Restoration Phase 2: Bathrooms

 It took me so long to decide on what we'd do in the bathrooms but I finally decided on all this. The top vanity and tile are for the front bathroom with a similar faucet. The bottom tile and vanity are for the master bath. Love it all and am so excited to see how it looks when it's in place!

We've been moved back into our house for about a week, if you can call the way we're living moved in. Looks like we are probably going to move back out in a few days for the next phase. The wood floors are wonderful but the laundry room that we thought would be complete hasn't even been touched. We also thought the boys' room would be started by now. Tuesday they are supposed to start in on both bathrooms, they suffered damage from the non-stop leaky toilets that the tenant didn't let us know about or fix. I'm pretty excited about this redo, shopping for it was stressful and fun! New tile and sub-floor, and we decided to go ahead and do the vanities while they're ripping it all out anyway. We don't know insurance will cover their replacement but it's clear by their strong, mildew smell they have suffered and need replaced. The adventure continues!

Getting Floored III: Hotel Living

 Ooh, ahhh! On the left is the damaged wood, right is the new oak floor with natural finish

We moved out of our construction zone/home about 5 days ago and into a wonderful extended stay hotel that we're really happy with, it's more like a little apartment. The charms of continental breakfast and indoor, heated swimming pool seem to be wearing off for the boys though. Yesterday Mr. Golden Curls said he misses our house and Spitfire agreed. This has been a very unstable couple of months in their lives. First the process of having the other house on the market and The Bohemian moving. Then we move into a house and move back out. New school, new church...whew and we thought we were settling for good this time! But at the end of all the construction will be a cute little, new and improved, healthy, pretty house for us to settle into and start up our little backyard farm in!

the Little Mister ready to go poolside

Silly Golden Curls aka Puss in Boots

Handsome Spitfire with that mischevious smile

Getting Floored: Part II

On the left is our house with majorly water damaged floors. It doesn't look so bad compared to the picture on the right, which is the same spot after it has been demoed and had all the rotten stuff removed.

 

What a mess! I have more sympathy for people who complain about the hassles of renovations. I think I'll spare the details of how much of a pain this has all been and just show some pictures of the progress that has been made so far. I will say that we have been pleased as punch with the insurance company (Nationwide) and the company doing the renovations (Restore It). Everyone we've dealt with has been 100% helpful and pleasant and that makes all the difference in a stressful situation like this.

Before demo on left after demo on the right

More of the same in the hallway

Yay for new wood! In these pics it is still unfinished but oooh aahhh. Looks good and no mildew smell! Even though this is all a pain and was an unexpected turn of events, I've always wanted to renovate a home and it is fun to see it all happen and not have to do the work myself.

We've been dining picnic style for a few days now so we can keep from messing up the unprotected wood. It will definitely be nice to be set up in the hotel!

Autumn Coffee Break

 What a wonderful place for a coffee break, and it's right out my front door! Change in seasons always make me happy.

 I absolutely love that this is my front yard! The table is under the biggest old tree and all of the fall colors are coming out across the street. And even better, across the street is really far away!

Our cute little house. The weather has been so beautiful, I'm soaking it all in because I know it will be winter eventually and I'll want to stay all bundled up inside.

Spicy Pumpkin Seeds

These are my spicy pumpkin seeds I mentioned in yesterday's post. The only time we make these is when we carve our jack-o-lanterns and that just makes them an extra special delicacy at our house. The kids like them too, which always surprises me, and this year even the Little Mister ate some and kept coming back for more. It's a recipe I found a million years ago on the Martha Stewart Living website. Such a simple recipe and so good.

Martha Stewart's Spicy Pumpkin Seeds

Ingredients

1 cup pumpkin seeds

(From the two pumpkins we carved this year we got 3 cups of seeds)

1 teaspoon chili powder

1/8 to 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons fresh lime juice

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

In a medium bowl, combine all ingredients

 toss to coat 

Spread on a rimmed baking sheet

 bake until puffed and browned, about 10 minutes.

NOTE: I totally disagree with this 10 min thing, it takes me much longer but every 10min I'll give them a stir.

Punkin' Carvin' Day

 Pumpkin Guts

I realized this year that the day we carve pumpkins into jack-o-lanterns has grown to very closely resemble the pomp of our Christmas Tree Decorating Day. In the beginning...way back when we were newly weds...we simply carved the pumpkins. Now we make and put out decorations, gut the pumpkins, and while the Bohemian helps the boys carve I roast up the seeds into delicious spicy pumpkin seeds. There is generally a seasonally appropriate drink...like hot apple cider. This year we even added haunted ginger bread house assembly. Well, we attempted it, but it was so haunted I couldn't get it to stay glued together and followed Spitfires's wise advice to not be disappointed and just go ahead and eat it!

Pumpkin Patches, Corn Mazes and Mums...Must Be Fall!

The Little Mister is happy to hitch a ride at first.

I am having just way too much fun this fall, I hardly know where to start! Really my problem is I don't know where to stop! It's all so much fun I want to show you every bit of it...you can tell by all the photos I've posted! Let's get to it!

Vanzant Farms was wonderful, what a sweet little farm. It was a completely different experience than our trip to Family Farm a few years back, but just as enjoyable...and with the added bonus of honey, peach jelly and the absolute most divine apple butter I've ever tasted, all made right there from things they've grown.

Little Mister and his buddy scoping out pumpkins

This place was small but there was so much to see and it was nice that the big ones could roam freely without me needing to keep such close watch.

 

Checking out the huge corn stalks

Look, I added a cute little pumpkin to the patch!

Good 'ole fashion fun with a roll down the hill

Mr. Golden Curls hunts diligently for the right pumpkin

Spitfire thinks the perfect pumpkin is the one closest to him so he can get back to rolling down the hill! 

Oh, brothers!

What a crew, tried so hard to get a good pic of them all together but toddlers are so uncooperative...and we had two with us!

Home again, home again jiggety jig...but not for long, it's to the corn maze!

The wonderful thing about going to farms is letting the boys have a chance to learn where food comes from. They were amazed how the corn grew.

Happily lost

Dreams of Chicks and Ducks

Adorable shed coop plans and pics from Ana-White.com. Find coop plans here.

On the way to school our first week here the boys were talking about the big backyard we have now and I was telling them how we might get to have a garden and chickens or ducks etc. Spitfire kept asking questions like "Can we have a cow? What about a sheep, could we have a sheep? Just one sheep?" Then right before drop off Spitfire says: "While I'm at school why don't you just go ahead and get some chickens or ducks for me?" "Why don't we get moved into the house and get it all fixed up first!"

Truth be told, I've been dreaming of chickens and gardens myself. I've been scouring the web for things like making a compost pile, what we can do to prep a veggie garden, and I've scoped out the adorable chicken coop in the picture above...think I should start researching the chickens themselves before I get into adorable coop building! The one above is from an awesome website full of free plans for building, well, pretty much anything you want. You can find the plans and more pics of this coop by clicking here.

Getting Floored

Can you tell which appliance survived?

It's been pretty frustrating since we moved back into our house to see the damage that has been caused by others. This last tenant never paid her rent on time, usually needed harrassed into paying and nearly got evicted twice in the two years she lived there, but she was keeping it clean and tidy. That was our mantra, at least she's taking care of it. Maybe not so much. I guess if you overlook the water heater that leaked unchecked for unknown months and the toilets that are doing the same, then yes, she took great care of it.

The Bohemian and Uncle T assess the damage with the peanut gallery looking on.

In the first week of moving in we had to buy a new refrigerator, dishwasher, washer and dryer. We had all of these things in the house, and had for the 4 years it had been rented. Somehow this one renter single handedly killed them all in the 2 that she lived in it. I have to admit, shopping for brand new appliances, so much fun! As a family of 5 humans and 3 pets living on a youth director's income while I stay at home with the kids, shopping for the big stuff just doesn't happen, ever. My new appliances...gorgeous, the floor around them...ruined by water damage. When the delivery guys moved the old washing machine there was a comically huge bubble of floor underneath it. Not just a bubble in the linoleum, we're talking sub-floor and all!

Now we find ourselves in more new territory, homeowners insurance claims and remodels. Today the flooring people come out to asses the work they're about to do. The insurance adjuster has said it will be new floor covering in the laundry room, boys' bedroom and new wood floors throughout...pretty excited about that! The worry part is that the laundry room and part of the boys' room needs new sub-flooring as well, they laundry room will have its walls cut out from 2ft down, and we'll see what they unearth when they get started...that sounds messy to me!

While all of this should be completely stressing me out, and normally would be throwing me into a complete tizzy, it's not. I'm relaxed, I'm taking it as it comes. I think it's because I just feel like I'm home. I feel like we're finally going to get to stay put for awhile and that all this is an investment in our own house not a house we're fixing up for someone else. Let's see if my zen holds when I start receiving all those credit card bills!

Purple Pepper Eater

When your 6 year old asks "Can I have a snack...a healthy one?" you know it's time to set aside the moving crazies and get back to grocery shopping and cooking like someone who isn't obsessed about which appliance is going to break next and what the next step on a home owners insurance claim is. So Wednesday the Bohemian and I took the Little Mister to the local farmers market. It was our first time for this market. Definitely smaller than the ones we're used to, but beautiful food! Well, just look at those gorgeous peppers, I've never even had a purple pepper before.

Home Sweet Home

Us moving in: here we are in 2008 having breakfast on our brand new kitchen floor on the day we closed on the house in Hot Springs. Those babies sure have grown up in the past 4 years!

It's nice to see you again. I haven't been here in awhile. I feel like I'm meeting up with an old friend that I used to be really close to but have been neglecting and feel guilty and awkward reuniting with. But I really like blogging and I'm starting to miss it. Facebook distracted me for awhile with its ease of use and immediate audience, but I miss composing posts, telling stories, and giving all the details. So I'm just going to jump in from here and pretend nothing ever happened...what problem in our relationship?

Things have certainly been happening, exciting things, and happening fast. So fast that I really couldn't have shared stories along the way anyhow. Things like a big move across the state, out of suburbia, and back into the house we moved out of 4.5 years ago! It went a lot more smoothly coming this way than going that way. No Bohemian living in a storage space above a shop, no 6 months separated. This time it was about 5 weeks of separation and he got to live those weeks in an honest to goodness house with friends.

Us moving out: here we are last week in our almost empty house ready to head back to NWA with an additional little boy in tow!

Ok, I feel I need to back up a bit. The hardest part this go 'round was all that led up to this decision. We knew we wanted to be back in this area, we miss it every time we leave, but leaving Hot Springs became a harder choice than we had anticipated. We had grown a lot by living there, we had met amazing people, our boys were in a phenomenal school...worst of all, we couldn't really share our struggles with a lot of those people we had grown to love. Once the path was set and we could make announcements it was such a weight lifted off of us. Moving forward on the overwhelming tasks of all that went into us moving seemed less burdensome when I could be open about it all.

We weren't planning on such a short separation, the boys and I were staying behind to sell the house, just as we had before. The Bohemian had imposed a "my foot is down" timeline of max. 3 months apart. Our tenant in our old house had other plans and moved out, without notice or paying rent. With the house vacated it was not a tough decision to go ahead and be under one roof as soon as we could manage. Thanks to my whirlwind of a mom-in-law we managed the move in less than 2 weeks!

And that, in a nutshell, brings me to the present. Later on I'll probably elaborate even more, I told you I had lots to say! Life is a wonderful adventure, one big, exciting, messy, loud, wonderful adventure, and I feel like sharing!

 

Spitfire, age 2, moving us south

 

Spitfire, age 6, moving us back up north

Sticks and Stones

 ...may break your bones but telling your brother "kick me in the butt!" while on your knees in bed will send you flying mouth first into the corner of a dresser! I always knew Spitfire would be the one to turn us into ER regulars. Current ER count for Spitfire: 5...at the age of 6...this is going to be an interesting 18 years!

Soccer Mom Convert

Saturday was all out soccer from 8am to 1pm and I loved it! I don't know the first thing about soccer. Hopefully I'll be a quick study because my enthusiasm causes me to cheer loudly, sometimes things that are a little inaccurate...like "turn that ball around" when they're going the right way.

Mr. Golden Curls (on the soccer ball) has been going to soccer practice for weeks, which was killing his little brother.

 

 

Saturday was an extra early morning because Spitfire had pictures before practice. He was so excited he was literally running circles. The first thing he and I saw when we arrived was a duck on the field which we both thought was hilarious.

Can you tell which one is him? Little bit excited. All the kids were so cute, they would see a ball and could hardly contain themselves, they had to kick it.

  It was a chilly damp morning but a perfect day. Golden Curls, Pappa and the Little Mister, who was a perfect baby considering the fact that we were there for 5 hours.

 I love this league, Upward sports. It's Christian based and all about being encouraging, letting the kids have fun and teaching the sport. Before the games they call each kids name and they get to run through the tunnel. There's Little Spitfire running down the hill.

Spitfire got with it! He's next to the ball with the blond hair and green jersey. Both boys managed to get there feet on the ball several times during the game.

 Golden Curls running through the tunnel like a cheese monkey! He's so goofy but when it came to game time he turned it on. He was always where the ball was. If we can just convince him to get into the fray and steal it he'll be gold! He was there for every out of bounds ball, wanting to throw them back into the game. That's what he's doing below.

T Minus Two Weeks And Counting

 The Little Mister has his 1st birthday party in a few short weeks and I'm getting ready to blitz the house with cleanliness and try to finish up some more decorations. Very excited to see family that we haven't seen in way too long and hopefully have some friends join us too. Haven't gotten much crafting done since the rag wreath a few weeks ago, but have been buying up some super cute robots, monsters and other fun stuff! I'm planning on making a banner or two this week. Oh! That completely adorable appliqued and embroidered t-shirt was made by my sis-in-law who owns GoLoud Graphics. You should check them out, they are fantastic!

Note: this was supposed to auto post last week but did not! So his birthday is only a few days away!