The Reno Life

Ian has made mention in past home renovations that I become on edge and seem stressed out. And I'm like, I don't know what you are talking about!!! (insert sarcasm here) What's there to be stressed about?! I mean who cares not knowing exactly when people are coming and going from your house? People that don't seem to care about locking the door, and shutting said door seems optional at times. Then there is the mess. The mess that seems to make it to every inch of the house. And let us not forget the keeping the kids out of the way. That's like the hardest one when the construction area is like a piece of candy drawing the kids in. And I can kiss nap time goodbye! 

I actually found a plunger sitting right next to our bed the other day. Our bed. The place where we lay our heads at night to sleep. The place that is supposed to be a refuge. And, I must not leave out that they set said plunger not just next to our bed, but on our WOOL RUG without anything between said rug and dirty plunger. Face palm. Puke face. I shouldn't even have to mention this, but you just know it was a man that placed the plunger there. I certainly wouldn't and wouldn't think most women would. But I am sure my husband is reading this right now thinking, "What's the big deal Jess?!" Which, for his sake, I should be sure to point out it was one of the construction guys that put it there, not Ian.

But it will all be worth it in the end. Right? It always is. But my goodness it is stressful, messy and difficult while going on. Not to mention we have never tackled a project of this size and money so I feel all anxious about every decision, fearing I may hate it in the end. Oh house projects, I love you, but I totally hate you. Frenemies. We must be frenemies. 

So lets look back at my room, when there wasn't a plunger sitting next to my bed...don't worry, it didn't sit there over night. You can see the bedside lights Ian got me for Christmas. And get a glimpse of said defiled rug that I still love...because it's grey and huge and pretty. And my newest house plant baby right next to my bed. 

In a few short weeks (hopefully!) I will be staring at a pretty new bathroom attached to my room and not thinking about dirty plungers next to my bed.  Also, I now realize we have an oddly large amount of pictures of ourselves in our room. I guess there's no mistaking who the inhabitants of the room are!

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Connor & Isla's Shared Room

Our house actually has four bedrooms, but one of those rooms is downstairs and for right now works great as a playroom, so everyone is upstairs together. When we first moved in, I put Connor in the larger room, assuming him and Callum would eventually share a bedroom. I was so excited with how both Connor and Isla's bedrooms turned out, though I never shared Isla's on the blog. But, after Callum sleeping horribly bunked up with Ian and I, I got a wild hair and while the kids were at school one day, moved Isla in with Connor. The transition with the two of them sharing a room actually went quite well. Me settling on how I wanted the room to be, not so much. 

This is actually the FOURTH way the kids beds have been arranged since sharing a room. But, I like this way the best so far and it's working really well. They are opposite of each other. Isla can see into the hall, which really helps her at night. And, this allows for both of them to sort of have their own little spot. 

Most of the stuff in their room has been repurposed from other parts of our house. I tend to rearrange things in our house a lot. For instance, the quilt on Connor's bed used to be on his bed a while ago and made a comeback with me wanting to simplify their room a bit...which that quilt is a Pottery Barn Kids one that I scored for $5 one time. Yep, totally bragging about that one. And the bookshelf above Isla's bed used to be a shelf in Connor's nursery way back in the day...then was in Isla's room for a while. And the night stand was originally for Isla's nursery, then went into Connor's room, then went away and is now back. I could go on and on, but you get the picture. 

^^ My apologies for the bed being slightly off center. I promise I will fix it!

^^ The little hobbit door goes to our attic. We don't actually have anything in there. I have big plans of us one day pushing that wall back several feet and making this room much bigger. Who needs an attic anyway when you also have a storage basement and a full attic over your back house?! Our house has crazy amounts of (mostly unused) storage.

^^ My parents actually bought these lockers. But I saw them and wanted them. The kids were super excited about them too.

Believe it or not, I actually took a lot out of the kids rooms in the last rearrange. Even though most of their toys are in the playroom, they each still had a bin of toys in here that I took out. It helps keep things cleaner. But even with just books, stuffed animals and pokemon cards (don't get me started on the pokemon cards!), they can do a lot of damage quickly.

I am really happy with how it turned out. And they seem to be too...and that's what really matters. This makes me think I probably should do an updated living room post at some point too, given that I have rearranged in there a couple times since moving in too...seriously, rearranging is kind of my hobby.

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Our Front Yard

We are in the middle of completely redoing our backyard. Like EVERYTHING up to the edge of the pool has been ripped out and is being redone. Anyway, in the middle of all that, Ian asked our concrete guy about adding on a walkway in the front yard and since it was super reasonable, we went for it. We had the flagstone taken out (and now have the yellow spots on our grass to prove that they sat there for two days) and replaced with 3 foot by 3 foot concrete squares. My favorite part of this is that we now have a true path over to our driveway where we park...you can see the front of my car stopped right at that path ;)

Here is what the front of the house looked like when we bought it.

Since moving in, we ripped out all the plants planted on the driveway side and replaced them with plants that make sense. I say "we", but what I really mean is my aunt and uncle showed up one afternoon in May with all the plants and did all the work while the kids and I sort of helped. You can't tell from a picture, but we also installed a small led can light in the arch above our front door, allowing us the privilege of now actually being able to see the key hole without getting out our cell phones to use as light to find it. And lastly, the walkway we just put in. Since this picture is in full sun, here is one from when the house was listed by the buyers

Did you know you can see all the photos associated with your house in the last several years on realtor.com? Well, because of that, we got to see what our house looked like before it was renovated in 2014. Here's the front of the house from then.

I just realized when I downloaded this picture that the house used to have a shake roof. They really changed a lot about the house when it was redone. And the tree on the right has grown a ton in just 3+ years! Anyway, here are a couple move photos of our new front walkway.

I really like it and am glad we made the last minute decision to do it. And Ian and I managed to place all that rock in half an hour. It was way easier than I expected. Also, in case you are wondering, I have no clue who put those pink flamingos in my front yard. They were just there one day when I came home. But the joke is on whoever put them there because I totally like them!

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Our House Front Entry and Hall

So, funny story about this entry and hallway of ours. When we bought the house, I thought the only things that would immediately need painting were the living and dining rooms that were very dungeon like and painted an olive green. As soon as we got the keys and went inside, it became apparent that the white walls were dingy and dirty. So, we chose a light grey for the whole house and went to painting. The house also didn't have baseboards, but quarter round, and Ian wanted baseboards installed. So, to make painting easier, Ian decided to roll a strip of grey paint around the bottom of all the walls as it meant he wouldn't have to paint right up to the baseboards after they were installed. Imagine my heart attack (anger?) when I walked in and saw that stripe everywhere. That eventually turned to laughter and it's a good thing...because it took SIX MONTHS before we finally finished painting the entry and hall way. 

There was also a very decorative, i.e. belongs in a teenage girls room, chandelier hanging in the entry and we swapped that out for something a little more our taste. Lastly, in a little alcove toward the back of the hall, I made a little center for the kids to hang their backpacks and jackets, put their shoes and a board to put all those papers that kids need and I tend to lose. 

The bench in the hallway used to be seating for our dining room table. At our last house, I decided to make it into a bit of an entry bench and loved having a place for us to take off our shoes, set things when we come in, etc, so did the same thing at this house. 

^^ So you get an idea of the layout of the house, on the right of the stairs is the living room, on the left is the dining room, which is also connected to the kitchen. The door on the left at the end of the hall also leads to the kitchen. At the end of the hall, to the right is a full bathroom and a bedroom.

^^ One of my favorite additions has been this little catchall area for the kids. First, it isn't practical to store a school backpack upstairs when we do homework downstairs. Second, it's so easy to tell the kids to put their stuff away and it ALL GOES AWAY IN THE SAME PLACE. Genius. And when they ask where something is...BAM! Yep, love it. 

Want to see more of our house? Here is the living room (before I changed it up...I am a rearranging addict folks!), dining room, our master bedroom (which now has a couple additions), Connor's room (before he was sharing with Isla) and Callum's room.

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Callum's Room

I had envisioned from the time Callum was born that he would transition out of our room and into Connor's room once he was sleeping through the night. Well, 14 months on and this kid has only slept through the night a handful of times! And, to be honest, his sleep went from good (I thought I birthed a sleep unicorn he slept so well) to pretty dang awful and has now landed somewhere in between.

A few months ago, at the crux of his bad sleep, I decided I had had enough and needed Callum out of our room. So, I moved Isla in with Connor and gave Callum his own room. There are still remnants of Isla in this room, as that was both her rug and dresser. The rest has sort of come together. It's a bit of a hobbit room, with the low ceiling. But it also has a quaint feeling to it...though I do sort of detest the wall light, but haven't really ever looked into other options. It was just there when we bought the house.

Callum is sleeping slightly better...well more than slightly, but less than incredibly, but you get the picture. The other nice thing is this room is fully baby proof and we have a gate installed in the doorway, so he can easily be left in there for a time and not get into too much trouble. Though his current favorite thing is removing all the contents from all the dresser drawers he can reach.

I still envision that eventually Callum and Connor will share a room, but if there is anything that three kids has taught me, it's that things are so fluid, you never know where anything will land! And, for the time being, Connor and Isla sharing a room is going great. And, what do they say? If it's not broke, don't fix it! So that is how it shall remain for now.

^^ The crib from Scotland that all three of my babies have slept in...and has the teeth marks on it to prove it! 

^^ I made this mobile for Callum when I was big and pregnant with him. And I still totally love the simplicity of it. Sometimes, when I am putting him to bed, I will just stare at it and watch it slowly move.

Want to see more of our house? So much of it has already changed, since I'm always rearranging, but here's what the living room used to look like, Connor's room when it was just his room, our master bedroom and the dining room. 

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Our Dining Room

^^ Those shadows on the ground literally make me giddy. Plus, house plants...my new obsession. 

^^ The view of the dining room from the kitchen.

I never knew I could love a dining room so much until we moved into this house. The way the sunlight fills this room for so much of the day constantly draws me in. I find myself enjoying sitting in here to read the paper, chat with friends, color with Isla and more. I don't know if I will ever stop being giddy at the shadows of the pane windows on the ground. It really is one of my favorite things.

Our dining room is off the front of the house, connected to the kitchen. In our old house, you essentially had to walk through the dining room to get anywhere in the house. So it became a dumping grounds and I hated that. Plus, it was small and we realistically couldn't seat more than our family to eat, so it made it really difficult to have people over. Well, all that has changed here. And in the seven months that we have lived here, we have probably had more people over for dinner than in the five years we lived at our last house. No joke. Not only is our dining room much larger, but we also now have a nine foot long dining room table. Sure, we don't own enough chairs for it, but it just allows those Ikea folding chairs we bought when we first got married to get some use! I work hard at keeping the table from being a catch all. Even though it collects things, I try to make sure it's cleared off daily.

Since buying the house, we took the doors off the dining room that essentially closed the dining room off from the entryway of our house. I'm not huge on interior doors, plus they took up a lot of room when open. We did leave the door on between the kitchen and dining room, though I have never actually shut it for any other reason than to block Callum. We also painted over the olive green paint that made the room look like a dark dungeon and painted it the same grey as the rest of the house. And it got baseboards, like the rest of the house. I replaced the curtains that were hanging in there, but kept the sheer curtains they had up because I like the privacy they give. We replaced the light fixture as well. They had a shell chandelier up. Not my style at all...and really not the style of almost anyone that saw it. One of my good friends totally dug it though. That cracked me up. Ian actually picked out the light we went with. Everything else is from our old house - the lockers, wine glass shelves (they were in our old kitchen), etc. I got the house plant for in here at the same time as the one in our bedroom. I need to get a proper stand for it, but for the time being, it gets to rest upon an antique toddler chair. I now realize I never took a picture of the corner opposite of the house plant, but all it houses is Callum's high chair...and the reality is that corner is the most used corner in the room because the boy likes to eat!

So there you have it, our dining room. Want to come over and use, err, I mean see it? Offer to bring dinner and I'll totally let you ;)

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Our Bedroom

I never really liked our bedroom in our last house. I was practically embarrassed of it and never really showed it off. I closed the door when people came over and certainly never put pictures of it up on my blog. It was small, dark and had the most stained up carpet in it. When we moved out and that carpet was ripped out and those original hardwood floors refinished (not to mention the walls being painted), my heart jumped a bit. Alas, I never lived in it in that state. I lived in it how it was and I treated it how I felt. It became a dumping ground for anything and everything...before Callum came along and we had to make space for another roommate in that tiny room! 

Anyway, our bedroom in our new house is literally the opposite of our old. It is a true master bedroom. It has a bathroom attached. Something that we have for the first time in 13 years of marriage. And, I have to say, I totally love having our own bathroom. Anyway, this room is larger, brighter and has beautiful hardwood floors. Since moving in, we painted this room, added baseboards, installed a ceiling fan and got some furniture. Just in October we got "adult" dressers. Before, we had been using dressers from Ian's childhood. I also scored our headboard from craigslist. And we replaced the curtains that were in the bedroom when we bought the house. My newest addition to the bedroom is the house plant. And I totally love it. It makes me ridiculously happy. No joke. A house plant. I know, it doesn't make sense, but the plant actually makes me smile. Eventually I would like to find a big rug that would go under our bed, as well as night stands and some sort of fun (I'm picturing something hanging) lights for either side of our bed. Oh, and I have my eye on an industrial laundry hamper. 

In the mean time, enjoy what our room looks like now...I know I certainly do. I mean, I actually make my bed now because my room just brings me such joy. And, if I actually get the opportunity to nap (which rarely happens with three kids anyway!), I just mess up the bed. #nuffsaid

 

^^ How can you not smile looking at that beauty?!

^^ This picture man. Circa 2001. I had bleached my hair and was growing it out. But look how happy we were. We apparently didn't care about the hot mess that was on my head! Oh, and that heart shaped rock I picked up off the beach in Hawaii this last summer. 

^^ I literally fretted so much about what to hang over our bed. In the end, I went with two pictures of us, printed on wood. Which my brother made fun of because apparently he doesn't decorate his room full of pictures of himself...to each his own, I guess ;)

^^ My aunt got us this pillow as an anniversary present one year. I love personalized things, so totally dug it.

In case you want to see more of our home, here's a bit about how we found it, what our living room looked like (i've already rearranged it and changed some things) and Connor's room (before I decided to have Connor and Isla share a room). I'm one of those people that love's rearranging and changing things up, so our house is ever changing.

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