Home Away from Home

Last weekend we were able to make an extra-long weekend and head North to my family's lake cabin. Our home away from home. My grandparents bought this little gem 37 years ago and poured their blood, sweat and tears into fixing it up.

Since my grandmother passed away and my parents took on ownership, they've done a  great round of updating and modernizing. Including finishing the attic and building a dormer off the front to expand the second floor. (All the construction was done by my amazing brother-in-law, who's working on our dining room renovation right now.)

The cabin is tucked underneath a wooded mountain and directly across the street is this beauty. A teeny little lake that is perfect for swimming, canoeing and exploring. There's no cell reception, no TV, and you have to drive miles on dirt roads to get to anything near civilization. Sooo peaceful.

My kids spend most of their time at the lake perfecting their cannon-balls and inventing new dive techniques.

Every Memorial Day weekend, the little village has the most amazing, small-town parade you could ever see. This year a National Guard marching band came down.

The bagpipes get me every time...

These guys have the MOST fun with their mini-motorcycles.

Love the old-time rescue vehicles.

Civil-war era...

...to the Minutemen from the Revolutionary War.

The highlight for my kids is an ice cream from the general store.

Stay tuned for more progress on the home-front.

Kitchen Organization for Kids Stuff

Between an intense but short work week and an extra long weekend away, things have screeched (is that a word?) to a halt on the kitchen/dining room reno. But, my wheels are turning with ideas to improve our kitchen organization.

If you have school-aged kids, you know just how much STUFF they come home with every day. Backpacks full of papers, folders, art projects and lunch bags. Plus, you really need a central calendar system so everyone knows which days certain activities happen.

Right now we have a mish-mash of semi-organization at various locations in the house. The kids hang their backpacks on hooks by the front door. No where near where they actually put all the STUFF from the backpacks. Plus, I'd really like to keep the hooks by the front door for guests and not have kid clutter be the first thing you see when you walk in the door.

I showed you a couple of shots on the Kitchen tour, shown here. This little patch of counter where we dump papers and charge phones. Clear on the other side of the room we have the phone and family calendar.

But now that we've taken out the kitchen/dining room wall and this trash can will go into a pull-out cabinet in the new island, this patch of wall seems like a good solution spot:

That little wall is right next to the drop zone. At first I started thinking of built-in entryway cubbies but the only spot big enough is in the dining room. What we really needed was some hooks for backpacks and wall space for our family calendar. I got inspired by some pins like this:

Then I found this wall cubby with hooks from Target. I loved the idea of hanging it halfway up the wall and using the hooks for backpacks. With 3 kids, these 3 cubbies would be perfect for storing kids lunch bags.

After looking around on Target.com I came across this bathroom shelf for only $59.99. At 25 inches wide, it's the perfect fit for that little piece of wall. 

I love the x-design on the side and that there are 3 hooks. I'll take some "after" pics soon once this beauty arrives and we get it up on the wall. Stay tuned.

Paint it...Greige?

It is time for the finishing touches on the kitchen/dining room renovation. We're still waiting on the cabinets and countertops for the island and built-in sideboard but everything else is ready for paint.

But first, there are a boat load of nail holes that need filling, sanding, refilling, sanding, and cleaning. I try to avoid that part but asking Freckle Man to take that on when there are many other projects I need him to accomplish seems silly. So I'm trying to get myself motivated here.

As for the actual painting, I love the IDEA of painting. I love change. But once I'm painting, eh, I don't love it so much. But since the wall was taken down there's more than just touching up to do. Both rooms need an overhaul. And since what once were two very separate rooms are now one big room, I'd like to make them one consistent color.

Here's a view of where the dining room and kitchen meet up. The dining room color is a tan that ended up having a lot of pink undertones. I liked it at the time, but, I'm over it. The kitchen is an off-white/yellow from the previous owners.

The funny thing is that I painted the same test patches on both sides but the color look really different in the two rooms. On the dining room side we have Benjamin Moore's bleeker beige (top left), greenbriar beige (top right) and Revere pewter (bottom). On the kitchen side is bleeker beige (top) and Revere pewter (bottom). I guess the lighting is pretty darn different in the two rooms. I narrowed it down to the bleeker beige and Rever pewter...wasn't a big fan of the greenbriar beige.

The bleeker beige is a basic, everyday kind of beige.

Here's what it looks like in a room. So pretty when contrasted against white trim and accents.

But as much as I love earth tones, I was looking for something more on the gray side. Greige. Enter Benjamin Moore's Revere pewter:

It's such a nice shade with cool tones and just a touch of beige.

My hope is that the dining room that currently looks like this:

will end up like this:

I'm hoping to sneak in some prep and painting time this weekend in between various kids events. I hope that once I get started I'll gain some momentum and crank it out. Stay tuned!

UPDATE: Check out the final look here!

Outside Tour: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

In addition to a bunch of work indoors, our new house needs a substantial amount of outdoor work as well. Let's go on a little tour shall we?

Let's start with the Good. There's a huge planting bed in the front of the house that has all sort of nice flowering shrubs and bushes. Here's a sampling:

To the right of the front door

To the left of the front door

Aren't these flowers amazing?

Here's a view from the left side of the house. These nice shrubs line the planing bed and the stone retaining wall is in pretty good shape. Beyond the shrubs you can see a pretty Japanese maple.

Looking out the front door, you see this beauty. Every house in the neighborhood has one, with either white flowers or pink. Ours has both! When we looked more closely we discovered that ours is actually two trees growing together. Cool, huh?

Heading past the stone wall towards the back yard you come to another planting bed. Last spring we got an awesome surprise when these peonies bloomed:

No flowers yet

On the other side as you go to the back, we have this giant azalea and some giant oaks that we hung a hammock in between.

I daydream about reading and napping in this bad boy!

The back yard is pretty wild but is borders on 40+ acres of conservation land forest. We love hiking on the trails back there and it's virtually  no maintenance.

The right side of the house is pretty neglected, mostly because we just don't go over there much. This seems to be where the previous owners planted the most flowers though. It looks like a bunch of tiger lilies have come up and there are even a few irises, one of my favorite flowers. The only problem is that they're planted right in front of the utility boxes, like this one:

Ok, now for the Bad.

Our yard is chock-full of weeds. And when you have a husband who tries to mow as few times as possible, you end up with it looking like this:

And with a really dry spring, the weeds survive and grass dries out and dies:

We usually find the low-maintenance, foresty feel of the back yard to be a plus, but the downside is that we have random patches of dirt where no grass is growing. Or anything for that matter.

BTW, this porch is one of our favorite parts of the house. We dine and entertain out there all summer. 

All right, this is a little embarrassing to show the Ugly, but I'm determined to share it all. When we bought the house there were GIGANTIC shrubs by the mailbox and lining the right side of the driveway. Here's a pic from when the house was on the market:

Well, Freckle Man yanked those suckers right out. We've put together a nice planting area near the mailbox. Unfortunately, the deer thought our new plants were a tasty treat over the winter. Some survived the damage but this one is just looking sad:

The green at the bottom doesn't look like enough new growth to ever fill the space so this one will be replaced

To the right of the driveway, there were about 6 more shrubs. After they came out, we were left with this dirt mound. Freckle Man is convinced a bobcat rental is in order but the very idea of him driving heavy machinery makes me shudder.

The "grassy" areas in the side yard aren't all that grassy anymore either:

So that's the outdoors of our home in a quick tour. Hopefully we'll get some progress shots soon. Next steps are:

• Laying down grass patch
• Setting up a watering system
• Grading the side dirt mound with a bobcat
• Framing out the playset area and
• Putting in peastone or soft synthetic material

Stay tuned!

Dining Room Reno Progress

Things have slowly been progressing with our kitchen dining room renovation project. First up, we (me and my brother-in-law/contractor) taped off the boxes for the faux paneling. It took a bit of tinkering to get the spacing to look right. We also had to work around a heater on this wall:

On the other wall, we wondered if we should space the bottom edge to be in line with the heater wall or space it closer to the base molding. We went for the latter because we thought it would look weird for the box to be up substantially higher. Here's the lower version:

After about an hour of cutting, BAM, up went the trim for the paneling:

As much as I can't WAIT to paint over this red (yes, I did paint it that color in the first place) it actually looks kinda cool with the white boxes.

My BIL then spacled and filled a bunch of holes. On the other side of the room, he did a lot of trim and finish work to frame out the space left when we took the wall between the kitchen and the dining room down.

There was about a 1-1.5 inch difference in the wood flooring in the dining room and the tile in the kitchen given that whoever remodeled the kitchen just added on another layer of flooring. BIL did a fabulous job with this transition:

It is a beautiful piece of wood, 12 feet long, and when you walk over it, the elevation change is so subtle.He also had to trim back some tiles on the kitchen side and do a little regrouting. It looks perfecto!

To frame out the opening we did a basic molding with a cap block on the top. Can't wait to paint that sucker!

He also put chair rail with a nice little return on the end to polish it off:

Here are the next steps:

• Paint -- greige on top, white on bottom
• New rug and curtains
• Shuffle artwork around
• Order cabinets and granite/marble for the built-in sideboard for over here

Thanks for reading and stay tuned!