Friday, April 24, 2015

Construction: Week 1

Construction started on our addition last Friday. Unfortunately, its been a pretty unproductive week since then!

Around 7:30am last Friday the crew showed up to prepare our existing back patio for the addition. I didn't take any " before pictures" but here is a shot of the back patio a while ago.


The new plans involve replacing that double window with french barn doors. The sliding glass door ( half pictured on the left) will be replaced with a single glass panel door. Our third bedroom window ( not pictures but would be to the far right in the above picture) will be filled in and will be the wall for the new closet.

We will also be getting a new roof on the entire house. The new roof for the addition will cover the entire existing slab. Most will be "addition" but some will be saved for a new screened in patio. Charlotte LOVES being outside and we really have no shaded area to take her. Currently, my car has been given the boot from the garage to allow her to play in there.

Last Friday, they came and dug for the new footers. This was pretty much wrapped up in half a day and they called for inspection. I was super excited because the roofers were even scheduled to start this week. Unfortunately,  due to issues with the inspector we didn't get a full inspection till Thursday! They were set to pour concrete this morning however due to all the rain we had yesterday, we got bumped to Monday so they could finish up the job they had scheduled for yesterday.

I am so anxious to get things moving. Because we have decided to do a lot of the finishing work ourselves, there is a ton to be done before baby #2 arrives! As of now, the forecast next week isn't looking too promising either but hopefully I will have more progress to report. Here is what we look like now.



Friday, April 17, 2015

Love it or List it?

Not too long after Charlotte was born, Tim and I started to talk about our house, space and future kiddos. We knew we wanted to have one more kid and while we do have three bedrooms, we really needed a 4th for an office/ play space. We started to look at houses locally just to get an idea. I am a *bit* more particular than Tim in that I did not want to move outside of our current school zones. This means we are limited to a pretty small area. 

I went to a couple of open houses and religiously checked the Real Estate listings. To gain a 4th bedroom and a mere 100 more square feet, we would be paying nearly DOUBLE what we paid for our house just 4 years ago. Then we started thinking about how much work we have done here and how we would need to essentially start that process all over with a new house. Only this time with a toddler running around. 

So back in October/November, we decided to get a few estimates to see how much it would cost to add a room on to our existing house. We have a 500 ft back patio and a 500 ft front patio and quite frankly we do not utilize our outdoor space. We got two estimates that were pretty comparable. We sat on it for a while, really weighing our options. We like our neighborhood, we like our schools, we are close to my parents who help our tremendously with Charlotte. We decided financially, it made more sense to stay put. 

Then in December we got some pretty exciting news... 

So we decided no time like the present, right? We started the construction plans with one of the contractors and JUST got our permit approved this week! We will be getting a new roof on the entire house, adding a room with lots of storage and getting a new back patio! We decided to do all the finishing ourselves so we have LOTS of projects coming up. They actually just started construction this morning so I am going to TRY to do a weekly update as it comes together. I am both excited and nervous for everything to come together before this baby arrives in early August! :) 

Friday, April 10, 2015

Ikea Kitchen Makeover

Every time we took Charlotte to a Birthday party or event, she would gravitate to the play kitchen... and then wouldn't leave. Tim and I both knew we wanted to get her one for the house but simply did not want something plastic. I had toyed around with the idea of making one from an old TV stand... I even went as far as to track one down for $15 at our local Goodwill. At the last minute we changed our minds. We didn't want another heavy piece of furniture in the house either.

So, we decided to pick up Ikea's basic Duktig play kitchen. However, we had NO intention of leaving it as is! The same day we brought the kitchen home, we headed out to Lowe's for supplies.


We knew we wanted to paint the kitchen, add a back splash and come up with someway to make a fridge.  That is where my dad came in. We bought an inexpensive shelving unit and asked him to make a door for it. We has a really hard time finding something that already had a door. Then we had fun with it! For the fridge, we painted the bottom portion in chalkboard paint. The freezer portion was coated in Magnetic paint. This was my first time using Magnetic paint... I purchased a quart of Rust-Oleum Magnetic Primer. I was nervous because it seemed like it got pretty bad reviews overall and a lot of people complained it simply didn't work. While it isn't an easy product to work with... it does hold our magnets perfectly! My tips would be 1) use a brush/roller/ tray you are fine with throwing away after, 2) Have it professionally mixed just before using, 3) Use multiple thin coats ( we did somewhere between 5-7 coats), and 4) Stir, stir, stir between coats! I was nervous that adding a "top coat" like the product calls for would negate some of the magnetization but it held up just fine! Once everything was dry, we added some handles and attached the door.

The remainder of the Kitchen got a thin coat of primer and two thin coats of paint. It hard to see in the picture above but the paint is called Lazy Days from Valspar's Signature Kids Collection. We opted to only paint what was wooden. We left everything that was white originally, as is. The counter was sanded down ( there was some type of thin clear coat on top) and then given a few coats of Red Mahogany Stain and some spray poly.



Next we added under cabinet lighting. Yes you read that correctly... my daughters play kitchen has under cabinet lighting and my own kitchen does not. We use one of these lights from Ikea we happened to have at home. The switch is on the side of the kitchen. I have to say, it is one of her favorite things about the kitchen! She loves turning the light on and off.  The final thing to be added was the back splash. We used the same product we used on our Kitchen Ceiling, just a different pattern. We attached it on the back with the staple gun and left a small hole in the corner to feed out the wire for our under cabinet lighting. Oh and the knobs.... this was more of a struggle than I would like to admit. We could not find real oven knobs small to fit this space. We ended up painting regular black wooden knobs and adding white stripes. We added a washer behind them so they do spin. And this is what the final product looked like.

 



She LOVES it and plays with it everyday. We picked up the utensil and pots at Ikea too. We purchased the food from Amazon since most of the playfood at Ikea is plush and we wanted plastic. So while we might of spent more than we would have on a generic plastic kids kitchen set at the toy store, we LOVE the way it turned out and that it blends in with the rest of our  house.