Basket Case

I persuaded Mike to go to some yard sales with me a few weekends ago. I found this basket for $0.50.

 At the time I had no idea what to do with it, but figured for that price I could find some use for it.  Once we got home I decided I wanted to spray paint it because we'll it's pretty ugly. Well, I didn't get to because Mike jumped in and did it for me.

 It looks so much better now.

After it sat out and dried I still didn't know what to use it for. Once I brought it inside I noticed all Mason's "toys" sitting around and decided that it would be his toy basket. He loves it!

We got a roof over our heads

Over the past fours years living here our roof has "gone bad." The front side of our house in always in the sun because there are no trees out there. And with our BIG 45 degree angle roof it too is always in the sun. Let's just say it's seen better days.  My dad stopped by to help out and over the course of a few days we got it done, but not without some snags along the way...

Day one started out like this. We took the awning down that was over the door. Once we did that the gutter fell down too. The board behind the gutter was rotten so it was just resting on top of the awning. 

Day one ended with all the shingles being taken off and the tar paper all up.  That's about as far as Mike made it because we got shut down by the city inspector.  See that little rectangle in the window below on the left? Yah, that's a permit that we had to get to continue working. You need one of those so they can make sure that you have ice and water shield on your roof. That black strip along the bottom edge of the roof is the shield stuff.  Once we had the permit Mike was all set to continue working. 

He's a good worker!

All done! Notice anything ugly in the above picture? Those nasty porch lights had to go. For one, the right one was home to a momma bird for a while until she abandoned her eggs. And the one on the left doesn't have it's cover. So off to Menard's we went. We found some white lights we liked, but they were $19 a piece. We then found these for $18 for two.

We decided to go with these since they're half the price of the white ones, and then we bought a can of white spray paint. Mike sprayed them while I supervised.

Zeus supervised too!

Once the paint dried for 24 hours we hung them up. (I've been typing we throughout this whole post, but Mike's done all the work until now) 

ALL DONE!  Just need to wait for gutters to go on sale and we'll be all set. 

(Side note- my nice landscaping that I did here is ruined! It's full of shingle pieces and my bushes got smooshed during the demo process of roofing. So, we'll be taking it all out and redoing it eventually)

Landscaping

Remember this from last summer?

 I planted three bushes in front of the house last summer. I didn't really do much with them until now.

I still need to finish the far right side, but there's some big limestone rocks there that I can't pick up/move so that will have to wait for Mike. The mulch, landscape fabric, and timbers only cost about $15 which isn't too bad to make this space look like it does now.  And I am far from a professional because I didn't level the ground underneath or pull any of the weeds under there either. I just figure with time and the weight of the mulch it will fix itself.

That's pinteresting!

Ever since we got our front door I have been a little scared that I would look out there at night and see someone looking in at me.  Not to mention, when people come over this is what they can see

When I see that, I want to turn and run so who knows what strangers think. LOL!

Well I found an idea on Pinterest and I got to work.  All it took was some $6 contact paper.  I actually spent more time in Wal-Mart looking for the contact paper than it took me to put it up.  All I had to do was trace the stencil on the contact paper, cut them all out, and stick them up.  I also decided to do the kitchen window because it had this sticky stuff on it from the previous owner. I think they had a stained glass sticker on there or something.  So here's the pictures, they pretty much speak for themselves.

Front door looking out before. 

During

After!

Kitchen window looking out. Before. 

Kitchen window after. Still ugly-ish, but hopefully better. 

95% done

We are so close to being done with moving Marley upstairs, us downstairs, and creating a little office upstairs too.  Marley's room just needs trim around the bottom, door and window. Our room just needs clothes put away, and the baby stuff set up.  The office still needs all it's drywall done, flooring done, and some major organization.  So far Marley seems to really like her room. She has almost all of her toys up there (which I love!)  Her bed is a reversible loft bed. When she was downstairs she slept on the bottom. We switched up when we moved her upstairs. She freaked out at bed time as asked us to flip it back over. We did and she was fine after that.  The next day she asked us to flip it back over so she's on top again... We did, and so far so good. Here's the picture timeline of the whole progress.

Marley's old room downstairs- AAHH It's a mess! 

Bye bye pink paint...

Priming upstairs. 

New paint. Marley said she wanted blue. Mike picked this out. She said she didn't like it, it's not blue it's green were her exact words. 

CARPET! I have this weird pregnancy thing where I LOVE to vacuum. I'm not going to lie, I've vacuumed her room 4 times already...

It's done! 

Our room downstairs. 

Our headboard is about 3 inches too long for that wall so it extends into the closet. Baby Corn's crib will also be in this closet (not the one with the door haha)

So there it is. It took us about 8 days so far. Like I said all that's left is little touch up stuff.  I love not having toys in the living room and I think Marley loves having her own little space upstairs.

Movin' on up...

Remember this post here about us moving Marley's room upstairs? Well we've finally started working on that. However, things changed a little.

See in this picture the room in the top left corner? That was originally going to be the nursery. We've since decided to make that Marley's room, and have the baby downstairs with us for at least the first month or so.

Mike's been working for only about 2 days and he's made some great progress so far. All the "fun" stuff is done, and now it's time to mud and sand all the drywall. That is definitely not fun, and it's very messy.

Here's our progress so far...

This is the upstairs from the stop of the stairs looking into the room. This was taken the day we bought our house. 

Now it looks like this! The hallway on the right leads to the bathroom. The jut out on the left is the closet in the room. 

Here's the view looking back from inside her room. Closet on the right. Not sure what kind of door we're going to get on there. It's about 3 feet smaller than her room now, but for some reason it seems bigger.  

She decided she wants her room painted brown. A few days before she decided on brown she said she wanted blue, so we'll see what we finally end up with. We should have it all done in a few weeks. Just need to finish all the drywall up, paint, carpet, put up trim and then switch all her stuff up here and the rest of our stuff down stairs (most of our stuff is out of this room, either on the other side of the wall or in our dining room).  We'll also have to paint downstairs since her current room is pink and I don't think Mike likes the idea of having a pink bedroom.  We also put in a new window up here and a new fan (it's so cute) I have pictures on my other camera of it so I'll share that in the next update (which will hopefully be once we're finished!)