?

Anyway, that is what we have done.  We packed up our house, moved it out to the garage, drove to Georgia, came home and moved the furniture back in the house.  All the other stuff is still out in the garage.

Seriously.

Yes, we have been home for a few weeks but I still don't have my act together.

Shocking, I know.

I have brought some things back in, essentials like the coffee pot, pots and pans and baking dishes.     My family insists upon eating.....every-single-day. They are very demanding.

When we got home from Georgia our house looked like this.

We really liked how open and big the house felt.  We were tempted to convert to true minimalism and get rid of all our belongings. But after a few days of sitting on the hardwood floors we fell back in love with furniture.

Before we could move stuff back into the house we had a bit of cleaning to do. Everything was coated in dust so we had to wash everything down.  Our dishes had a fine coating of dust too but we have just been cleaning those as we go along. "Pull everything out of kitchen cabinets and pantry, clean all items, clean shelves"  is still on my endless to-do list.  It will probably stay there for awhile.

This is what all the walls looked like.

Ainsley helping to wash walls. She did a good job on the area 36" from the floor.

So, to all the people who have asked "are you excited to be finished with the addition?" the answer is...we are not finished.

Close...but not done.

We have to finish staining the toe molding so that we can install that in the addition. (at some point we will have to quit calling it "the addition")  I still have to move/unpack/find a home for the stuff we hid in the garage. And in order to have the house put back together I have to paint/decorate both kids rooms, paint the dining room (and buy furniture) and paint the living room.

We aren't quite ready to pop open that bottle of champagne....but that day will come!

'til next time...

Hello blog...do you remember me?

For the past half hour I was attempting to "catch up" on my blog, then I realized I was only half way through April and here we are almost midway through June.  I wanted to tell about Easter, my sister's visit, baby chicks, working on the addition, working on the retaining wall, raising chickens, traveling, so many things, so many pictures to share.  I will not be able to document the past two months though I may share a few pictures from these months.

The most exciting news is that we have moved into the addition, into the new master bedroom! The project isn't 100% complete but we are making great progress. We moved the furniture in and now I am working on the despicable task of moving clothes, sorting out junk drawers, sorting/organizing toiletries, it will be so nice to be organized again after these three years of construction chaos!

I am also working on repainting/decorating the living room, dining room, Wythe's room and Ainsley's room. They will soon have their own rooms for the first time, this should be an interesting transition!

my piano room/library

master bedroom

'til next time...

Potty training + house renovation = Stale blog

2 few weeks back my favorite living brother wrote on my Facebook page,  "your blog is stale"

Well, that really made me want to sit down and write.

Not.

Funny how words of encouragement like that just make you want to run for the hills.

But he was right, my blog has been stale.  Frankly, my brain has been stale. I'd like to say that has changed but...I think that would be telling a falsehood.

Anyway, despite my brain being completely dysfunctional I have been potty training two toddlers, working on the house addition, potty training two toddlers,  planning for spring plantings,  potty training two toddlers, and potty training. I'm pretty sure the potty training explains everything that is wrong with my brain. That, however, deserves it's own post and I may or may not write about it, I'm still trying to decide if I want to document the misery.

In other news,  we have continued working in the addition but we have been doing the dreaded task of painting trim. To date we are putting our 3,287th coat of paint on the trim and it still looks the same as it did a few weeks ago. I can't even show pictures of the "progress" because the 3,287th coat looks remarkably like the 1,245th coat looked.
We did finish painting the bookcases and put the books in so that we could get the boxes off of the floor. That was an encouraging sight because the room starts to look "lived in".
Probably the biggest project I accomplished was cleaning out the closet in the addition.  That was kind of like my own Day of Reckoning. For weeks, or months, I have been shoving everything into that closet. Outgrown clothes, tools, paint buckets, gifts, everything that doesn't fit or have a place in our house. And, I know of at least one time that I just grabbed everything off the floor and stuffed it in that closet before company came over. I knew that one day I would have to clean out this closet of shame. The good news is I got a slight grace period on my day of reckoning, I got to move a lot of the stuff out to the office. That will be my next room of shame to deal with. But at least the closet is cleaned out and we can work on  installing the shelves and racks.

Just to humiliate myself I'll show you a before picture,

...and after a very long day,

Here's to stale blogs!

'til next time...

Addition update - progress has been made

I was looking at my blog today and realized that I haven't updated about the progress on the addition.  The best part is, there is actually progress to report.

At the end of November we moved the bookcases to their new home, you can read about that here.  But since that post we have installed the crown molding around the top and painted the bookcases.  Like everything else around here it is not quite finished so I can't take it off the list but it is still progress.

                               

We have also been working on the outside as well. Our property is very sloped and we had to dig into the hill when we started building the addition.  The long range plan was to build retaining walls once the addition was completed. However, we have been getting so much water under the house every time it rains that we had to move forward with that project. Last month we had a company come in and start digging the footers for the retaining wall.  This was a very effective way of entertaining our toddlers, you can read about that here.

This is what our yard looked like behind the addition. Notice the logs?  I call those "redneck retaining walls", they didn't really work.

After a day of digging we had lots of dirt piles.  A little boy's dream come true.

Then after days and days and days of work, we have the first level of wall up, 110 feet of concrete block.  Now Peter is digging back 8 feet to make room for the second level.

Basically, we are building our own Great Wall of China.  It is possible that the Great Wall of Rightmyer may take almost as long to construct as the China version. Once all the block walls are up we still have to clad all of the walls with brick. Peter and I were discussing how many bricks we need for the first level of wall. We discovered we can't count that high. It is somewhat discouraging to realize you will have to lay more bricks than you can count. However, bricks are pretty small, not too heavy, I see no reason why Wythe and Ainsley cannot start their masonry training soon.

Now for the big news.....the bathroom!  After months of trying to pick tile, pick paint colors, changing tile, changing paint colors, making up my mind, changing my mind....it is finished.  I can no longer change my mind on the tile or the layout of the tile.  I could change my mind about the paint color but I think I am content to let  that be.  This bathroom has been a story unto itself.  I think to do it justice I will need to write a post only about the bathroom, so you may be hearing more about that later. But for now, here is the picture of the bathroom prior to tile/paint/etc. 

And here it is painted and tiled. We are still waiting for the shower head and I need to do some touch up work, another coat of stain on the cabinets, hang the window curtain, things like that.  But this is pretty much what it is going to look like.

It is so exciting to see things finally coming together, perhaps this will motivate me to finish painting the rest of the addition!

'til next time...

New Year's Resolutions, working on the house, and so on and so forth...

We rang in the New Year the way we spend most 11:59 P.M.'s.....snoring peacefully away.

There was a time a few years ago that we would have been partying, or having some neighbors over, or watching the ball drop, but those days are temporarily on hold.  Our kids are usually in bed by 8 o'clock.  That means 4 long hours of trying to stay awake to welcome 2012.  Just wasn't gonna happen this year.

We did however, have a weekend that  pretty much summed up our entire year.   We worked on the addition. We painted, sanded drywall, promised ourselves that "this time next year we will be enjoying this space in our house and will have forgotten how many hours we worked on it".....it seems like we have said that before.

But we did make good progress. I finally picked out a paint color for our new bathroom. I know that doesn't sound impressive but it really was quite the accomplishment. Did you know there are approximately 64,000 shades of green at Home Depot and Lowe's?  I know because I have bought a sample of each one of them, painted a test patch on my wall, primed over it and gone back to the store for more.  I finally chose a color that I really don't like, in fact it almost makes my want to throw up a little in my mouth, but I made a decision, so that it good.

We finally broke down and hired "Professionals" to tile the bathroom.  Something about being almost 3 years into a 6 month project just wasn't setting well with us.  The are supposed to start the tile this week, that is the main reason we were motivated to work hard vs sitting around drinking champagne.  Although, had we heard a 'pop' in the distance we would have gladly set down our paint brushes and followed the bubbly.

Since I put "New Year's Resolutions" in the title I should probably address that subject, as distasteful as it may be.  Basically, I'm still working on those, I kind of allow myself the whole month of January to let the resolutions fully develop.  I do know what #1 is.

#!.  Finish the dang-blasted addition project.

That resolution has actually been number one for the past few years, but this year I switched it up a little and added the "dang-blasted".  I hate to jinx anything but I'm feeling good about this one.

I usually have about ten resolutions and this year I'm really trying to have better resolutions and stay away from all the standard ones you hear about.  I used to always resolve to 1. lose weight  2. drink less alcohol  3. drink more water  4. improve relationships with various people, etc., etc., etc.  My failure rate was high, thus my happiness and confidence was low.  So, I took charge of the situation and resolved to make better resolutions, resolve to not do certain things throughout the year.  "I resolve to: 1. not get addicted to nicotine  2. not rob a bank  3. not gain more than 20 pounds (unless pregnant)  4. not get drunk before 5pm (except on weekends or holidays).  Things like that, you get the picture.  I can honestly say my success rate has been high.  But this year I'm really trying to raise the bar a little.  So bear with me as I cogitate a bit.  If I come up with more resolutions that are sharable then by all means, I will do so.

Happy New Year!  Bring it on 2012!

'til next time...

Addition update - Christmas parties, Santa bread, picking paint colors and tile....always tile

 My eyes hurt.

I'm tired of looking at paint samples the size of your thumb nail and trying to envision what that will look like in an entire room.

Or looking at a piece of tile and trying to decide what this will look like on the wall.  Should it run in a straight line, run it off-set, on a diagonal? what color grout should we use?  where should the decorative pieces go?  Just when I think I have it figured out I find out that I need to change it.  I have redrawn the plans for the tile pattern many times but it seems that the basic design has been worked out.

The hours we have spent on this bathroom...I had better get some good soaks in that tub!

This weekend we had some friends over for a Christmas brunch and gift exchange for the kids. Once again we said "this will be the LAST party we hold in the addition!"   It would seem we are starting an annual tradition of saying "this is the last event we will hold in the future master bedroom", maybe this is indeed the last.  Looking at some pictures that were posted on Facebook I realized that it looked as though the kids were opening their presents on the diaper aisle at Walmart.

All those boxes are full of books from the bookcase that we just moved.  Oh well,  it could have been worse, the other boxes we had were all liquor boxes.  Better if the pictures look like we are holding a kids party on the diaper aisle rather than the liquor store.

"Santa bread"

'til next time...