A Basement Bathroom and a *finally* finished Basement!

Remember back in 2019/2020 when we worked hard to finish our basement? Our dads came and helped us on a weekly basis to teach us, bring tools, and do work on our behalf! My dad singlehandedly laid the bathroom floor for us on a week that we were particularly busy plus helped us drill a hole through the outside of the house (which was fun) when he installed the vent fan. Cal was incredible as he planned and carefully framed each tricky area and did all the waterlines. They both did more for us than I can even list here: installing the tub & surround, figuring out how to make a drop-ceiling, framing, electrical, water lines, drain pipes, oh so many things! We are so blessed to have dads who are so willing to teach us and help us with this huge project.  

We probably mentioned this when we wrote about finishing the basement, but with even more time between now and then, I can say with much more perspective - finishing the basement when we did was such a HUGE blessing. At the time we started, Lucy was only about two months old. Starting a huge project like that with a tiny baby seems like a wild idea but it felt like the timing was right. With both of our dads donating their time and diligent effort, plus the decision to hire out hanging the sheetrock and painting, we finished almost everything RIGHT before the COVID-19 pandemic shut the world down. (I remember going to Home Depot by myself in the evening that first week of shut down to get the wood for our storage room shelves because we weren't sure that stores would even be open and we didn't want to not have the wood to finish the project.) We didn't know it then, but having a finished basement would be a miraculous boon for our family in a year when we really couldn't be anywhere other than our own house. Having the finished basement was a blessing that we couldn't have forseen that we would need but made a huge difference to us. However, COVID-19 brought additional stress and our mental energy was needed elsewhere and we ended up locking the bathroom door and deciding to come back to it later. 

So, spring of 2021 we unlocked that door and decided to put in the work to finish it out. The biggest hurdle was the backsplash because the backsplash we ordered with the vanity didn't fit together right. (That's one of the big reasons we locked the door and walked away in 2020, we just didn't have the mental capacity to make a decision about how to handle this.) 


We found a peel and stick tile that matched the vanity decently well and decided to just go for it. Perfection matters less than having a finished bathroom (and a huge check mark off our to-do list). We installed it and slowly but surely started making way through the final details that always take much longer than you think they will. Shelves, towel rods, caulking, adjusting doorframes to fit better, etc... 

('m really happy with the way this turned out!) 

Then summer hit and the final few things got put on hold, because who wants to be inside doing house projects when you could be outside living your best summer-life?? (ha, I say this a little facetiously because I should have finished it this summer. It really shouldn't have taken the extra four months to finally finish. But... #summer.) 

Finally over fall break this last week - I took a day (one day was all it took!) to come downstairs and finish the final details. Finishing all of the caulking, fixing a chip in the tub, painting the yellowed caulk (from using the wrong tube in the spring), and hanging the shower curtain. 


And just like that, it's finished! I'm so happy with the way it turned out and just so incredibly grateful all over again for our dads who made this a reality. I can only vaguely remember when this space was storing two sets of washers/dryers and a ping-pong table. Now it's a fully functional bathroom and it's beautiful. We can now officially say that our basement is FINISHED! (Other than the few holes in the sheetrock from some energetic playing that we need to patch, but that's life.) 

Shantel's September Photo Dump

Just a quick recap of some things that I missed blogging about during the month of September. 

1.  Our beautiful new stair light fixture. We've been looking for the perfect new stair fixture for a long time because we wanted something to fill up the space a little better (better than the little mushroom fixture that came with the house). We found this beauty at Sam's Club for a super good deal and we loooove it! We'd never replaced a light fixture by ourselves before - but with some good ole' YouTubing we figured it out! (Although at one point we were both up at the very top of a super-tall ladder together, one trying to hold the super-heavy fixture up, the other trying to screw it together. It was quite a sight.) 

2. David and Lydia's "matching Jammies". 

3. Super Caleb and a big sister that already loves playing dress up with him.

 4. We had this picture taken at a wedding reception for one of David's co-workers (whose wedding announcements I designed/printed). I hung this picture on the dash of my car because I love the way it turned out and I looooove this boy. Call me a cheese, but I love him more now than I ever knew I could. I still feel like a school-girl when he calls me on the phone or tells me that he loves me. I'm lucky to have him, and glad to have this picture in my can to make me smile every time I see it.

5. Lydia's bed set up in my bedroom for the nights that David was gone on a work trip. Lydia and Austin took turns sleeping in my bed with me, and the other one slept on the toddler mattress in the corner. It was a win/win/win except for the fact that David wasn't there and that was less of a win.

6. Reading books with Grandpa Peaden. Cal is always so good to play, read, and otherwise shower these kids with attention whenever he's around. I'm so grateful for kind, loving grandparents. 

7. Austin helping me carry the library books to our car. 

8. Austin is in a huge "I can do it myself" phase. And I'm frequently surprised at how much he really CAN do. And sometimes we end up with ketchup all over everything. That's the way we roll. We're just enjoying the ride.

 9. We invited a bunch of neighborhood kids out in our front yard to help eat the rest of Austin's birthday cake, and the next day our sweet neighbors, the Warnocks, came over with a delicious treat and a stack of super darling letters saying thank you. We have great neighbors and this made my day. (Katie Warnock is the kind of mother I aspire to me, she's good and kind and teaches her kids so many good, thoughtful, and uplifting things.)

10. I hosted a Baby Shower for my sweetest friend, Ali Middleton. It was super simple, and each guest brought a freezer meal to stock her meal-supply up for after the baby comes. I just love her and I'm grateful for the good friend and example she is. I'm constantly amazed at what an incredible example of motherhood she is, and really an example of just genuine goodness.  So excited for that sweet baby to join the crew.

11. It's possible that the sweetest thing in all the land is when your five year old daughter who is just barely barely barely learning to read, memorizes her favorite book and then reads it to your baby whenever he feels sad or needs attention. This girl is such a great big sister.

Nesting: Home Projects

Okay, let's talk about how my nesting energy has kicked in full force and I've been working hard to get all these projects finished. We've been working over the last 6 months or so to get our window seat and downstairs bathroom exactly the way we want them - but I had one more project that was just eating me up. I wanted to get it finished SO badly. 

The Mudroom. 

So much unused potential. SO much mess. I really should have taken a before picture of the coats and shoes and bags all over each other, because it was just so full of stuff. It took me a long time to figure out exactly what I wanted to do in there, but as soon as I got the picture in my head of how I wanted it to look (specifically seeing the functionality that it could have) I was like a dog with a bone and could think of nothing else anytime I walked past. This is the before: bare, bare, bare. I had my garbage cans in the corner but mostly it was just piles of coats and shoes and bags and gloves. 

So for Christmas, I asked my dad if he would come down and help me do it. I absolutely know that he would have come down in a minute if I had just asked him to, but it made me feel better to pretend like it was a Christmas Gift. (They still got me a separate Christmas gift, so really it was just my dad being wonderful.) It took me longer than I thought to track down the counter that I wanted in the corner because I started out with thinking I wanted to make a wood/butcher block counter, then moved to thinking maybe we'd just try to find a remnant of a laminate countertop, to finally finally finally finding the most beautiful piece of marble countertop! But, you may not know... marble is heavy. Like heavy-heavy, weighs 800 lbs heavy. So even our little 18x30 inch countertop was so heavy I couldn't pick it up. We were worried about getting it mounted as a floating countertop safely - but my dad, being the amazing builder he is, helped us make sure everything was secure and he made my vision come to life! 

There are no words for how giddy this room makes me! I love it so incredibly much I can barely handle it. The shoe dividers and upper shelf on the one side and the floating countertop and the hooks (oh the hooks!) on the other. It turned the space from "potential" into "functional beauty"! And hello, look at that marble countertop. It's gorgeous. 

I love it SO much. (Did I already say that?) It's already made such a difference in that little space. I grabbed a $5 clearance clipboard and $5 flower at Target, used an extra cork board from our basement, and printed out a few little prints to hang. (My favorite one says "It's so good to be Home.") The whole space is just so clean and functional and I adore it. Huge shout out to my dad for coming and basically doing it all for me, because I wanted it done so much but there's no way I could have done it being so pregnant while David was working so much. 

The Powder Bathroom

Having that finished made me really really want to finish the bathroom downstairs. I posted about it in December (Projects). I finally found a rug/hand towels that I like that fit with the space and I picked up a few other decorations to finish off the shelves. Love!

The Nursery

So throughout this all this nesting, the "nursery" has pretty much gotten zero attention. But after finishing up those other projects downstairs I got really excited and moved into the nursery to work on just a few little things. I think I'll post pictures of the nursery when it's all finished - but I'm excited about finishing off the last blank wall in that room!

I slowly worked my way around the room over the course of the last 3 years or so. I remember just sitting and holding Austin in that big chair and staring at the blank wall across from me wracking my brain for what I wanted to do. I honestly just started in one corner and moved from space to space until I only had this big blank wall left. I wasn't sure what I wanted it to look like. I picked up that space print for free at a yard sale and grabbed some twine at the store for $1.50. It wasn't until I actually started taping up the twine that that geometric shape started coming out. I was thinking I'd just clip things on the string in a line or something, but I love this so much more. There's a few things left to do before I post pictures of the whole room, but I also printed out monster-letters of baby-boy's name (!) and hung them above the crib. I'm so happy and it makes me so excited for him to come. 

Real Life 

So after I finished these areas, staged them and took pictures of them - I was so excited that I posted them to instagram. Then I felt like I was giving an inaccurate representation of my house and so I took this picture: 

This is pretty much what the rest of my house looks like right now. It's a disaster. So now my nesting needs to jump from finishing projects into cleaning mode! 

Really though, I'm so happy. Yay for finished projects! 

Projects

It's getting toward the end of the year, so I thought that I'd do a quick recap of some of the projects that we've been working on lately. (And by lately, I mean over the past 6 months-year.)

Window Seat

This is a project that has been a long time coming. When we first build our house in 2012/2013 we fell in love with the idea of putting a window seat in this stairway. We used our money to pop out the landing area to make room for a window seat, but decided to put the seat in afterwards. I'm SO glad that we did. It took us over 3 years, but I love the way that it turned out so much more than if we had just had the builders put their standard one in. We went back and forth between open shelving and built-in-shelves and I love the way that it turned out. (The shelf across the top was a last minute addition, and I'm so glad that it happened! I absolutely love it.) It's taken a long time (months and months) to fill in the shelves, but it's really starting to come together. I have some shelves that I think are perfect and I wouldn't change at all and a few that still need work - but overall I'm really really happy with the way that everything turned out. 

 Things still on my list to finish with this project: 

-Make padded cushion for bench-seat (with matching pillows)

-Adjust a few shelf decorations to be more balanced/personal.

 Powder Bathroom

I have to admit, this project was all from my brain. David was such a champ to go along with it, because I don't think that the bare bathroom walls bothered him the same way that it bothered me. As soon as I got the picture of what I wanted it to be - I just couldn't. let. go. He humored me and basically let me just create what I wanted in my mind. We used peel-and-stick wood flooring for the wall (which turned out amazing!). I traded babysitting with a girl in my ward and she built the shelves for me. She had asked if I wanted her to teach me how to build them, and although I'm sure I could have - I honestly didn't want to. I just wanted someone to build them for me. Ha. They turned out wonderfully! I bought a Command-brand towel bar and put it below my sink so that the kids could have a towel that was their height and they'd stop pulling my hand-towel down. And I installed a glass shelf to keep the area by the mirror from looking so bare. (The glass shelf was supposed to be an easy project but there ended up being something behind the sheetrock in that corner. I accidentally drilled through it, then spent a few hours and about 8-9 test drilled holes to try to figure out what it was. I couldn't ever figure it out, so I just patched everything up and I'm hoping that it's just... fine. I really love the shelf there though.) Oh, and the Daniel Tiger Print? I designed it and I love it. 

 Things still on my list to finish with this project:  

-Put velcro, or a button or something, on the hand-towels so the kids stop pulling them down.

-Grab a few more decorations for the glass shelf/lower wall shelf. 

-A colorful rug to balance the navy/green color scheme going on plus some colorful hand towels to match.

-Eventually (like, way down the road) a new light for above the mirror. (Maybe a new mirror?)

 Sewing Projects

I've already written about some of the sewing projects I've been working on lately. Aubrey's baptism dress, Lydia & Austin Halloween costumes, some personalized pie-iron bags as a gift, even a few smaller projects thrown in as well. But I haven't ever written more than just very vague references about my two biggest projects because they were both top secret gifts. I'm updating this post before we print our blog book, so it's safe to post details now - even though this post is dated for December.

The first was a quilt that I was making with my sister. This quilt has been in the works for years, literally. Jenna started cutting the brown squares out at the beginning of 2014 (maybe even 2013?). If you look closely you can tell that each brown piece was cut out of my dad's brown Wrangler work-pants. Those pants have been on many adventures, 4-wheeler rides into the mountains, planting new deer habitats, airplane rides to count wild animals, and even the occasional moose-chase. (My Dad is the Habitat Manager for the Northern Region of the State of Utah with the Division of Wildlife Resources.) Okay, these pants have also seen countless days sitting at a desk in an office, but regardless - after they were worn out they went into a pile. Jenna and my mom decided that it would be really neat to make a quilt for my dad out of them. Jenna asked for my help in finding fabric to go with the shade of brown, but we had a really hard time - we just couldn't find anything. Last year (2015) we finally found some fabric that looked really nice and started sewing things together, hoping to have the quilt made by Christmas 2015. It didn't happen, so we said "Father's Day 2016". Obviously, that didn't happen either. We knew that we had to put the pedal to the metal (or to the linoleum, in our case) if we were going to make it happen for Christmas 2016. We really got serious and it took us a lot of crazy sewing days with four kids 4 and under, but we finished it! It turned out awesome. We even did some neat hidden pockets (where the pants pockets extend into the quilt so you can have a pocket for a remote or whatever). I think my Dad liked it, and I just hope he knows how much we appreciate all the work that he's done to provide for us though our lives. 

The second quilt that I made was actually for a birthday, not Christmas - but I told myself that I had to finish my Dad's quilt with Jenna before I could start working on this quilt. (We finished my Dad's quilt in October, which gave me just enough time to finish the kids Halloween costumes and start working on this quilt that needed to be done at the end of November for Sue's December 2nd birthday.) David's mom, Sue, is so incredibly talented at sewing and she's always so selfless with her time, energy, and money. Among many other blankets and sewing projects that she's done for us and others- When Lydia was born she made the softest, nicest blanket (out of minky fabric) and when I was pregnant with Austin, I asked if she'd make one for him too, because I loved it so much. She did and both kids have loved those blankets. She made Wendy, Amy, and I all our own adult-sized blankets of the same minky fabric. The blankets are so warm and soft and we all love them. We started talking about it this year and decided that we wanted to make her one of her very own. So we picked out fabric together, Amy came down one day and helped cut it out, and I sewed it together. It's not nearly as perfect as the ones that Sue makes, but it turned out beautifully and I think she loved it. 

Cal's Book

 Last year around Christmas-time, Sue started talking about a book that she wanted to put together for Cal. She wanted to include pictures from his life and letters from all his kids. Nothing ever happened with it, but around August/September this year she started talking about it again. David and I volunteered to help her with it and ended up being very involved in the whole process. We started by going through all of the pictures that they've taken in their 43 years of marriage. We uploaded all of the photos that they had on their computer (which was a lot- thousands and thousands) and went through them one by one to pick out the best pictures that were representative of their life. Then we moved to the printed photos and did the same thing, picking out the best photos to be scanned in. Sue would come down and we'd spend hours going through photos together! I joked that after spending so much time going through photos of David and his siblings growing up, I probably remembered their childhood better than they did. David and I spent many nights scanning pictures together. After compiling all of the photos it was time to put them together in a book. Again, Sue would come down whenever she was able (and I went up there a couple of times, but we had to time it so Cal didn't know what we were up to) and we'd work on putting the pictures together into a book. (I used Mixbook online and it worked really well for what we were trying to accomplish.) I don't even know how many hours went into this project. Easily over 100 hours. Toward the end, when we were nearing the deadline of being able to get it printed by Christmas, there were a lot of late nights working on this book - but we were committed and knew we had to get it finished! In the end, it turned out wonderfully. Maybe not perfect (like, I forgot to include my name and our wedding date on our wedding page?) but I think that it gives an incredible vision of the wonderful life that Cal has lived as well as what it was like to grow up in the Peaden Home. There are pictures, letters from each child/spouse, memories from everyone, including grandkids, and more pictures! About 333 pages worthAnd so I give you: The Life and Legacy of Calvin Peaden. 

 

 Primary

Remind me to always always always bake cookies and take them around to the Primary Presidency toward the end of the year/switch to new classes for the rest of forever. It is so much work and so hard to keep everything straight. Luckily, we have a great computer program that we use - and that helped me a ton. This picture was taken just after two o'clock in the AM because I'd had to stay up late to try to get all of our binders switched over so I could drop them off to a counselor of mine so she could finish them up and they'd be ready to hand out at church on the last Sunday of the year. I think it's always a challenge to switch over classes, but adding the fact that we have just called 28 new teachers who will be starting in January makes me feel a little overwhelmed. The Hymn "Be Thou Humble" has been a blessing to me and I frequently find myself thinking about the words:

"Be thou humble in thy weakness, and the Lord thy God shall lead thee,

Shall lead thee by the hand and give thee answer to thy prayers." 

and 

"Be thou humble in thy calling, and the Lord thy God shall teach thee

To serve his children gladly with a pure and gentle love."

Being the Primary President has been challenging and also rewarding, but the thing that has surprised me the very most is how different it has been from serving as the Secretary or as a Counselor. (The two callings that I was in right before this one.) It's not even that I'm more busy - because I was busy with both of those callings as well. It just feels more... heavy. I feel such a weight of responsibility for the people in the Primary organization, both children and adults. I've been putting in overtime in this calling with our Primary Program, Fall Festival (that the Primary was in charge of), calling 28 new teachers and getting their binders ready for the new year. It's definitely a blessing to be able to serve the Lord, and I'm gaining a testimony every day of how much He loves me and how he truly will lead me by the hand if I humble myself enough to ask for His help. That is a blessing to me. 

Project Baby

Did I mention I'm building a baby? That's right, I'm so crafty - I make people. Ha.

(This is actually a 30 week photo, taken the first week of January - but I couldn't resist adding it in at the end of the "project" post.)