a remodeling story

The guest room is completed and ready for its first guests.

When Daniel sat down at the table the other night-- after finishing the last bit of caulking and the final brush strokes and having carried the heavy mattress set up our steep, narrow stairs by himself so that I could set about with all the "primping" work in the room-- he looked at me with an incredulous look in his eye:

"It's finished. It's... done."

(Well, the interior is done, anyway. Please ignore the Tyvek exterior for a bit longer. Lord willing, we sure do hope to tackle that this summer.)

Perhaps you, dear reader, can't comprehend what a monumental thing this is-- though if you've ever done remodeling, I'm guessing you can.

We are done, hallelujah!

It's a bit of a story, this house addition thing.

Too long and still a bit too deeply personal to share right here and right now. But suffice it to say: on the surface, they're just rooms. But for me, they're the awesome, obedience-inspiring provision of God.

Anyway.

In June of 2011 we blew open our roof to make more bedrooms for our [ever-expanding!] family. Up until then, we'd had a 2-3 bedroom house, and we needed more space. We tossed around selling and buying a bigger house, but it wasn't going to be a practical option. We had been able to purchase our house for far less than we would be able to upgrade for-- not to mention, I like my house. I like the age of it, the details of it, the flow of it. Finding a 4+ bedroom house in our area isn't easy to begin with, but finding one I really like?

Yeah.

Adding on was going to be the best option.

For those first two weeks of renovation, we hired some good friends/contractors to do the tricky work: severing the major beam that ran the length of the house and restructuring accordingly, framing and sheathing and roofing the new space, and laying the new subfloor. You can take a look at my facebook album for more pictures of that time.

When we started, the top of our stairs looked like this. On the left is the boys' bedroom door; on the right is the [old] doorway that led to the 3/4 bath and the girls' bedroom. This is the picture from Day #1, and you can see that they had removed a small window and the sheetrock that had been straight ahead. 

 

Those two weeks were dusty, commotion-filled, exciting days! The process of new framing is pretty cool, if you ask me. Seeing space that wasn't come into being was awesome.

 

When the initial push was done, the picture below was the view from the top of the stairs. Already transformed, but still with quite a bit of work ahead: electrical, insulation, sheetrock, taping, flooring, trim, doors, painting-- not to mention the plumbing and tiling in the bathroom that we had ripped out. I don't think either of us realized just how many "days off" would be required to complete the job! We estimated about a year to complete all the interior work; the true time frame was 20 months.

 

Here we are today: finished landing (which is the same square footage as the original landing, but without the knee-wall directly in front of you and having torn down the wall that divided it in two, it feels much bigger), finished bathroom (around the corner on the right), and finished bedrooms (ours is the door directly ahead on the left; the guest room is the door directly ahead on the right). 

 

The bathroom was finished last March, just before Elliot's arrival. I literally tiled those walls while pregnant with a 9lb baby. Nesting taken to a whole new level.

 

Double sinks are where it's at, I tell ya. With 6 kids, it still feels like we're short a sink or two, but it does help an awful lot! 

 

Now for the bedroom picture tour, but with a caveat: I did nothing to prep these rooms for photos. Nothing. I'm assuming the pictures are too small to show dust bunnies and fingerprints, and that the less-than-perfectly-organized closet will be looked upon with grace. I thought about waiting until sometime when the bathroom and bedrooms are freshly cleaned, but, well, the chances of all those spaces being freshly cleaned on the same exact day are slim to none!

Our bedroom:

 

That closet might not seem like much, but it is crazy good in my book! You have to understand that I spent more than a year beforehand without a real closet at all-- and even before then we had a closet that was simply a rod behind bi-fold doors. No organization, no efficiency. This closet makes me smile just about every single day of my life.

Moving on.

The nursery/guest room, which is the last piece of the puzzle (you know... if you're not including the exterior, which I'm not since it's winter and I forget that we even have an exterior about this time of year):

 

Here are the details on the nursery/guest room, since it's the "newest" addition to the home:

Before Elliot was born, I bought this zebra for him for his Easter basket. I didn't know if we were having a boy or a girl, but I had a strong hunch that blue was on the horizon-- and even if it was a girl, I figured I could tie a bow around the zebra's neck and make it a bit more feminine. He was just too cute to pass up.

And I knew as soon as I bought it that I wanted to freshen up all the crib bedding, too. The old stuff was, well, old. Five babies later, it was torn in some spots, worn through in others from many washings, and stained. I decided to go with an inexpensive, all-white set and then just look for a nice blanket to bring in a touch of something special and personal.

 

After Elliot was born, I saw a picture on pinterest of a quilt. It was perfect for him. Perfect to go with his zebra. Perfect to pair with all white crib bedding.

My only dilemma was that I don't quilt.

Lucky me, I have a friend on pinterest who saw the picture and messaged me, asking me if I would like her to make it for me. Um, yes please?

Another friend helped me pick out the fabric, I delivered it to the afore-mentioned friend, and not many days later the completed quilt arrived. It is flawlessly constructed and just right for my chevron-wearing baby.

And it inspired the color scheme for the entire room.

I majored on gray and white (the walls are Benjamin Moore Feather Down, the trim is Benjamin Moore Sandy Hook Gray, the bedding is all gray & white from Ikea) and just added pops of yellow here and there (close-out Urban Outfitters curtains, leftover quilt fabric in thrift store embroidery hoops, and yellow suitcases rescued from the stoop across the road). I wanted to keep the more permanent things simple. Yellow accents can easily be swapped out at a later date if I grow tired of the color scheme. This particular gray and white combination is very Sense and Sensibility-ish, which I can tell you very confidently, I will never grow tired of.

 

I'm not great with crafts of any kind. I don't sew. I don't draw or paint. But I can print!

I needed something for the wall above the crib. Ideally, I'd like a shelf with fun, little boy knick knacks. Realistically, I had zero dollars to work with. So I rummaged through some frames I was no longer using elsewhere and found three matching white ones in my stash. A bit bigger would be better; this size does the trick. A softer yellow would be nicer; a bird in hand is worth two in a bush. I then printed and framed three verses I wanted hung right above where my baby sleeps.

Ta-da.

That right there is DIY for simpletons like me.

 

I love a good house project. I really like the process: seeing things take shape, learning lessons of perseverance and when to hit things hard and when to pull back so that we can invest in other areas, working hard to create something beautiful right here where I live each and every day of my life. Sometimes people ask me why I like cleaning and decorating and cooking. It isn't because I think I'm so amazing at any of it, and it certainly isn't to impress anyone (quite frankly, I'm not good enough at any particular area to really hang with the professionals!).

It's because this is my home and I was created to be a homemaker.

My home won't look quite like yours. In some seasons the hammers will be ringing and the dust will be flying, and in others the blankets will be folded nicely and the books will be organized just so. In yet others, pb&j will be nothing short of a masterful kitchen creation because they were made by weak hands, sick with illness or preoccupied with the growing of a new life or just plain weary.

For now, I am relishing a job finished; the celebration of having thrown my heart and soul into something and now getting to look back and say, "It is good."

Not perfect (let me be the first to say, nothing here in this world is ever perfect), but good.

The end.