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So Long, Farewell

Before you get too worried because of the title of this blog post, I will clarify. I’m not saying goodbye to this blog. I’m just saying goodbye to our old house. This will be the last post about it and then I will move on to all of the crazy happenings at the new house. I know it’s been forever since I posted and you all are probably ready for updates about the new house but I figured I needed one last post for record keeping sake. One more photo tour to show you all what it looked like before we started packing up and putting things in boxes. I took these photos right before our realtor came and took photos so the house is all picked up and sparkling clean. Pretty much anyway. Except for the basement. I think I cleaned it up a bit more after these photos were taken but it was never perfect. I mean, it’s a basement!! It’s supposed to be messy! Anyhoo… are you ready for picture overload?! Because that is what you are about to get!

Oh, the outside. There were so many ideas I had that I never did. And that’s okay, maybe the new owners will do them. We did refresh the mulch for the sale and it looked so nice. Amazing what a small thing like that does! It helps that it was a pretty time of year too. Plus, I bought some plants for the porch and the topiaries for the garage and I loved how they looked. I have since killed all of the potted plants because I have been too busy to take care of them. Sad day.

We finally got a new mailbox post. Our previous one was always leaning. One of the many projects we wished we had done ages ago! I tried as hard as I could to make it look good, but we finally just realized a new set was the way to go.

The back of the house. Look at my sparkling windows!! We did a ton of touch up painting on the outside and it was a lot of time and effort but it made it look so nice. It was worth it :)

Speaking of windows… remember my window project? Well, I finished it. It was a big job (I had been working on it since May!!) and I never want to do it again! After a few burns from the heat gun and cuts from the scraper I suppose they were worth it because they looked so nice when they were all done.

More of the backyard. You can see my little garden on the left side. It was sad to leave it because it was still producing. Hopefully the new owners got to enjoy it for a bit.

Another backyard view. The roof on the birdhouse had disintegrated and so Jason took the time to make a new roof and now it’s cute again.

Upon entering the house through the front door, this is what you would have seen. Kitchen ahead, stairs to the right, living room to the left, cat on the floor. The cat likes to follow me around while I take photos :)

Facing the front door in the entry. I loved the blue door. It was such a dark color that you couldn’t always tell it was blue. Sometimes it looked black. And actually, it started as white, then it became black, and it finished as being blue. So fun.

The living room and the gallery wall. I took most of the gallery wall with me because I still like it and I have just the perfect spot for it :) Plus, it took me a long time to collect all of the frames, I want to enjoy it a bit longer!!

We sold almost everything. Literally. I thought that it would be hard to see it go but it was actually very freeing. I only kept a couple of things from this room. I would have liked to have kept more but they wouldn’t fit in our new tiny house. And that’s okay; new treasures will be found for the new house. If you would like to see the progression of this room, check it out here.

The dining room. The table is definitely too big for our new house so I worked on some ideas with my Dad as to how we can make it smaller and work for our new space since I still love it so much.

I don’t know if you remember the pendant light fixture we had in this room previously but I wanted to take it with us for our new house so I quickly had Jason switch it out for me with this new (old) chandelier pictured above. It actually looked super cute in there and I kind of wanted to take that one with me too :) It was a chandelier that I found on the side of the road and brought it home, sprainted it white, and hung it up. So cute. And even farther back, does anyone remember the red chandelier that I had longer ago? It’s fun to see the changes. Check out the progression post to see all the changes made to this room, here.

Oh how I loved my kitchen. I really will miss this room. And all of its space! The sunny breakfast nook! And pull outs! The list goes on… If you want to see the progression of this room check out the posts here and here.

If you go up the stairs and look down, you will see the entryway. It went through several colors. Four colors to be exact. At one point it was bright red. Can you believe it?!

The famous stairway. When I posted about drawing on my walls I couldn’t believe how much traffic I got. And I still get comments about it at times. I wonder if the new owners will keep it…

I will also be missing my craft room :)

I will have to tell you about my chalkboard project in another post…

What a wonderful room it had been for me. A lot of stuff that showed up on the blog happened in this room.

On the other side of the hallway, my studio. This is where I did all of my work for Every Jot & Tittle (which is currently put on hold for the foreseeable future). I started out with my studio in the basement and moved up here last year. You can read some more about it in an old post here.

You’ve already seen the finished guest bathroom but I had to include it in the tour, right?! Plus this room has seen some changes as well. It used to be yellow. I loved it at first but ultimately, I like the mellowness of the gray better. I guess yellow isn’t so mellow now is it? At least not as mellow as gray. Haha, I’m a dork :)

The guest bath has two rooms joined by a doorway with no door. The shower and commode are in the second half. It was a nice big bathroom and I always loved that it was all white.

The guest bedroom. It has seen a bunch of changes along with the rest of the house. You can see some of them, here.

The other side of the guest room. I had to get rid of most of the big furniture. It was very sad because I loved it all.

I loved our bedroom with the dark walls. I really doubt the drawing will last on the wall for the new owners though. They have two boys and one of them will occupy this room. The drawing is a bit on the girly side.

In the new house our bedroom will have the same duvet cover but the room will have a different feel. I’m really excited about it. Again, as seen in the photo above, the cat likes to make her presence in our house known.

The other side of the master bedroom that didn’t get photographed very often. At one point I moved the colorful dresser from the guest bedroom into our room for more clothing storage. Now that feels like a joke to me because I had two closets and didn’t think it was enough and now we just have one itty bitty closet. I sold or gave away over half of my clothes for this new venture of ours. That was almost harder than getting rid of furniture!

Again, the master bath. I wish I would have painted that cabinet ages ago. But since it was wood for so long, I will always have that in my memory versus this new white (better) version.

Now moving downstairs… This is the view from the entryway looking downstairs. These stairs are located right next to the stairway leading upstairs.

This is a long narrow room with lots of doorways so it’s kind of hard to arrange. We never, ever sat in this chair. It was kind of off by itself.

Does anyone spy a kitty in this photo?!

We ended up moving our router and wireless box before we sold the house and it looked so much better. Another project I wished we had done years ago because it literally took 30 minutes to relocate it. Crazy…

I love this little black cabinet that a friend made for me. It fit so perfectly in that space. You can read a little more about it here.

The other side of the family room and a view of the fireplace. We never once used our fireplace. Can you believe that?! And see the t.v.? It is no more. We got sold all of our tv’s in the move. We didn’t ever have cable and we never watched regular t.v. Then, we aren’t even sure why, we both became more or less disinterested in movies as well. So our t.v. sat unwatched for months at a time. It seemed like a good idea to get rid of it. And neither one of us regret it.

Another angle. I carefully measured each and every piece of furniture that we had and made a small scale replica of everything so I could see how furniture would fit in our tiny house. No couches for me. Only a loveseat will work so I sold both couches we had. Whew! It’s a lot of work to downsize!

Another piece of furniture that has made its home with another family is the ottoman. It has gone through several different fabrics since we made it a few years ago. You can read about how we made it here.

On to the basement. The disaster zone! The basement is a rectangle shape but divided to create an office so the part that is unfinished makes an L shape. This is where we stored our stuff. You know, like paint cans and tools and such. Just stuff. Everybody has it, right?

This other part of our basement was our workout room. We are really missing our workout room. We faithfully workout everyday except for Sundays and so it gets a lot of use. But we have a plan for the new house and so far, it is working out (haha, pun intended!).

And yet another corner of the basement. I’m pretty sure that much of this space has yet to make an appearance on the blog even after 6.5 years of living here. This just might be its debut.

Jason’s office or as I like to call it, the library. This room is pretty much unchanged since I fixed it up last year as a surprise to Jason while he was out of town (read all about it: Before, 1, 2 3& 4, 5, 6, 7).

The other side of the library. We loved this room. It was very cozy. Especially during bad storms. We spent some time down here during tornado season :)

And the only other room to show is the laundry room which I just did a whole post about recently so I will just post one little photo to complete the tour. For those wondering, the laundry room is on the same level as the family room.

I just realized that I never took photos of the garage. Silly me! Not that it is very interesting to see but it is part of the house. That is another thing we really miss. We had never had a garage before and we got used to it and loved parking our car in there. Now that we don’t have one again, we’re scheming how we could someday add one on.

Well old friend, you have been a good house to us and we loved the years we spent there. And now it’s time to say so long, farewell…

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Tagged: Our House

The Completed Laundry Room

I still have a couple of posts that I would like to show you to wrap up our previous house before I move onto the new house. Seriously, with all of the work we have been putting in, the posts are just piling up. Now if I just had time to write them and edit/upload photos we would be in good shape. But I like to think that one of these days we will be back to normal and I can get all caught up!

When I was trying to figure out where to even start, I realized that I never post photos of the completed laundry room so I thought I would show them today. I showed you the progress of the laundry room (#1, #2, #3, and #4) back in January and then I left you hanging and moved onto other things. Silly me, I get easily sidetracked. So without further adieu; the room in which we wash our clothes:

If you opened the door to the room, this is what you would see. The floors are concrete and so I painted them with porch paint in black. The walls I painted Sherwin Williams Creamy. The runners (there are two of them together) are from Target and they were super cheap, I think $15 each but I got them on sale for $8 each. Our Target still has them if you are interested in having some for yourself.

The room is actually sort of divided into two rooms, the half bath and the laundry area but there isn’t a door in between. This part is the bathroom and we switched out the regular sized bath sink for a large laundry sink. I really loved having the large sink and I’m definitely going to miss that in our new house. At least we got to enjoy it for 6 months or so :) You can read more about the sink and how I scored it for free, here. The hand towel was from Target and the mirror came from who-knows-where. In other words, I can’t remember, I had it for a long time :) Way back in the day when we bought the house there used to be a recessed medicine cabinet over the sink. But it was ugly and I didn’t think it was necessary to have one in the laundry room so we removed it and I had Jason fill the hole for me. I like having a plain old mirror there better :)

The other side of the bath area. You can see these are tiny little rooms but they served their purpose well. These photos were taken shortly before we moved so I didn’t really have them styled. If we had stayed, I had some plans for curtains and other fun touches. It’s pretty bare bones at this point.

Onto the laundry area. Another unstyled room. I had big plans for it. It was going to be super cute. Oh well :) The rug in front of the washer was brought to me by my Mom from Brazil. The cabinet was made for Jason and I as a wedding present from my older brother 13 years ago. It’s gone through a couple of color changes and I think it looks pretty sharp in black. During painting, I had a mishap with one of the pulls and it broke. I tried to glue it back together but it didn’t work. In the new house, this cabinet will serve a different purpose and I have new pulls for it :)

And the inside of the door in the bath area. You can see close ups of the artwork I had on the walls in this old post.

When we started working on the laundry room in January, we didn’t know we were going to be selling the house. I’m so glad we started working on it then so we could at least enjoy it for the few months we had. And now, the new owners (hopefully) are enjoying it! It sure did come a long way, didn’t it?

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Tagged: Our House

The Club House

Well, the last time I blogged I was still talking about our current house. Soon that will change and it will be called our previous house. That still seems strange to me :)

Today, I would like to tell you about our new adventure and show you photos of our new home. So, the big news first, our current house is under contract and we should be moving at the end of the month! Yay for us! Our house was only on the market for a week before we got an offer. Praise the Lord, I know it was His handiwork! The inspections have been done and everything is moving right along. In the mean time, the house is getting emptier and emptier. Why, you may ask, if we haven’t moved yet? Let me tell you…

I have been feeling for quite some time the need to downsize. At first even I thought it was a crazy idea. We LOVE our house. Why would we want to move? There are actually many other factors that were a part of our decision but it would make for a really long blog post so that is just the basic idea. We want to downsize and have less to take care of. Less maintenance, less cleaning. So, for this whole year I have been praying about it. And along the way, Jason caught the vision too. At first, we were really thinking that it would happen sometime next year. After we finished some of the projects we started (like my windows) and after we fixed some things that needed to be fixed. But then, the right house came along and it put everything onto the fast track.

We found our new house on a whim. But it struck a chord with us and even though we were nowhere near ready to move we decided to go look at it. We found out that it was a HUD home and there was only a week to place a bid on it. A week. Crazy. But we prayed about it. And we really felt like we were supposed to do all that we could to get this house. Let me tell you, it seriously was a miracle that we even got the bid! We closed on the house quickly and have already owned it for about a month. Miracle number one, placing a bid on the new home… done. Miracle number two, having our bid accepted because we put in a low offer… done. Miracle number three, putting our house on the market and selling it… done. Isn’t God amazing?!

So that accounts for all the frenzy of crazy work to put our house on the market. We had already bought the new house and we still needed to list ours. Remember how I said we were giving ourselves a year to get everything done before we even thought of selling? Ya, well, we ended up doing it all in less than two weeks. Two weeks of waking up at 6 am and working until midnight every day. But it was worth it!

Okay, so now is where it really gets crazy. At least I’m pretty sure most of you will think we are just a bit crazy. But first I would like to say that we are super thrilled and we can’t wait to see how God will use this new home in our lives. Remember I said we are downsizing? Our current home is about 2100 square feet plus an unfinished basement plus a two car garage. We have 4 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, and office, yada, yada, yada. We have some space. Our new home is 800 square feet (794 to be exact). For reals. Two bedrooms, one bath, no garage. At first I wasn’t sure I could do it. I mean, that’s pretty small. But it was confirmed to us in so many ways that now I can’t imagine continuing to live where we currently do. Not that there is anything wrong with living how we do now, it’s just that this is the next step for us and it feels right. I know there will be challenges, but we are ready to take them on!

Well, are you ready for a tour?! Let’s go!!

I actually forgot to take a photo of the outside so I had to snag this one off the internet. It’s a super cute little cottage. A little spiffing up and the outside will be just peachy. I will be doing some painting outside and we will be adding some grass and some more landscaping :)

When you walk in the front door, you enter into the living room. This is the right side of the room. There are so many things I’m going to do to this little house. I can’t wait!!

This is still in the living room, facing the left side. You can see the kitchen, dining room, and living room all flow together. Because the house is so small, I like it that way. It feels larger than it would if there were walls everywhere.

The kitchen. Again, lots of plans for this space! And do you see all of the windows? I am in love! I took these photos before we had even placed a bid on the house. My parents and our realtor were there with us.

This is just off the kitchen (where my Dad, in the red shirt, was standing in the previous photo). The refrigerator is in this little space and we are going to get a counter depth fridge so it doesn’t stick out. I love this little mud room. Tiny but oh, so cute!

Standing in the kitchen, facing the living room. I love the floors.

Off to the bedrooms. More wood floors that I love. Both bedrooms are exactly the same size. We have decided to use the bedroom on the right for us because of the closet…

This closet has bi-fold doors. It’s a tiny closet, I want as much access to it as I can get!

In the second bedroom, there is just a standard door which makes the closet harder to use. Someday we would really like to have built in closets to maximize our space.

This is the tiny little hallway. I’m standing in the first bedroom, looking toward the second. The bathroom is on the right.

The bathroom. Again, big plans for this space, I can’t wait to see it come together!

Behind the door in the other photo is the bath cabinet. Not too convenient. Don’t worry, we have big plans here too :)

The only other part you didn’t get to see is there is an unfinished basement. It’s really tiny, pretty much the cutest little basement ever :) It has hookups for a washer and dryer and some space for storage. But, there was no power on when we took these photos and it’s pretty hard to take a photo in a basement with no light.

That completes our tour! What do you think? We love our little Club house :) Why do we call it our Club house? Because it’s on Club drive and because it’s about the size of a club house. Haha!

Renovations have already started and now it looks a lot worse than when we bought it. But soon, it will look much better. We are thrilled.

Because our new home is so small, I am letting go of over half of what we own. Seriously. At first I thought it would be really hard (like when I threw away almost all of my scrapbooks) but actually, it’s been very freeing. To get rid of stuff and not have so much has been good for me. I’m very thankful!

Tomorrow and Saturday I am having a garage sale to finish purging our big house. I’m not kidding, when you see what is actually left in the house you would be amazed. Most of the things you have seen in my house are going, going, gone. If you live in the area and want to come to the sale, let me know. Send me an email and I will be happy to send you our address.

There are a few more posts I have to show you to finish up things at the big house and then we will move on to the Club house. A little scary? Yes. But also good :)

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Tagged: Club House, Our House

Changes To The Master Bath

Isn’t painting something so satisfying?! The before and after that new paint makes me giddy just thinking about it. Ya, I’m weird like that but it’s true :) I have been wanting to paint in my master bath since we bought the house 6 years ago and just never got around to it. I don’t know why. There just always seemed to be other projects to do instead. But, as this is how it always goes, since we decided to sell the house, I figured it was about time. And, as with most projects of this nature, I wish I had done it ages ago :)

Most of the woodwork in our house was painted before we moved in. There were only a few exceptions and one of them was the master bath. Seriously, it looks better in photos than it did in real life as the wood needed to be either refinished or painted. Plus, it had kind of an orange cast to it which isn’t really my favorite color of wood. Then, to top it off, the tile in the master has an orange cast as well. It just made the whole bathroom look outdated. But a little bit of paint really transformed it! Sweet! Here is the before:

I couldn’t find a better before so this one will have to do. But you can see what color all of the trim, doors, and window were with the exception of the crown molding. So, I got to work!

It looks like a new cabinet!! I seriously wish I would have done this a long time ago!! Procrastination stinks!!

The linen closet door is now crisp and white too :)

And the window might actually be my favorite part. Everything feels fresh to me now.

Another testimony to the power of paint!! Yay for simple fixes!

The paint I chose is actually not bright white. Since the rest of the room is brown tones I chose Creamy by Sherwin Williams. In the room it looks white but it has more yellow in it so it looks nice with the tile and walls.

Another project down… a million to go :)

Happy weekend!!

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Tagged: Before & After, Our House

New Doors For An Old Cabinet

Before we made the decision to sell our house, I was working on a project with my Dad for our guest bathroom. Then, when we decided to sell, I quickly finished up the project and it looks so nice I wish I would have done it ages ago!

In our guest bathroom, we had an ugly vanity. I mean, nasty. See, the previous owners had taken the old cabinet doors and filled the groves sloppily in with putty and then painted them with glossy paint. It has always bugged me. I always just thought we would need to replace the whole cabinet but then I got to thinking that maybe just the doors would need to be replaced. That’s where my Dad comes in. He was a cabinet maker for 30+ years so he knows what he’s doing and I knew I needed his help :)

Want to see the before? Ya, I bet you do:

Can’t tell so much from a distance but up close is where the fun starts. And the missing knob? Not so great :)

Can you see those lines? They were all groves filled in. Not a very good idea. Plus there are paint drips like you wouldn’t believe!

And even closer… Gross! Plus the glossy paint made everything show up even more. Time to do away with these little guys and on to something better.

First, my Dad measured it for me and we made a plan and figured out what sizes we needed.

Next, I ran the boards that we were going to use through the planer. It helps cut down on sanding later and I am all about that! I hate sanding. Always have. Anyone with me on this?!

After my Dad cut the pieces to the desired lengths, he ran them through the table saw with two blades to make a groove.

See the groove? This is what will hold the middle panel in place.

Next, he ran the sides through to create grooves so the side pieces would fit together. I’m not able to get real technical here since I had no idea what we were doing, I was just following the master, documenting it all :)

Once everything was cut, we started assembling using some wood glue.

And then we clamped them and let the glue dry. After they were dry, I sanded them all and painted them. Then I had to call my Dad back over to hang them for me. My Dad is the best :)

Instead of going with the original white, I decided to go black and I love it! I was never super crazy about the white with the counter top so a color change was in order. And now it looks super sharp.

A head on view, with me in the mirror after we had just finished and I’m still in my grubby clothes.

Much better! Now when I walk in the room I smile instead of grimace! And you know the best part? I only had to pay for hinges which my Dad found at Habitat For Humanity and the new wooden knobs because for everything else we used scraps my Dad had lying around. The whole project cost less than $20! Pretty good upgrade for cheap! My favorite kind :)

And this isn’t the only bathroom that got a facelift. Wait until you see the master bath!

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Tagged: Before & After, DIY, Our House