This Crazy Thing Called Renovation

We have been BUSY working away on our house renovation. And boy, It's a lot of work. After we got the beams placed in the attic, we went straight to taking out the walls between the kitchen and living room.

The demolition is my favorite part. It's a great stress reliever and it goes fast. It's the clean-up and putting the house back together that isn't as fun.

Taking out that wall makes such a huge transformation. The house feels so much bigger. Can't wait until it's completely finished and we can actually use this space!

 After we took the walls down, we tore out the entire kitchen. It was really a bittersweet moment. Don't get me wrong, I am so excited to get rid of those old cabinets, but living without a kitchen with twin 

1 1/2 year olds is hard...crazy hard. Yeah, I know! What were we thinking?

Kitchen Demolished :)

Now that we no longer have a working kitchen we have everything set up in the basement...and we don't have a very big basement, so it's a tight squeeze. We took our small kitchen table down stairs and placed it where our coffee table goes. My craft table is taking a break from crafts and instead is holding all the kitchen essentials. We are doing lots of microwave dinners and grilling. I'm using our tiny bathroom sink to wash dishes. It's definitely not the ideal setup, but I am oh so thankful for my new kitchen. It's all going to be worth it. 

Our make-shift kitchen :) 

It was a couple days after we took the kitchen completely out that our parents' took the boys for 5 whole days so that we could get a ton of work done without any interruption. Let me just say, I am so thankful for grandparents. You guys are lifesavers. 

After we destroyed the kitchen it was time to tackle the linoleum floor. Worst job ever. I spent 4 hours just trying to get a decent section pulled up. It was so stubborn and I'm so happy that it is gone. This floor had definitely seen it's better days. 

Goodbye, You won't be missed, Linoleum!

Now that we have torn the house apart, we just need to get it all put back together. :) Should be no problem, right? Cabinets are being installed on Tuesday. Countdown has begun. Ahhhhh!

Beams and Flooring and Ceilings, Oh My!

So the other day we went and picked up our flooring from Lowe's and also got wood from Menards for the beams Brian is making so that we can take down some walls.

Our Trailer- Load

Oh, and we bought kitchen knobs and pulls at Menards too! The boys really enjoyed this shopping trip.

Brian let them stand in the cart while he pushed them. I was freaking out and telling him it was dangerous, but I let them have fun anyway and took a picture. 

Ok so now for a sneak peak...of the flooring!

It is called Handscraped Vintage Antique Bamboo (from Lowe's).

Now to the dirty work...We have popcorn ceilings in our living room and since our kitchen does not have popcorn ceilings and we are taking a wall down we needed to do something. So naturally, we decided to scrape the popcorn off of the ceilings. 

I taped the whole room off in plastic. They sell plastic with painter's tape already attached, but I didn't buy it because, well, it was more expensive. It would have saved me a ton of time though, and probably would have been worth it. The things we learn. :)

Brian, getting ready to enter the Room of Doom (literally).

My popcorn-scraping Hero. 

I helped too. We were in it together. It was terrible. I mean really terrible. It was hot and hard and I never want to scrape a ceiling again. But, we did it. 

The couple who scrapes ceilings together, stays together :)

It made an absolute mess.

After all that hard work, I started sanding the ceiling so that we could make them match our other flat ceiling. After 10 mins. I knew this job would take me days. So we decided, "why not buy tongue and groove wood to put on the ceilings?" 

I think it is going to look great. Brian wants to leave it natural and I want to paint it white. Any opinions or suggestions???

Brian built beams to put in the attic so that we could take the wall down between the living room and kitchen. With the help of friends, he was able to get them on the roof and installed in the attic. 

This is me on the roof pretending to lift a heavy beam. The funny thing is that my legs look disconnected from my body. Photo credit: Brian. Well played, Husband, well played.

Up next...Walls will be coming down! :)

It's Just the Beginning

A couple weeks ago we officially purchased cabinets, counters, appliances, and flooring all at Lowe's. We are going to completely redo our kitchen and dining/living room. It's a pretty big deal and I'm really excited for the new kitchen part. Getting there is going to be a little difficult.

Here is a picture of the night we took the boys to purchase cabinets. It was a huge mistake. I thought since we had already picked everything out that it wouldn't take very long to purchase it. WRONG. We spent 2 1/2 hours chasing the boys around Lowe's. They were thrilled and we were pulling our hair out. They were enthralled with the kitchen section because they have all the sample kitchens on display. They spent a good part of the evening opening all the cabinet doors and slamming them shut. There was also plenty of screaming, running away, and melt-downs. We started thinking that maybe a kitchen was not worth all this hassle. But, alas, we survived and bought a kitchen :) Whew!

And then this happened.... All my furniture is in here.
My house is empty.
My kitchen is in boxes.

 I'm trying to figure out why I thought now would be a good time to renovate a house with two 1 1/2 year olds.  Oh right, I'm desperate for a dishwasher and a working oven. :) Seriously!

We pulled up all the flooring in the hallway and dining/living room. Next on the list is scraping the popcorn ceiling and putting in support beams so we can take the wall down between the kitchen and dining/living room. Exciting stuff!

Now enough about renovating...
Last week I went to spend some time with my mom, because the husband was working a whole 2 weeks of 12 hour shifts. I had a wonderful time with her and it was so nice having someone to help me corral the boys. One of the best parts was going to Deanna Rose Farmstead with the cousins. The boys were right at home. They were so thrilled to see the animals and kept sticking their fingers through the fence so the goats could nibble on them and then laughed about it.

My Farmer Boys

I love seeing how sweet the older cousins are to the boys. They love on them and play with them and are pretty much the best little helpers ever (see below).

Hello, Fall

As soon as we had some cool weather show up, I decided it was time to pull out the fall decor. It really doesn't matter that it's currently 79 degrees and I'm wearing shorts and a t-shirt as I write this post. :)
Fall is my absolute favorite season. I love it so much I've started wearing fall clothes and then realize half way through the day that I'm sweating and uncomfortably hot.

Anyway, back to fall decor. Here's a few things I've put out so far:

Aren't these painted pine cones so fun? No I did not paint them myself. I bought them (they were only 50 cents). Unfortunately, I didn't have any of my own pine cones laying around that need painting. 

I got this little cutie from a local boutique. If you are from this area go check out the Rusted Rooster in Andover. You won't be disappointed. They had a ton of great fall decor. (It's also where I found those pinecones for 50 cents)

Sign painted by me! I'm really enjoying this making signs thing. It's way too fun. Maybe someday when life with twins isn't so crazy I'll actually make some to sell....oh Dreams!

This is what the whole setup looks like right now. Nothing too fancy.

This is a free fall printable. I just popped it in a frame and wha-laa...a cheap, easy, cute fall decoration. You can get the same one right HERE. There are a bunch of other free printables too. Go check it out. 

That's pretty much all I have done so far. It's bittersweet though, because this weekend we are having a pod delivered to our house so that we can store all our living/dining room furniture, which means I'll have to put all the decorations away. We are getting ready to do some major demolition to our house. We purchased our new kitchen (YAY!) and now as we wait on the cabinets we have a whole list of other projects to do, such as scraping the popcorn ceiling (not really looking forward to that).