Back tracking project

Okay guys...GOOD MORNING!

I am sitting here with my coffee beside me and finally a list of pictures from the projects we have done.

When I say something is a "small project", I am referring to the fact that it is less expensive or in a very small area.

The one I am posting about today was a small area, being it was our downstairs foyer and half bath. However, it took me 2 days to complete this.

I loath a popcorn ceiling!!! Obviously whoever thought these were a good idea never thought it through. These are just cobweb holders, lets be real here folks...They discolor over the years because you can not really ever clean them, and if there is a vent in your ceiling or a ceiling fan then over time it will become dirty around it from the build up of dust. These came to be because they are "cheap", there is no finishing required and a builder can just spray this over the drywall and it is done. That is why they exist.

Now because of this, after wetting and scrapping drywall that is not finished underneath it tears up the drywall in little places, which means it needs to be skim coated with the mud and sanded down to make it nice and smooth.

Then we did something that we have only ever done 1 time before...we hired someone to come fix the walls.

My husband knows a guy that does great work, so we hired him to come by and skim coat the walls for us. Then we did the painting. We don't usually pay people to do things we can do ourselves. My husband can do the skim coating but it would take us a month to get it all done. We don't either one of us do it enough to be good at it...and I can promise you it wouldn't look as good as it does now with a professional doing it, hahaha. 

The only thing you need to do this project is hot water in a spray bottle ( I used a pump sprayer this time), a large scrapper, plastic to drape your furniture, and usually the flooring, and most important thing...a MASK! (I learned this lesson the hard way when I scrapped the ceiling the year prior in the den without one.)  For us, we just had concrete flooring at the time down there, so I didn't worry about covering it. I just swept and used the shop vac to get it up.

This project somewhat became a family affair, my girls would come scrape a little to give my arms a break, and the little one helped by cleaning the floors for me as we went. My husband painted it when all was done.

I will post the pictures of it from beginning to end below. In the last two photos, you will notice there is flooring in the area. That post is coming, these were the photos I have of it all pretty though 😁

walls in half bath before

walls in half bath before

ceiling in foyer before

Ceiling before

me all masked up

little one double masked, haha

me scrapping

floors with no covering

daughter spraying

Foyer finished, even floors, that post is coming....

1/2 bath finished, floor post to come. 

Surprise!

Yep! It is me...I didn't fall down a rabbit hole or accidentally flush myself, hahaha, but life has just been more than we could handle at times.

I have been working 2 jobs for over a year, switched real estate companies, and still temping in dental and medical. 

Don't worry, you haven't missed too much. We had to put most projects on hold until the last couple of months here.

I have had a lot of people in the last six months though to say we should put our house online, showing the differences...then some have told me I should be a blogger...well, I have done both, just not in a long time as you can see from the times of post.

After talking with my daughter who is a blogger, and so many people asking to put the improvements on line, well I have decided to bring my blog back alive, but not just on the house...it will show all the things we do here on the house, and still on a shoestring budget, but I am going to add some other things to my blogging as well.

My blog here will also start covering day to day life with a family and a budget. It will be a way to hopefully help others with things such as feeding a family of 4-7 on a budget. Really any size family can learn from it and get some kind of take away.

With the holidays coming, you will even be carried along with me to decorate the house from top to bottom. So when the videos go up you may hear a colorful word or two as you see some of the cleaning, decorating or building. I will try to keep myself in check with it though. :-)

I hope that all of you who were following me before will stick around to see all that will be posted. This blog is about to fill up with all kinds of good stuff.

The projects that we have done since last post were the stone tile floors, a fence for the back yard, removal of brick backsplash in the kitchen, some paint, some trim, new stair treads this week (still not finished there or with the trim work). There will be tons of pics to come this week and some extra blog post on budgeting for family life.

Something else to come, we are about to start a refinance of our house and the plan is to take you on the ride for that as well. As real estate brokers we understand the process well, but the general public doesn't. So I thought it may be a good idea to show the process.

When I post some things you guys please feel free to comment on the post. The feedback lets me know what you guys think of it, as well as some things that you may have done on a budget that have worked for you.

Been a long while, but back at it!

Hello all, I know it has been a very long time since I last posted on this blog site. I am really sorry about that, but things here with our home had to be put on the back burner as I have been dealing with a lot of health problems, as well as my husband and I have been working really hard to try and start a new business. We have been doing some small things to the house, but most of that is having to be redone, thanks to a septic system that backed up downstairs and flooded our 1/2 bath and foyer down stairs.  This happened back in June over the holiday weekend. The vinyl floor that was put in place downstairs last December had to be torn up. Thank God it didn't mess up any of the carpet. We have decided to remove the remaining amount that is in the hallway and laundry room though.

That will be our next big project...we will be sanding our concrete floors downstairs in the foyer, hallway that we built, and the utility room as well as the 1/2 bath. Then it will be stained. Yes, you heard that right...we are going to keep the concrete floors, but when finished it will be beautiful. 

The things that we have been able to do is enclose the 4th bedroom, and it is about 80% complete. The door is still in that room leading outside, but that was because we couldn't find vinyl siding to match the rest of the house, and I was not willing to redo the entire house. Then 2 weeks ago, my husband found some that matched it, so come this fall we can work on finishing a few things, like putting in the new window we have for that bedroom and getting the door out, taking one of the roll up garage doors out, and framing it up for a standard door to go in.

We also took out those dreadful old sliding glass doors finally and have some french doors there now, they just need to be stained, and they are complete then, and best of all this past weekend, we got that very dark den with that old 70's paneling on the walls primed and painted. I LOVE the new color. The ceiling is scrapped, but we are going to have a man come finish the ceiling out, and we will paint it. This cuts down the time it takes us to complete something. My husband can do that work, but he is very slow at it, and this other man can do it all in one day, verses 2 weeks.

I wish I could say that we had this house complete, but the truth is, life just hasn't allowed it to happen. In fact, working in that den last weekend set me back quiet a bit and landed me in the hospital for 2 days. I am on strict rest this week. I am having to accept that I can not be a part of a lot of the jobs we do in the house, especially when chemicals are involved.

I hope that many of you who were following this blog before will pick up and follow us again now that we are trying to do more with the house to get it complete.  I will post a few pictures of the work we have done since the last postings.

Here are three of the hallway coming together. We decided on wall sconces for lighting because it just seemed to much for ceiling lights in there. 

These next pictures are of the new double french doors going in place of the old sliding glass doors in our downstairs den.

As you can see, they are unstained, and will get done this fall as the odor is rough, so we need to have the doors and windows open all day, and it is too hot right now for that one. They open up under our deck, and that is another project that we are going to be tackling eventually. We want to enclose it underneath and make it a screened in area with furniture.

The fist two pictures are of the den before anything was done in there. The others were from this past weekend after all the painting was done. I just love the lighter color with the dark trim. I am wanting to keep a rustic look in there, but have it more open and bright at the same time. 

I hope you guys enjoy the progress we are making. Feel free to comment or ask questions as we go. We are hoping to be back on track of being able to do a few things every couple of months here as well to keep us posting.

Until next time, find a project you want to do and enjoy knowing as you do the work, it is a part of you in your home. You are making your mark on your home. 

Almost time to start again....

I know it has been a month since the last post, but with the holidays and spending the New Year in the Childrens Hospital the house has not been top priority. It seems as though we are about to have another stay in that hospital first of this week as surgery is in the future of our 7 year old for kidney stones. We hope to be back at the construction here by first of February. The next step will be to start the building of the two extra bedrooms downstairs. I know there is a lot more that is cosmetically needed to the existing, but the bedrooms are a necessity and so the construction will begin as soon as everyone is well enough.  Stay tuned! Its gonna be big when we get going again :-)

Building for yard

Hi everyone.

This one has nothing to do with the inside of the house....well, not technically anyway. We had a building built in our back yard, but we got mostly the basics except for we asked for the walls to be taller. I wanted a barn style roof on the building, but that would have added another $1,000 to the price, and lets just be honest here....I am what my daddy used to call a tightwad. If it were really something important to the building, like making it stronger or making it last longer, I would have been all in, but just because I liked it better was not worth it. We also decided to pay $100 extra for the double door, that way we could get large items in and out of there easier. But if you notice,  there are no windows on the building and the inside of it was just 4 walls when they were done with building it.

The reason we decided to not put windows in were that they were $200 for each one they had to put in, and we had 2 brand new windows that we had purchased on Craigslist (Craigslist will become your best friend when doing big projects on a budget) for $45 a piece some time back. We were going to use them in our old garage, but ended up moving before we could do that renovation. We can put those in at a later date sometime. We did want to utilize the space inside the building though, so Brian and I spent two days out there in the freezing cold building a loft and shelves on one end. It only cost us $380 to do that. If the company had built the loft alone, with no extra shelves it would have been $500 more. See the savings of a little hard work and freezing your butt off???

Now most everything is to one side and up off the floor so you can walk in and see everything without having to step over it all. We are sooooo happy with this investment.  We had purchased a newer suburban a few months back, and had our old one for sale, so when it sold the week before the building was built, that paid for it all but $200.

The company that we hired, had it built in 2 days from the ground up and they are a local family run company. The man and his two sons came out and did all the work. I like buying local and helping the small business out, sometimes it is not always cheaper, but in this case they were WAY cheaper than the larger companies and especially like the buildings you see outside of a Home Depot that you can have built. I am talking $2,000-$5,000 cheaper. We are super pleased with this building and the quality.

My husband and I talked about it for a few months on whether or not to build it ourselves, but with the time it would have taken us to do this, and the urgency of the need, we decided with all the money we had saved so far on our remodel we would spend the $3,400 for the building. We couldn't begin the process of building the new additions after the first of the year without this building to hold all of our "crap" as Brian likes to call it.

Here are a few pictures of it going up and all the way finished with our additions of the loft and shelves that we built.

From the start of it going up....

The finished product....

The shelves that we added and the loft. You will be amazed how much this holds....

It holds so much stuff...We emptied out half of a really large 2 car garage into this space and some in the other areas that you will see, like furniture that cant go on the shelves.

This is the middle and other end of the building....still loads of room for storage in there.

LOVING IT!!!

Pretty cool I think :-)

I just wanted to add something here that I couldn't add in another place for some of you to see. It is really cool to me to see all the places that my blog is being viewed. I cant wait to see this continue to grow.  Thanks to everyone out there who is following our progress here on this journey. I really hope all of you that have been stopping by to see our progress will continue to do so.  This blog is making it even more fun for me as we tread through all the projects we have going on here in our house.

This is from early this morning, it doesn't show all the views, but it does show the recent ones.

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Our Family's Dream Home  ·  Stats  ›  Audience

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chalk board and bead board

Guess what??? Two more things to post tonight...I didn't think we would get anymore done this week. Our 7 year old has been in doctor offices and the hospital the last 2 days. But I did get the chalk board paint on the 2 panels of my pantry door. I am going to love having my pantry to write on. I know, I sound like a kid, but oh well it is really country and cute to me.

Note, the blue you see is the painters tape and the chalkboard paint was wet in this picture so it will not have that shine to it once it dried. The only things missing now are the cabinet doors to be ready and the trim around that door. Then the kitchen will be complete!!!! You have no idea what a wonderful feeling to be able to say that. We have been living with it all in a mess for many months now, so to have it this close to complete is such a sweet feeling.

Brian surprised me yesterday while I was at the hospital with Brylee, and when we got home he had started on the walls in the hall way. We had purchased bead board to go below the chair rail months ago. When we got it home, we quickly found out that the existing chair rail and baseboard was not going to work with all the bead board that we had purchased. This is one of those times when I said before there will be things that you budget for and the budget just doesn't work. There are always going to be unexpected expenses no matter how hard to you try to stick to a budget. So, we had to decide if we were going to send it all back and just paint below the chair rail, or if we were going to spend the extra $300 or so to replace the chair rail and baseboards. Well, as you can see, we went with it. We had to cut some other things that we wanted, but got the walls the way we had planned.

We purchased the chair rail that has been notched out for the bead board and it was really narrow, so we purchased another decorative trim piece to place underneath it and it looks great to me. We wanted real wood, not the pressed wood stuff, so it is unfinished, but that is okay, we had to paint the other trim and the bead board anyway, because it just comes primed.

This is a picture of the wall with the old chair rail and base board removed.

Here you can see the bead board is up and the new chair rail has a notch on the back to fit over the bead board.

In these two pictures you can see the two separate pieces that we chose for the chair rail.

These are two pictures from the master bath where the bead board and chair rail are complete. This shows what the finished product looks like. I think the small rope trim adds a nice touch to it. I look forward to having the rest of the areas finished off with this. In the end it will be in the two upstairs bathrooms, hallway and the dining room. Stay tuned to my page to see more finished projects.

Below are links to the YouTube page for a video on how to install this product. 

http://youtu.be/qk_COOetMHk

http://youtu.be/QF5C1z6M2o0