Hanging Letters

Every now and then I have a good idea all by myself.  It's rare, so we have to celebrate when it happens.

Yesterday I finally hung up pictures and decorations in Nora's room.  She has painted wooden letters that spell her name.  They're tricky to hang because the letters are different sizes and the ribbons they hang on are slightly different lengths.

I was trying to figure out how to hang them by myself (Jared was outside riding bikes with Nolan!) when I got a bright idea.

I pulled out my poster putty.  You may remember this stuff from your college dorm days.  Or if you've ever been a teacher then you've most likely used it before.  Nora thought it was hilarious that it felt like gum.

I put two blobs of poster putty on the back of each wooden letter.

Then I positioned the letters on the wall where I wanted them.  I used a level to get the bottoms of the letters lined up.  I had to reposition them a couple times to get the spacing just right.

All the letters were temporarily held up on the wall by the poster putty.

Working with one letter at a time, I pulled the ribbon up as far as it would go, centering the bow above the letter.  I drilled a tiny pilot hole right under the bow.

I drilled just enough to make a mark on the wall, then I moved the ribbon down out of the way as I drilled the rest of the pilot hole.

Next I hammered my white nail into the pilot hole.

Then I simply put the bow back up over the nail.

I repeated the process for all of the letters.  Voila!

I was going to remove the poster putty since I just needed it to help me hang the letters, but I decided there's really no reason to remove it.  It's just extra insurance that the letters won't move.

I hung up Nora's letters, pictures, and all four of her bow holders.  AND I unpacked the last box in her room!  Jared unpacked the last box in the boys' room, so now we have several box-free rooms!

We're slowly but surely getting settled in!

Jessica

Firsts

As we've been settling into our new home, there have been lots of firsts.

The first night sleeping in the new house.

The first home-cooked family dinner.

The first time a kid puked in the new house.  Yes, that's already happened.

The first time I've cleaned the new house (the downside of upsizing).

I'm still waiting for the first time I get to do laundry in our new house since our appliance delivery keeps getting pushed back.  We had to take our clothes to the laundromat last night.  Not my idea of a good time.

We have met the neighbors on each side of us, as well as the giant monster dog that lives next door.  On Sunday the neighbors directly across the street brought us this:

That's right--they baked us delicious cookies and brought them with a card welcoming us to the neighborhood!  How adorable is that??

They are super friendly and have three young kids.  The bad news is that they are trying to sell their house because of a job relocation.  Is it wrong to hope they don't sell their house just because I want to keep the friendliest neighbors? :)

We have only driven by our old house one time, and we could see that the new owner was ripping out our landscaping in front of the house.  She already told us that she's planning to put in TWO more bathrooms in the house, and I know she's going to paint and make other changes as well.

Jared unexpectedly ran into her at the grocery store last night.  They exchanged pleasantries and he avoided asking about the old house, but I think it was slightly weird nonetheless.  I guess we should prepare for more awkward run-ins.

I bought school supplies last night, and I'm still waiting on Griffin's backpack (ordered from Old Navy), which was re-routed when we changed our address and should hopefully make its way to us this week.

This is our final week of summer bliss.  Next week starts morning routines and me barking orders at the kids so we can get out the door on time. 

I'm not gonna lie...I'm SUPER nervous about Griffin starting kindergarten.  That's a first that's much bigger and more important than all our house firsts.  I want my kids to thrive in school, both academically and socially.

Then again, this isn't the first time I've gone through the emotional journey of sending a child to kindergarten.  Nolan struggled horribly with adjusting to kindergarten, and we didn't even have a reason to think he might have a hard time.  I prayed nearly every minute of every day, and my sister fielded my daily crying phone calls.  We survived, and Nolan eventually became a school pro.

Griffin may actually do well at school right from the start.  It wouldn't be the first time he surprised us.

Jessica

Packing

Now that I'm spending free time packing (mostly sorting, throwing away, donating, and then packing), the kids have to entertain themselves quite a bit.

I've loosened my regulations on tv watching, Wii, and iPad time.  The kids have also been playing board games together and playing with their toys before I pack them up.

They are very interested in anything that's different, and right now there's something changing in the house everyday.

Even though I packed up our books last week, they just discovered the fun of the empty bookshelves today.

Whatever keeps them happy, right?

Jessica

Homeless

I've always been a homebody. 

I not only love spending time at home, but I need recharge time at home before I can go back out into the big wide world.

Home is sacred to me.  No matter how small or cluttered or not-magazine-worthy my house is, it's still my house.

So you can see that I have a deep emotional attachment to my home.

When we first started the house-hunting process early this year, I thought there was no way my heart could handle leaving our house after nine years of doing life here.

As God has led us one baby step at a time, He has also started working on my emotions. 

When I fell in love with the new house we're buying, I started emotionally detaching from our current house.  I know it's still going to be hard to leave, but my heart is ready to be in the new house.

I was so excited for that new house that I spent every waking second thinking about it.  Floor plans.  Paint colors.  Furniture.  Appliances.  Making family meals.  My kids' bedrooms.  If you follow me on Pinterest, then you know a lot of what I've been thinking about and browsing.

We've even changed the way we talk about the houses.  We tend to call this house the old house, the current house, or even the Lincoln St. house.  In our hearts it's no longer "home."

But a problem arose in this emotional progression.  It's called The Moving Process.  While everything started off so quickly for us, it's certainly moving along in a jerky, ungraceful fashion.  It hasn't been smooth and seamless. 

It's been an emotional roller coaster.

The status of our move changes daily.  Some days it seems certain and exciting.  Other days it looks as though this domino tower is about to fall, and our plans will not come to fruition.

So, to protect myself, I've emotionally detached from the new home as well.  No sense being crazy excited about something that might not end up being mine.  Through a variety of factors--paperwork, reports, uncertainty from our buyer, and unfavorable reactions from other people--I've lost that initial joy and anticipation.

Now I'm emotionally homeless.

I need to pack up everything in this current house and complete the process of moving out, but I'm afraid we'll just be unpacking all those belonging right back to their original spots if the deal falls through.  I need to make sure my kids are getting registered at the correct school, but right now I'm not sure which one that will be.  I need restful sleep.  I need peace in my stomach.

I need a place to call home so I can recharge.

As I said, this game changes DAILY.  I will likely feel differently at the end of this day than at the beginning, be it better or worse.  I've been operating in constant prayer, begging God to override the stress that continually grips my heart, mind, and body.  He started us on this journey, and I'm holding onto His promise to complete what He started.

And then I hope He never tells us to move again.

Jessica 

Living Room

We're about to get into the rooms where we did major remodeling, but first I wanted to show you the living room.  We just did basic cosmetic updates in this room, but I still think they made a big difference.

The room when we bought the house:

Try to ignore the sneak peek of the kitchen :)

The carpet was in decent condition.  All the wood trim was outdated.  The drapes were pretty awesome.  All the old furniture was a bit distracting.  Also, doesn't that seem like a horrible place for a couch?  You had to walk around the couch to go from the kitchen (on the right) to the hallway (on the left) leading to the bathroom and bedrooms.

We didn't do much to this room right away.  In fact, here are some pictures of our second Christmas in the house:

My sister Kristi, me (pregnant with Nolan), and my sister-in-law Bree.  Note that the walls, carpet, and wood trim are identical to when we bought the house.

That's my mom playing Santa and my nephew opening gifts.  The super stylish couch in the background was given to us by one of our former high school teachers.

Note the awesome drapes still hanging behind the Christmas tree.

When my dad made our huge custom bookshelf, his one condition was that we had to stain it ourselves.  No problem.  I set it up on a drop cloth in the living room and got to work.  Unfortunately, I knocked over the can of stain, and it spilled directly over the only tear in the drop cloth.  The dark brown stain got on the carpet.

We decided not to throw away the carpet that was in good condition.  We cut it into two pieces, cutting out the stained portion between the two large pieces.  We rolled it up, carried it downstairs, and set it up where the couch, toys, and projector are.  You can see it here.

We painted the walls a light bluish gray, painted the window frame a creamy off-white, took down the old drapes, put up ivory blinds, installed light wood laminate flooring, and installed new baseboards that match the floor.

I could only find one picture of the living room at this stage.  We bought the rug and chair (there is a second matching chair not in the picture) at Ikea.  I found a natural-colored slipcover for the hand-me-down floral couch.  The big coffee table in the corner eventually got moved to the family room (more on that later).  That's my niece Layla pretending to talk on my old cell phone while sitting with Nolan.

We eventually moved the slipcovered couch to the basement.  We also moved that rug to the basement laundry area and replaced it with a gray and white floral rug from Ikea.  We added an ivory love seat (Ikea again), gray curtains from Target, pillows from Ikea and some that I recovered, and two lamps.  We also bought a display cabinet to hold treasures from my grandparents who passed away.

Here's how it looks now:

This is the bookshelf my dad made (and I stained...thus ruining the carpet).  My sister made us the picture frame with photos she took that spell our last name.

We just have three rooms left to go:  kitchen, bathroom, and family room.  They're the most dramatic!

Jessica

This Is My Nerdery

I'm a full-blown nerd.  I can hide it well because I'm not your traditional computer nerd or science nerd.

But I'm not in denial about my nerd status.

Here's a recent example.

Last Friday we had the home inspection on our new house.  That meant an all-access pass to be in our new home for two full hours!  I was pumped.

Jared left work to meet us there.  We had our three kids as well as our niece and nephew.  All five kids enjoyed playing on the play set in the back yard, running around on the tennis court behind our lot, and playing hide-and-seek in the empty house with lots of closets.  It made my heart happy to see the kids running around the house.

While the kids were playing and the inspector was inspecting, Jared and I took measurements of all the rooms.  I scribbled sketches and numbers in a notebook for future reference.

Later that afternoon Jared was back at work, my niece and nephew were gone, and my kids were having rest time.

So I sat down for some quality time with my calculator, notebook, and some graph paper.

Our printer has an option to print "school papers," including graph paper.  I chose to print some pages with metric measurements because that seemed to be the best scale.  I did some calculations and figured out that I could fit all rooms on a single sheet of paper with one square on the graph paper equaling 6 inches in real life.

Enter my trusty ruler and pencil, and pretty soon I had scaled drawings of all the major rooms in the new house.  Jared, who already knew I would do this anyway, measured our big pieces of furniture.  He used my same scale to convert the real measurements into graph paper models of furniture.

Then I got to play paper dolls like a true nerd.

I moved furniture around until I had an arrangement I liked.  Then I used poster putty to secure each furniture piece to the paper, but I can still move them later if I want.

Now we'll know where to move the big pieces of furniture on moving day.

See?  Being a nerd can be useful.

Jessica

The Green Room

Continuing the tour of our house, I'd like to show you one of the bedrooms.  This room has served many purposes, so it has had many names.  You'll see why I call it the green room.

This is the largest bedroom, and it has two closets.  I honestly can't remember why we didn't choose this as our master bedroom.

Here's the room when we bought the house:

That was Jared's stepmom and stepsister inspecting the house with us.

We pulled up the gross carpet to reveal original hardwood floors.  They were in decent condition, but they (still) need to be refinished.  That was a project we just never tackled.

I was a young newlywed who had watched too much Trading Spaces, and I came up with a vision for this room.

This was our office, and we had two desks and a bookshelf in the room.  My vision was a limey/grassy green and lemon yellow.  I really couldn't find too many pictures of this phase of the room, but here's one shot of one part of the room:

We eventually got a huge super cool bookshelf that my dad built, and it took the place of the little one in this photo.  My favorite part was a glass bowl of fake lemons in one compartment of the giant custom-made shelving unit.  Seriously, too much Trading Spaces.  And yes, I actually made those hideous curtains.  And yes, the ceiling is yellow.

The office became Griffin's room when we found ourselves expecting Baby #2.

I couldn't find any pictures (you'll hear that a lot) of when the room was a cute nursery for Griffin.  It's a shame because we found adorable crib bedding that was light blue with fish and circles that were white and the exact shade of green on the walls.  We left the green walls but painted the ceiling white.

Here's a picture of Griffin sleeping in his crib in this room (after he was old enough that we removed the crib bumper pads):

Don't worry, we quickly moved him out of that position.

Once we found out Baby #3 was coming, we had to move the boys into a bedroom together.  We chose the green room since it's the largest and has two closets.  Apparently, God always knew how the bedroom shuffle would go for us, so He just made us choose a smaller bedroom as our master from the beginning.

Here's the first night we had the boys sleep together in this room:

The last change for this room was when we got the boys in bunk beds.  We actually bought a loft bed from Ikea, and we put a twin mattress on the floor underneath for Griffin.  That way he couldn't roll off the bed very far, and Nolan's "top bunk" isn't as high off the floor as a traditional top bunk.

This is still what the room looks like currently.  We figured ugly green paint wouldn't keep someone from buying the house.  It should be interesting to see what colors the boys want in the new house.

Jessica

Basement Updates

I've been going through old pictures to remind myself of what our house used to look like and how much work we've put into it.

I thought I'd share pictures with you room by room.  I know this is much more interesting to me and Jared than to anyone else, but that's okay.  You don't have to read my rambling, right? :)

I'm starting with the basement because, well, it's the ugliest part of our house.  It's all better from here.

When we bought our house, the basement was unfinished.  Today the basement is still unfinished.  But it is usable space.

Here's part of our basement when we bought the house:

It had green grass-like outdoor carpet on the floor and the world's ugliest and heaviest couch.  In case you're wondering, that woman was our realtor's assistant.

We made this area into a bit of a play/family area.  We removed the ancient couch and put in a couch, love seat, and my Grandpa's recliner.  Against my advice, Jared cut a square out of the paneling and installed a projector behind the paneling wall.  He hung a projector on the opposite wall.  We put video games and toys down there as well.

The other part of this side of the basement is what we were working on last week.  I couldn't find any "before" pictures of that side.  Let me just say it was gross and creepy.

We painted the cement blocks and the fake bricks, put in new flooring, and set it up as an exercise area.

The other half of our basement when we first bought the house:

I was so excited to have an extra oven for big family meals (like Thanksgiving).  Turned out it didn't work. 

Here's what this side of the basement looks like now:

This end is just for storage.

Laundry area

Pantry shelf and my craft supplies

It's still an unfinished basement, but I think it's less creepy than it used to be.

I promise the rest of the rooms will be prettier. :)

Jessica

The Paycheck

Last night before we put the kids to bed, we snuggled up on our (me & Jared's) bed and read devotions and prayed.  My kids frequently blow me away with their prayers.  Last night Nolan's went something like this:

God, thank you for helping us find that house.  Help the people to accept our offer to buy the house.  If that's where you want us then let them accept our offer.  Help us not to struggle if they don't accept our offer and just to trust you to take us to the right house that you have for us.  We love you.  In Jesus' name, amen.

Amazing.

After we had all prayed, Nolan said to me:

"Mom, it's like you spend your whole life living for God, and the paycheck is heaven."

That kid, I tell ya.  Sometimes kids have things more figured out than the grown ups do.

And by the way, they did accept our offer on the house. :)

Jessica

House Anniversary

Yesterday was the 9th anniversary of the day we closed on our house and it officially became our first home.

Happy house-iversary!

We spent the day the same way we've spent our days for the last two weeks.  Jared worked all day, came home early to view a couple houses with us and our realtor, we ate a quick and not very healthy dinner, and then we got busy on projects here at our house.  I spent the day trying to clean and finish my house projects.  I also spent my day snapping at my children and refereeing their fighting.

We've all had more than enough of this house business.  We haven't done much fun stuff with the kids, so they're going crazy and turning on each other.  I just want to get my house "chores" done, so I have very little patience for their interruptions.  But then I feel guilty because I can't expect them to entertain themselves and get along perfectly and stay out of our way all the time. 

It's hard to even explain what's keeping us so busy.  And I do mean busy.  Jared and I both feel exhausted like when we had tiny babies.  Or maybe a better analogy would be that it feels like the most exhausting part of college.  Only it's been "finals week" for two weeks straight already.  And the only time Jared and I have spent together has been when I need him to lift/move something or when he needs me to okay his plan or progress.

I've decided there's an order to the projects that you have to do around your house when you want to sell it:

1. First, you fix all the things that have bothered you about your house over the years.  You do all the projects you've been wanting to do but never quite got to (or never finished).  These are satisfying to see actually completed.  These projects make you think your house is fantastic.
2. Second, you fix all the things that you had simply learned to live with all along but suddenly realize that other people might not like.  These aren't quite as fulfilling as the projects on list #1, but they're bearable.  These projects make you think your house is marketable.
3. Finally, you fix all the things that other people (your realtor or people who have walked through your house) tell you need to be fixed.  You don't necessarily want to do these projects, but you're trying to please other people in order to sell your house.  These tasks are unsatisfying and frustrating (and time-consuming and costly).  These projects make you think about hurting someone that you better get every penny of your asking price...and then some.

This week we're living on list #3.

I spray painted a gutter that had some rust stains on the outside but is still solid and functioning perfectly.  I painted a small strip of wood under our front door that was bare wood before.  Jared scraped old paint off the cement block wall in our basement, and then he painted several coats of water-sealing paint.  Our basement also has one end wall that's covered in faux bricks.  The previous owners glued each individual fake brick onto the painted black wall.  They didn't fill in any sort of mortar.  Our realtor wanted us to paint it all white.  It was easy to roll on white paint over the brown "bricks."  Filling in the space between the uneven bricks has been a different story.  Jared and I took turns using different brushes, but the finished product still leaves something to be desired.  Three long nights of work for something that looks like it needs work. (And all this for an unfinished basement.)

How 'bout that floor, huh?  We have plans for that as well.  That's today's job.

Here's a closer look at the "bricks" after a coat of paint was rolled on:

And this is after we worked and worked to get paint into the cracks:

When preparing to get a house on the market, there's just no way to know ahead of time that you're going to spend three days just trying to paint fake bricks.

So now you have a glimpse into why our world is crazy, busy, tiring, and just not quite as we'd like it.

As my stress level is climbing at an alarming pace, I'm trying to turn to thankfulness as a way to keep my anxiety in check.  Last night as I felt myself nearing panic, I tried to list blessings for which I'm thankful.

A sampling of my list:

• Health--Jared and I are both healthy, strong, functioning people who are capable of doing all this work.  Also, our kids have been perfectly healthy for months, which is a huge miracle.
• Jared and I still like each other despite all this house stress.  We actually miss each other.
• Our kids still like us despite our crabbiness and busyness.  They're still three of the most beautiful things God has ever created.
• So far, we've managed to keep up with other responsibilities (Jared's work, my Sunday school class, a bridal shower I hosted last weekend, etc.).
• Somehow we've been able to afford all of the supplies for all the projects we have to do right now.
• Neither of us has ballooned into a fatty even though we've been eating quick/easy/unhealthy foods and haven't been exercising at all.
• The weather was cool and breezy yesterday, which also happened to be the day we needed to open windows to air out the paint smell in the basement.
• We've been able to work our schedules to meet with the realtor every time she's asked us to.

Even with my efforts to focus on our blessings, I think we've all about hit our limit.  There's no real "end" in sight.  We will complete the basement today (hopefully).  Tomorrow we'll have family time for the holiday.  Friday, our realtor is coming to have us sign all the papers and take pictures to actually list our house (hopefully it will be live on Monday).  Then we'll start the craziness of keeping our house spotless and leaving for people to walk through our house.

So we are carving out some family time tonight.  Several weeks ago Griffin saw an advertisement for the movie "Despicable Me 2."  He told me, "It's coming to theaters Julie 3."  He was reading the word "July" but pronounced it "Julie."  This morning he ran into my room and woke me up early to tell me that today is the day the movie comes to theaters.  I immediately talked to Jared (already on his way to work), and we made plans to take the kids out to the movie tonight.  We're all looking forward to some much-needed family time.

I wish you all a Happy 4th of July tomorrow!

Jessica