Room Shuffle

We decided to do a little room shuffling this summer. Eli, Justus, and JD stayed put. Hayden and Wesley moved into what was Annabeth's room. Annabeth moved into the former school room. The biggest task was moving all the school items and books into the living room. As long as we were moving all the school stuff out to the main living area we thought we'd move the computers out there as well. Previously, they had been in our bedroom.

I spent a lot of time looking at bookshelf ideas online. Thankfully, we have an Ikea relatively close so we knew we could get decent bookcases there inexpensively. I finally came up with a plan including an "Ikea hack" to build two small desks into the shelves. The hardest part was deciding what color bookcases to buy. In the end with went with white. I really liked the look of wood grain, but Ikea's version was quite dark and I knew it would show dust and really darken the room. Our living room doesn't have much natural light so in the end the white seemed like a better idea.

Here are a few before photos:

We made the trip to Ikea and bought seven white Billy bookcases. We decided to put doors on two of them to hide some of the less attractive school items. We also got a table that we would end up cutting in half to make the two desks.

I removed all the books from the shelves. I got rid of a few, but most were just set to the side to await the construction of their new home.

Jerry spent several hours over several days assembling. I put one together myself, but made a mistake and was demoted to assistant. They were pretty easy to put together and when you do so many in a row you kind of get it down after a couple.

Once the shelves were done, we got to work on the desks. We didn't put any of the books in place just in case we had second thoughts. The desks were pretty simple, basically just an Ikea table cut in half. We did reinforce the shelf they rest on with some L brackets and screw the table into place. In order to get the computers plugged in we did have to cut/drill a few holes.

It was looking good and the desks worked out great so we started putting the books into place.

We had books all over the house that are now housed together. We still need to figure out something for the top, it's a little plain right now, but overall we are really happy with how it turned out. 

It is nice to have the computers out of our room. Now if someone is on the computer they aren't hidden away from the rest of the family. We'll see how it goes doing school at the kitchen table. We've never really done that before!

Mending Fences (Again)

Another spring, another fence to mend. Is that a saying? Maybe it should be. Two years ago, we fixed the fence along the road and had a gate installed across the guest house driveway. We left some of the fence on the inside of the yard un-fixed. It was good enough to keep the chickens in and that's all we needed it for.

Now we have goats. There is a saying "if a fence can hold water, it can hold a goat". Well, our fence wasn't even trying. Unfortunately, the fence guy we used two years ago is moving out of state and couldn't help us. I asked around on Facebook and got the name of another guy. The fence is fixed. (That is about as good of a recommendation as you're going to get from me. I liked the other guy a lot better.)

But like I said the job is done and it holds the goats so what more can I ask for?! We even got three additional gates for a decent price. Two new man gates and a bigger driveway style gate just in case we need to get back there with a truck at some point.

The new fence guys used an old horse shoe for the handle on the gate.

This back section of the fence (by the shed) was completely blocked off before. I'm still not used to being able to get out of this corner and have actually walked all the way to the middle gate once or twice because I forgot I can use it. This gate will come in really handy during the summer months when I fill a second water tub for the animals. Last year we ran the hose through the fence but I had to holler at a kid to turn the hose off and on for me, now I'll be able to step through easily.

We still have one more section of fence that isn't really the way we want it, but we haven't decided if we want wire fence or block. We're leaning towards block. I'd really love it if we could talk the owner of the lot behind us into paying for half of it. Fencing is not cheap!

New and Improved

Did something this past week that we've been wanting to do for awhile... installed a washer and dryer in the guest house. We kept our old washer when we got our new washer and dryer. Then we found a decent used dryer on Craigslist. 

The set up out there was kind of odd. I had to think about it little bit before I came up with a good arrangement. It's a little unconventional, but they work which is the most important thing! Now guests (especially my parents) don't have to lug their laundry over to our house.

Next up out there will be a new water heater. The one out there has looked like it's on it's last leg since we moved in. It still works though so we'll wait.

Craftastic!

Since it's coming into guest season, I've been working on a few things for the guest house. Most of these ideas are my own version of something I have seen on a blog (usually via Pinterest). If you want to see my guest house Pinterest board, click here.

I wanted to stencil the cardinal directions and elevation along with our latitude and longitude on the guest house walls, but decided to make this instead. The boards are from a pallet left here during pool construction. I just used an old transfer technique I learned in middle school art class to transfer the lettering onto the board and then filled it in with a black Sharpie. Twine holds in all together and acts a hanger. [The pool arrow sign below it was a project I made last year. And, yes, it really points to the pool.]

I finally printed out my "Guest House Rules" poster. I made the "rough draft" last year using the free online photo editor Pic Monkey. Unfortunately, I had the settings wrong to print a large size without cutting off some of the words so I had to re-do it. It didn't take too long since I had already worked out all the details. I sent it to Costco get a 16x20 print. One of these days I'm going to mount it on a board. I tried a frame and didn't like it.

While I was on Costco's photo site, I found a couple stock photos of beaches. You can print these stock photos out like your own for only $1.49, so I ordered two and stuck them in a couple dollar store frames to balance the wall.

We made scarecrows at our church family night a couple weeks ago and I grabbed a little bit of extra burlap to make this wreath. It was easy, but time consuming. I used a piece of foam pipe insulation as the form and then tied (I didn't count but it felt like a million) strips of burlap around the form. I think it came out pretty cute but the insulation isn't quite sturdy enough to hold the shape I wanted so I had to use tacks to keep it from being more of an oval.

The next two projects are more makeover than craft. I got both the "painting" and mirror from a friend who didn't want them anymore. I thought I'd give them a little makeover to match the coastal/beach theme I am going for out in the guest house.

The painting started out like this...

A few coats of white spray paint to the frame and some acrylic paint to "canvas" and I had this...

The mirror went from this (sorry for the bad photo - it's the only before I could find)...

I painted the frame and added a piece of scrapbook paper to the top.

When my parents were here last year we made a trip to IKEA. Among other things we found a set of these metal vases. I love them. They come in this color, cream, and an orangish red. If you want to look for them they are called Socker. I saw you could buy packages of sticks to put in vases, but I have a ton of branches in my back lot thanks to wind storms this summer. I cut a few and saved my money.

Last year, I used a few more sticks from the backyard and some twine to make this star.

This next little craft is still a work in progress. I just love colored bottles so I have collected a few to put above the cabinets in the guest house. Some were already colored and some I colored using various methods. The white one is just straight up paint - makes it look like milk glass. The more turquoise ones are Mod Podge and food coloring. The Mod Podge method worked better on the bottles with wider mouths, so this method would work great on Mason jars. Of course, these are NOT food safe or even water proof, just strictly for decoration. I still have a few more bottles to work on and a couple got messed up so I'm going to wash them and try again.

A few weeks ago the kids and I did some painting with water colors. I put my water color sunset in a dollar store frame (that I spray painted white) and hung it in the main bedroom of the guest house.

This cute little palm tree was an IKEA find. I thought it went well with my beachy theme. My mom bought the little basket when she was here last year and this little guy fit in it perfectly.

Sometime last year I got two ceramic sea shells (only one is pictured) from the dollar store. They were kind of ugly colors but I knew a little white spray paint could fix that.

In my internet wanderings I had seen this nautical pier post. I thought something like that might be a nice addition to the decorative ledge in the guest house living room, but I wasn't about to pay $80 plus $40 shipping.

I found this stump out in our wood pile. I bought some rope and ended up with this:

My cost... I'm guessing that piece of rope cost about $1 and about 2 minutes of my time. (I bought a 50 ft. rope for $8 and used about 1/8 of it.) 

This last project took two seconds! I put some sand in a Mason jar with a candle and tied on some twine. Cheap (free really) and cute!

I updated the guest house "tour" if you want to see these items in their new home. They look a lot better in person so why don't you come see us! 

Rock On

As I mentioned we've been working on getting the yard in order. I had an informal goal of having things look nice for Jerry's 40th birthday party. There were two reasons for this: 1) The yard would be presentable for the party and 2) we wouldn't be working on the yard in the heat of summer.

First, we used some river rock from the side yard to a rock border around the pool. We knew we wanted rocks around the pool so toys and kids didn't get muddy, but we weren't sure what we would use to contain the rocks. We debated several choices and finally decided on just using the rocks we already had in the yard. Cheap and effective!

Next we ordered some landscaping rock. Ordering was the easy part! We got a 15 ton load of 3/4 inch screened "Walker Gold" granite. We knew it wouldn't be quite enough to finish the areas we wanted to cover, but the company we bought it from only offers full truck loads and we didn't think we'd need two loads.

So Friday March 22nd Jerry took the day off to work on some projects and we had the rock delivered.

The boys thought it was a fun place to play.

Then came the hard part. Spreading it all. We worked a little at a time. First we would weed and level the area to get it ready for rock. We decided against any type of landscape fabric for weed control. We sprayed weed killer and pre-emergent instead. Then Jerry loaded the rock into the wheelbarrow and I spread it with the rake. Unfortunately, the wheelbarrow tire gave out before we did. We ended up buying a solid one so we didn't have to keep patching the tire.

We didn't get done until right before the big party. In fact, we still aren't completely done. We ran out of rock. We knew it wasn't going to be enough, but it actually got us a lot further along in coverage than we thought. We'll have to order a few more tons from the landscape place to finish up the job although that just might have to wait until after summer when it cools down.

 Here are a few of the areas we spread the rock...

I think it looks really nice! Now we just have to work to keep it weed free.

Funny story about this area. We spread the rock and I added the stepping stones because we had decided we would remove this section of fence so it would be easy to get to the "outhouse" from the pool. See my lovely stepping stone path?

Well, apparently the fence was already there when they poured the concrete. This means that the fence is buried in about 8 inches of cement. So the stepping stones lead to no where. Needless to say, it will be awhile before we take the time to cut the fence (if we ever do).

Cover Up!

About 2 months ago I had a mini nervous breakdown and told Jerry if we didn't get the septic caps (or "the poop caps" as I like to call them) covered I was going to go crazy. It's true. Ask Jerry. I just couldn't look at them any more. We have a beautiful pool and a lovely patio and right there in the middle of it all were these ugly green caps.

When we first saw the photos of our house in the listing it showed a built in grill and bar in this location. It looked very nice! There was even a sink! Here are those listing photos...

Here is what we saw when we got to the house. It was gone.

They had built the grill over the septic caps to hide them but neglected to leave an opening to allow access to the caps. Whenever a home with septic is sold the tank has to be pumped. This meant the built in BBQ and bar had to go.

We tossed around the idea of rebuilding it and leaving some kind of access door. Jerry said he didn't want to do that. So I started looking for a way to cover the caps that would leave them accessible. I came across this photo...

Most "planters" I saw were built with those retaining wall blocks that are slightly curved. I really like this planter because it had nice right angles. This style of block is a bit more expensive than retaining wall blocks though - I figured it would cost us about $600 in materials. When the brick guy came we asked him for an estimate to build us something like this. He wanted almost $1000, which wasn't too bad considering the materials were so much, but we decided to keep thinking.

When we went to look at landscaping rock we noticed they had concrete (fencing) blocks for a lot cheaper than the other block. We did the math and figured we could build the planter for about $150! And the block came in three colors, including one that matched our existing brick patio pretty nicely. Sold!

So a few weeks ago Jerry took a Friday off from work and we got it done! The hardest part was loading and unloading the blocks. It ended up the location nearest to us didn't have quite enough for us to finish the job so Jerry had to drive to another location to pick up the rest. We did find one dead scorpion attached to the blocks. Thankfully, we were wearing gloves and keeping an eye out for creepy crawlies!

We just set them in place. No mortar or anything. The wall is only two blocks high with a cap on top so even if it was knocked over it wouldn't do any major damage. The whole point was to make it easy to take apart so we can get to those caps when we need too.

At some point I would like to get a few plants in there but for now we just put a sheet of foam inside and covered it with some of our landscaping rock.

It looks so much better now. Not only does it look nice, it was much cheaper than we expected! My only regret is that we didn't do it sooner!

Mending Fences

We have owned this house for one year as of March 12th, although we didn't actually move in until about a month later. The fence in the back portion of our lot has been broken since we first set eyes on the place. We have no idea what happened. Maybe a car hit it? We have a lot of dirt bikes and four wheelers in the neighborhood, but I don't see how a smaller vehicle could have done that amount of damage.

We temporarily put up a couple posts and some leftover chain link, but it was still an eye sore.

Since the chickens will be moving out there soon we had it fixed last week. It looks so much better! We still have to paint the steel to match the rest of the fence but even unpainted it is a great improvement.

When we moved in a there was a fence along the guest house driveway that could contain any animals (or kids!) in the grassy part of the yard. That fence was removed when they put in the pool. So to keep the backyard enclosed we also had them install a gate across the guest house driveway.

The company we hired gave us a discount (almost $100) for paying in cash. Like real dollar bills in an envelope cash. I'm not really sure why, but I was kind of nervous about it. It just seemed shady since with cash there is really no record of payment (except in this case the guys initials on our contract). As much as I like Dave Ramsey's ideas for building savings and reducing debt, I could never be on board with his suggestion to pay "cash only" for everything.

We have made lots of improvements in the year we've owned the house, but there's always something more to do. We have a couple of things I really want finished before it gets hot: landscape rock and build a planter to cover the septic caps. We're hoping to get the rocks delivered later this week so if you want a little exercise come help us haul rock. The weather should be beautiful and if it gets too hot you can jump in the pool for a quick swim!