Board & Batten

We've been doing a bunch of house projects lately, mostly paining. It's addicting once you start! You see the transformation in one space and it makes you think of all the other spaces you could change. The big project on our list was the dining room, we've been planning it out for a long time and getting up lots of courage to actually tackle it. Painting is one thing but board and batten is a little more permanent. It includes saws and nail guns and that's a little intimidating. 

We started by taping off everything and measuring and then measuring again. We went to the hardware store and priced out supplies, we calculated and planned and borrowed tools. Then we planned a Saturday we could actually execute on all those plans. Christopher was the procurement manager when we went to Home Depot on Friday night. He counted all the tubes of caulk and liquid nails. He watched the worker cut the boards and waved to all the people we saw.

Bright and early the next morning we set to work getting all those boards on the walls. We got the boards (the horizontal pieces) up before Topher's first nap- the compressor and nail gun freaked him out a bit but he was mostly just curious about what the heck was happening to his house. While he napped I measured and Thomas cut the battens (the vertical pieces). We had to measure and number each piece individually since we live in an old house and nothing is straight. When Topher woke up all we had to do was slap them up on the wall. And by slap them up on the wall I mean carefully glue, measure and level each piece before nailing it.

Installing the battens went much more quickly than I expected it to, Thomas watched Topher and I installed all 30 of them in about an hour. I was quite intimidated by the nail gun at first but it wasn't so bad. I didn't even shoot myself in the foot or anything! We managed to get all the caulking done that afternoon too.

We spent the following week painting each night after the baby was in bed. This part seemed to take forever! It was such an intricate process to make sure everything was coated nicely.

Then it was time to try and figure out what color we wanted for the top portion of the room. We had originally wanted grasscloth wallpaper but after pricing it out we decided on paint- much less expensive! It was between Benjamin Moore Twilight (left) or Benjamin Moore Galapagos Turquoise (right).

I really loved the Galapagos Turquoise but in the end it was just a little too green for the vision I had for the room. We went with Twilight and it's perfect! It's such a rich, deep looking blue with just a hint of green in the bright afternoon.

The finishing process on a project like this seems to take the longest time. It was two coats if white plus touch ups, two coats of blue plus touch ups and then making sure everywhere the colors met was perfect. You really see imperfections in such contrasting colors.

The end result could but be more perfect to me. It's almost exactly how I'd imagined it would turn out and has completely transformed the feel of the whole house.  

We've now completely covered all of the yellow walls on the main floor! Next up is probably the stairway but that area has some very interesting issues were going to have to work around. I think we might take a break from home things till after the holidays!

Home Updates

When we bought our house last year it had recently been remodeled and I feel lucky that we found a house we could afford in such great condition. The interior was painted a tan-yellow color and although it wasn't horrible I never really loved it. I prefer gray and that's what we chose to paint our bedroom the day we closed on the house. My plan was to paint the whole interior soon after we moved in but finding out I was pregnant a few days after we closed put a damper on that.

I feel like we've just recently reached the point where we have the time and mental capacity to really work on the house. It's crazy how much a baby can change your life!

The first project we decided to take on was the kitchen. The cupboards are a cream color with an orange-red distressing on the doors. The tan-yellow walls weren't a hugely offensive clash but it just did not go together. The colors were just off and it was so boring! We toyed around with choosing a gray but we couldn't pick one that went with the cupboards and the granite and the tile. It just wasn't meant to be a gray kitchen. We thought of blue or even an orange but in the end we chose a dark red- Benjamin Moore Heritage Red.

This simple change has made such a huge difference in how the house feels. It's like someone actually lives there now! It was a great place to start making changes in the house because it was very quick to finish and the impact was bold and satisfying.

Since we loved the kitchen change so much we decided to bite the bullet and paint the living room too. After Christopher went to bed one night we pulled the leftover paint from our bedroom out of the basement and did a first coat. We thought it would take longer since it's such a large room but the windows and doorways made the process very quick. We picked up more paint in the morning and finished the rest of the painting while Christopher napped. This gray is one of our favorites- Benjamin Moore Revere Pewter. We now have it in our bedroom, the guest room and the living room and we will probably paint the office and main floor bathroom this color too. It looks different in each of these rooms but I am in love with it!

This is what it looked like when we first moved in:

^^See that plant there? That's our rubber tree, it's much bigger now and I am very proud of that!^^

This change wasn't as bold or obvious as the kitchen but again, it totally changed the feel of the room. It looks so much more modern, the drapes look better (they had the same issue as the kitchen cupboards- just slightly clashing), and it just looks more "us".

The most recent change is one I have been wanting since the first time we saw this house- getting rid of the huge "old lady" shrubs in front of the house. I am fairly certain these bushes have been in front of our house since it was built in 1953. They were too old to just cut back because the branches were so thick. They weren't fluffy like you'd think they should be. Plus I just hated the look of them! 

This summer a boy in our church congregation has been mowing our lawn and his eyes lit up when we offered him a big chunk of money to get rid of these beasts. He, his dad and younger brother came over one evening with the chain saw and in a matter of minutes they had cut these bushes back to stumps. Our law doubled in size and I was giddy!

I want to plant some hydrangeas and peonies out there and maybe some tulip or buttercup bulbs. I also have a pack of hollyhock seeds from my grandma's garden that I want to attempt to grow. I have managed to keep our rubber plant alive for about three years and an herb garden alive all summer so I am feeling pretty confident in my gardening skills right now. Or I could kill them all in one season and have to start over. Either way, I am going to try and bit by bit this house will become ours!

Halloween 2015

We have loved owning our own home this year. It's been nice to live in a neighborhood rather than an apartment! We've been looking forward to celebrating the holidays in our own home before we even started looking for a house in earnest- we bought about 20 strings of Christmas lights on clearance last year just in case we had our own place by this December.

Our town is pretty big on Halloween, I think it has something to do with the proximity to Salem (yes the Witch Trials Salem). Our town has a Halloween parade every year and people put up lights and all sorts of decorations on their houses. I really like Halloween but we have never had trick-or-treaters come to our door since we've been married- not many people come to apartments with a door code on the building. Thomas never had trick-or-treaters come to his door growing up either, he lived down a spooky looking lane and nobody ever dared venture down there for a treat.

This year Thomas cooked up an idea to do something a little more than just hand out candy. We decided to go all out to be the cool house on the block. We borrowed a fire pit from some friends, brought out all the lawn chairs and set up a hot chocolate and cider station.

We invited some friends to come trick-or-treat in our neighborhood and use our house as a home base to keep warm. Everyone that came down the road was welcome to enjoy the fire in the driveway and we whipped up fresh hot chocolate all night. We finally met some of our neighbors which was nice especially since we've lived here since March and know pretty much none of them.

I think we might make this a yearly tradition, it turned out to be a huge hit and was so simple to put together. Plus, I love any excuse to have a good bonfire.

5 Things I Won't Miss About Apartment Living

1. The dogs. Now, I don't hate dogs but I am generally not a huge fan of them. I just get nervous around dogs I don't know, they always leave fur on my clothes and they smell- even clean, well groomed dogs. I know there are dog lovers out there who are going to try to convince me otherwise but I will not be swayed.

Our apartment complex is full of dogs. I can hear the two upstairs from us barking all day long, they jump at the door and howl every time someone walks past their door and when the owners take them out they rarely have them leashed and they always come running straight at me. For someone who is nervous about dogs, it's awful! Most of the dog owners in our complex let them do their business right outside the front door all winter. This makes for a disgusting slushy mess. Seriously, everyone has to walk right through poop alley to get into the building! Just take your dog 20 more feet from the door and for the love of Pete pick up it's poo- even in the winter when you think the snow will cover it up. When spring hits, BAM! poo everywhere.

I also don't think it's very fair to have big dogs crammed in an apartment all day. Some of the dogs in our building are pretty good sized (one neighbor had two Great Danes!!) and I think it's got to be terrible for them to be trapped inside all day while their owners are at work. I've seen some cases where I feel like it's very irresponsible and selfish of the owners to put their dogs in that situation.

Not sure if you can tell but this is a big issue for me. I am realllllly looking forward to not having to deal with this any more.

2. Neighbors who leave their stuff all over the place. This wasn't an issue until our new neighbors across the hall moved in. I don't know where all this junk comes from but it's everywhere in the hallways. We asked if we were allowed to keep our bikes in the hallway and were told no by the complex management. Our neighbors however, have stored easy chairs, bookcases, storage boxes, laundry baskets full of random things and their garbage in the hall for days on end. Just the other night I took this picture:

3. Parking. There is never enough of it at our complex. In the winter it's made even worse by the piles of snow that are mounded into some of the spaces. People in our complex also seem to think that they don't need to park properly. I've seen people park right in the middle of two spaces, pull in at almost a 45* angle, park in the handicap spot every single night even though they don't have a placard to do so. We consistently have to park at the far end of the parking lot since there are not enough spaces and, although this is definitely a first world problem, it annoys me to no end.

4. Not being able to grill or have our own outdoor area. Again, this is such a first world problem but we weren't allowed to even store our little gas grill on our small patio let alone use it. The poor thing spent most of the last two years either at the bottom of our storage closet or in the trunk of Thomas' car. And it wasn't in his car because we were taking it somewhere. There was just no more room for it in the closet. The outdoor space we had was a small patio where the ash from our upstairs neighbors' cigarettes dropped and the grass behind our house was constantly covered in cigarette butts. The landscapers did a great job of leaf-blowing dirt, twigs and said cigarette butts onto our patio every week or so.

5. Space. When we moved into our little 2 bed, 2 bath apartment we were so excited to have all this extra space for storage. We have a lot of camping gear and Christmas decorations plus we've been trying to grow our food storage. We don't have a TON of stuff because Thomas and I are very committed to not being hoarders. As mentioned in #4 we couldn't store anything on our patio. We found ourselves having less and less space every day especially when we started renting out our spare bed and bath. Our bikes were very carefully parked next to our bed, food storage was packed under our bed and in the TV console. There was a bag of rice behind our bedroom door for about a year. I kept meaning to move it but there was just nowhere to put it. A lot of our storage was inaccessible which meant that we never used things we should have and if we went through the trouble to dig it out it stayed out. We had leftover Christmas decorations still hanging around when we began packing to move in March.

We've been in our house for a few weeks now and we are loving it! It's been nice to stretch out and really be able to make things our own. We are looking forward to BBQs this summer and lots of other exciting things! We can finally see our entire back yard and although it could use a little TLC it's not covered in dog poop or cigarette butts! Winning!

5 Things About Buying Your Own House

I have realized a few things since beginning the process of buying a house:

1. This process is not for the faint of heart.

2. There is no limit to the things I have the ability worry about. Unless I know where the worst case scenario cap is, I can worry to the moon and back about things that are extremely unlikely and over which I have no control.

3. There are SO many moving parts and hoops to jump through when buying a house. I had no idea there were so many people involved from every angle imaginable and then some!

4. There is no point in comparing the price of a house in Boston to that of one in Texas or Utah or Idaho or even California. So what if I could buy three houses in Texas for the price of one here? I don't live in Texas, I won't live in Utah and I'm not sure what the heck we'd do in Idaho so it doesn't matter. Living in a van at the beach in Santa Barbara is still an enticing option however.

5. Buying things for your VERY OWN house is really fun albeit expensive. We bought a washer, dryer and fridge the other week and I felt very grown up.

We are just crossing our fingers and toes that everything continues to go smoothly and that by the end of this month we will be living in our cute little Cape house on Hamilton Road.

Bonus thing I've learned:

I have no idea where the camera lense is on my phone.