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

Our Bedroom

Our "master" bedroom is actually one of the smallest bedrooms in the house.  Here's what it looked like when we bought the house:

The awesome wallpaper

I also had a case of too-much-Trading-Spaces in this room.  I had this whole vision of gray and white with touches of pink.  I fell in love with some pink fabric that had Eiffel Towers on it because Jared and I met in high school French class.

Here's my interior decorating experiment:

I made the duvet cover.  And yes, I did paint the window frames gray with PINK on the bottom ledge.

I also covered our headboard (yet another piece of hand-me-down furniture) with gray fabric, as you can see here:

We eventually painted the window frames white and pulled up the carpet to expose the original hardwood floor.  I covered the wall behind the bed with long curtains to cover the short, wide window.  We got a new bedspread from Ikea as well as new shiny white nightstands from Ikea.

We also switched out the old light fixture for something more updated.

I love that the original gray paint we put on the walls lasted through my various decorating phases.

That completes the tour of our bedrooms.  There are more dynamic makeovers to come!

Jessica

Nora's Room

Nora's room started out as a guest room (I have no pictures of that, sorry).  Then it became Nolan's nursery.  Eventually Nolan moved out of the room and into the green room with Griffin so Nora could have the smaller bedroom.

Here's the room when we bought the house:

This was the lovely wallpaper.  It exactly matched the curtains as well as the bedspread.

This room never had carpet, and we just left the hardwood floor. 

I honestly don't remember how we decorated the room as a guest room.

When it was time to convert it to a nursery, we painted the walls light green.  I made Nolan's crib bumper pads.  The head bumper pad wasn't completed when I took this picture, but it had an appliqued snail.  His room was decorated in snails and caterpillars.

Nolan outgrew his crib and moved up to a twin bed with a guard rail:

Then he moved into the big bedroom with Griffin, and we painted this room pink for Nora.  I hated the first color we chose (it looked like Pepto Bismol), and I made Jared repaint with a new shade of pink.  My dad made Nora's crib, which is now a family heirloom for us. 

I paid someone to paint Nora's letters to match her crib bedding.  We didn't get the letters made until after she was born since it took us six hours after she was born to decide on her name!

Eventually Nora moved into a twin bed.  A family member gave us the bed frame, and I love that it's white and that it has drawers.

The above pictures are what the room currently looks like.  The tall bookshelf holds all of the kids' art supplies, Play Doh, and some books.  The dollhouse looking thing is actually a shelving unit that we found on clearance at Target.  It currently holds hair accessories, jewelry, and Nora's giant My Little Pony. :)  We could someday decorate it and use it as an actual doll house.

I made the first three bow holders for Nora.  I painted bare wood shapes from Hobby Lobby, Mod Podged scrapbook paper onto them, attached a long ribbon for the hair clips, and attached small ribbons for hanging.  My friend Megan made Nora the adorable bow holder with the turtle on top.  It was a birthday present for Nora at the height of her baby turtle obsession.

So, there you have it.  Another room checked off our tour list!

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

Counter Offer?

It's interesting explaining the whole moving process to kids.  I can see why they get confused when everything takes so long and has so many steps and nothing is definite until the closing.

The kids want to know if we are for sure buying the house we hope is our new home.  Our offer for the house was accepted, but we don't want to consider anything definite just yet.

The kids had lots of questions when we received an offer on our house and decided to counter offer.  Nolan was hammering Jared with questions, so I sat him down and explained the process of counter offering.  I used an analogy of him asking me for 5 pieces of candy as his initial offer.  I would then counter offer one piece of candy.  He could then counter with two pieces, and I would probably accept.

He smiled and said something about using that later.

Later that evening, I took Nolan to his baseball practice.  It's held at a school.  In fact, it will be the school the boys will attend once we move into our new house.

After practice is over, most of the boys like to play on the playground equipment for a bit before the parents break up the fun by dragging their kids away.  I waited a respectable amount of time, and then I told Nolan it was about time to go.

He was just approaching the monkey bars, so I told him he could finish the monkey bars and then we'd go.  The problem was that he could only make it about halfway across before dropping.  I waited patiently while he tried again.  And again.

Then I finally told him he could attempt it two more times and then we needed to go, no matter how far he got.  He tried two more times, but his little arms were tired, and he didn't make it very far.

I told him we needed to go.  In a rare moment for him, he decided he wanted to disobey me.  He climbed up on that rung that serves as a step to reach the monkey bars.  I looked at him squarely and told him he had reached a choice:  obedience or disobedience.  He asked me if he could have one more attempt to cross the monkey bars.

I told him he had zero more monkey bar attempts left.

He smiled at me with his big round sweaty cheeks and said, "Counter offer?"

I broke from my strict parenting stance and cracked up.  He climbed down and followed me as I laughed my way back to the car.

He had listened to my explanation and used the information against me.  Well played, Nolan.  Maybe I should explain closing costs to him.

Jessica

Houses, Houses, Houses!

Our life has revolved around houses for the last three weeks or so.  It's been such a whirlwind and so much work.  We have been busy preparing our house to sell it as well as searching for the right house to be our next home.  When we started, we didn't even know which realtor to choose.

And we already have big news...

We sold our house and bought our new house!

Ok, let me clarify.  We put in an offer on a new house, and that offer was accepted (subject to the sale of our house).  Today we received an offer on our house, we countered with a higher offer, and our counter offer was accepted by the buyer.

So now we start the fun of packing, paperwork, home inspections, replacing the roof on our current house (part of the deal), and actually moving.  And we're trying to cram it all in before Nolan starts second grade at a new school and Griffin starts kindergarten at a school with which we're not very familiar.  Should be interesting!

We are so grateful to God for orchestrating every detail so far, and we fully trust Him to carry out this house process to completion.  We have prayed so much leading up to this process and most certainly through the actual house hunt and house prep.

If you need evidence of God's hand on our house hunt, allow me to show you the timeline.

• Tuesday, June 25:  We finally chose a realtor and called her to make the first contact.
• Thursday, June 27:  The realtor walked through our house to start thinking about pricing, and she asked us about our wish list for a new house.
• Sunday, June 30:  We walked through seven houses on my list of possibilities.  Each and every one was a definite "no."
• Tuesday, July 2:  We looked at more houses that we didn't like.  I grew discouraged.
• Wednesday, July 3:  I found a new house listed online and asked our realtor to get us inside to see it.
• Friday, July 5:  We walked through the last house on my original list and the house that had just been listed.  We fell in love with the second house (the new listing).
• Saturday, July 6:  We met the realtor at the house we loved so we could make an offer.  The offer was accepted late that night.  Our current house was officially listed for sale.
• Monday, July 8, 11:00 am:  Our realtor showed our house for the first time.  The prospective buyer was one of her other clients.
• Monday, July 8, 2:10 pm:  Our realtor called with an offer on our house (from the woman who had walked through that morning).
• Monday, July 8, 5:00 pm:  We presented two possible counter offers (one for more money and one for slightly less money but no new roof).
• Monday, July 8, 8:10 pm:  Our realtor called to say that the buyer had accepted our counter offer!

Can you even believe that??  Less than one week from when we first started looking at houses, we had secured our new home.  Our current home sold after the first showing (which was the third day it was even on the market).  Clearly God is taking care of us and leading us.

I know there's lots of not-so-fun stuff yet to come (packing, moving, unpacking, and also holding our breath until the home inspection is over and all paperwork is signed).  But today is a day for excitement.

Thank you to all of you who have been praying for us.  Look how God answered your prayers!!

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