New Shutters and House Update

The paint on our front door has been peeling for a while. I have been trying to maintain it by using an acrylic craft paint that I mixed to be a similar enough color that your eye doesn't catch on the peeling pieces, but finally it's gotten so bad that I knew something needed to be done. As I've been talking to my mom about her house updates, we learned that black doors are the trendiest thing in exterior design right now. I love the look and decided that I was going to repaint our door the trendiest "Tricorn Black".  It took a bit to get David on board because he loves the navy blue that we picked when we first built our house (almost 12 years ago!). But I was feeling determined. 

I got a little stumped when I realized that I can't just paint my door, I would have to take off the shutters and paint those, too. No problem, I thought, until I then realized that one/two of our shutters are on the second floor with no way to access them. I came up against another obstacle when I realized that I would have to get permission from the HOA. 

My urgent motivation for getting the project done was starting to wane, but thankfully I got permission from the HOA after waiting only 2 of the 6 possible weeks for approval and after exploring a lot of options (paying a handyman to come remove the shutters, asking my dad to bring a tractor to my house) I found a friend who had a giant ladder that would allow me to get to the top window to remove the shutter. I purchased the paint and then it was go time! 




I painted the door and shutters and with the help of our neighbors Cade and Leah Ward - I got them hung back up while David was out of town. We decided to do a full makeover and I replaced the exterior garage lights with some really beautiful lanterns, and even replaced the house number with a sans serif number font (something that I have been wanting to do for years). 

The project escalated when I discovered some cracks in the stucco around the garage. I bought some repair stucco so that the cracks wouldn't get worse, but then I also had to buy stucco paint to cover the repair spots. Then because some of that stucco paint dripped on the border right around the garage, I had to go buy the lighter color of stucco paint to repaint the border. It felt like the project just kept escalating but I am SO so happy with the result. 

As always, what I thought was going to be a pretty cheap project (just $50 or so for paint) ended up requiring much more money - almost $600 after all of the paint supplies/brushes, new drill bits for removing stripped screws, new beautiful lamps, updated house numbers, stucco repair, and several gallons of stucco paint. We had some "home improvement" money budgeted for stepping stones in the garden but I wanted this project so badly that I used most of my personal money that I've been saving up to cover the rest of the project. 

This is the first project that was basically 100% me. I wanted it so I made it happen. David helped me hold the lanterns while I installed them because I couldn't do it by myself and I was grateful for his support through the project. I feel like the house looks so nice, and if we aren't going to move anytime soon - we should do the updates to make our house feel nice for us while we are here. 

Homeschool Room Prep

Over the past several years, we've slowly been converting our living room into our homeschooling space. It's been working fine for us, but as we approach our 7th year of homeschooling - I was feeling the need for a homeschool room refresh. We spent a large amount of time in this room and I needed it to be a little more functional. 



Homeschool room in action: 




A lot of our projects start with me having "a big idea" and then escalating from there. This was no different. We decided we needed some shelves - and one trip to Ikea later we were two bookshelves, one table, two chairs, and a whole bunch of other items richer. We also found this darling little chaise sofa which we ended up coming back for a smaller version of. 





But we all know how the story goes. "If you're getting new bookshelves, you should probably paint your walls." 


Unfortunately - I went to the store and purchased "Grecian Ivory" paint - which is what our paint color was named. I started painting and even though it was clearly the wrong color, I kept painting and painting in hopes that "when it dried" it would be the right color. Ha. No. The next time I went, I brought a paint chip off of our wall and had them color match it. Another thick coat of paint later and the walls looked as good as new! 

The New Shelves hold so much of our stuff, I don' know how we managed without them. 

The whole room got a refresh. We moved the piano out into the family room, added a second homeschool table, and included a little couch to snuggle and read on. This room is making me so happy. It feels good to embrace this as our homeschool room, and after 7 years - it's about time! 



The other thing that I'm VERY excited about for our homeschool this year is this new Skylight Calendar. It's a digital calendar that will automatically convert our google calendar into a family calender that the kids can look at and reference. It also has an area to track "chores" that we are going to use for tracking their homeschool responsibilities. I love that I can create a customized schedule because each of our days is a little different, but it will still help them to have responsibility to accomplish all the things they need to do.

 We've only had it a couple of weeks but already I LOVE it! I don't think we will ever be able to go back to not having a digital countertop calendar. When we saw it at Sams Club, I knew it was exactly what we needed and even though it was kind of pricy, it's already been worth every penny. 

Now, speaking of house projects - the homeschool room is (almost) done, but now I have my eye on my front porch. I really want to paint my door black. Unfortunately if we paint the door, we will need to paint the shutters and there is one shutter that I just cant reach. I sent this picture to David asking him if he thought I should pull over and ask this guy driving a cherry picker to come to my house to help me take down the shutters from our highest window. I'm still trying to figure that out, but it's on my list! 

Our House

I love this house of ours. 

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!