Style Injection: Kitchen Door Project (Part Two - Reveal!)

Thanks so much for the kind comments about our new windows :) We are really loving the way they freshened up the look of the entire house. It's a big blessing, too, to have those aluminum sliders out before the chilly Ohio winter sets in!

Okay - down to business. The kitchen door. Before the holiday weekend, I shared the kitchen door project that had hit a little rut. I'm happy to say that, after some of Sam's mad wood-putty skillz, the "rut" is barely noticeable. Two coats of paint later, and she looks great.

You'll remember how the metal door that leads from the kitchen to the garage started out...

Chipping paint...

Worn-out hardware...

It needed some love, didn't it? A new door was beyond our budget for the time being, so Sam and I put our heads together and came up with a plan for next to nothing. We had an area lumber yard (yes, the old school kind!) rip some lattice boards to our specs, picked up some chalkboard paint and Liquid Nails at Home Depot, and used primer and trim paint (plus screws and wood putty!) we already had. The wood was $18 including labor, the spray paint for the hardware was around $6, and the chalkboard paint was $12. So, for a grand total of around 35 beans...

We made our old door look like a new door!

See? You can just barely see the marks from the screws now :)

Sam caulked to keep the chalk dust from settling behind the lattice, too. He did such an awesome job on this whole project. (((Thank you, Babe!!!)))

Tah da!

The photo is a little crooked, but we couldn't be more please with how the real door turned out :) We hope you like it, too!

The first post about this door project has more details about the process. You can read it here!

One Year Frenzy-versary Part 4: Blink! The Title Is Ours

Yup, that's right. No joke. On Black Friday of last year, the 28th of November, we settled on the house. Somehow, in the last two weeks of November, we managed to scoot the original early December settlement date up and close before the end of the month - decreasing our interest pre-paid out of pocket at the outset. It definitely helped that the sellers had not been living in the house for the last six months, so they didn't need time to pack and move their things out. Very handy :)

My sister and her husband watched the children for us while we went to settlement and then headed over to the DMV to have our driver's licenses changed. The sellers were out of town for Thanksgiving, so we just signed our end of the papers and that was it. The agreement was that we would receive the keys on December 8th, after they returned. December 8th. Do you remember that we first saw the house on November 9th???

They had our signatures. They had our money. We had just bought the house.

Ready for the funny part? We still didn't have our current house on the market, yet. We had to pack everything up, move it, paint a number of rooms in the "previous" house, finish staining a deck (did I mention it was December?), do some exterior painting, finish a half-done landscaping project, interview a few realtors, and then put the house up for sale.

Ha.

So, you could pretty much say that the next two weeks (at least) were pure adrenaline. Well, okay, you're right - 90% adrenaline and 10% insanity. God is very, very gracious.

After we picked the children up from my sister's house, we went right home and got crackin'. Little Dude went down for a nap, and we went to work on our rather alarming list of things to do in order to get the house "show ready". These photos were taken on November 28th of last year.



Sam decided that a high of around 50 degrees was good enough for some staining (and it actually took fairly well, although dried slowly).



The girls and I headed down to the basement to try to sort through the junk down there. What to keep and take with us? What to give away? What to donate? What to pitch?



Then, I lugged the "what to keep and take with us" pile up the basement stairs, moved the living room furniture out of the way, and started using that front room as the official space for our packed-and-ready-to-go stuff.

The packing and moving plan was as follows: we had already been packing since our contract had been accepted (around November 19th), and we had ten more days to pack before we got the keys to the new house. So, we'd pack, get the keys on the 8th, clean the new house, gradually move smaller things over to the new house between the 10th and 13th, rent a moving van on the 13th and move most of our larger furniture; however, we did decide to leave some of our better pieces so the house would not have to show completely empty. Then, Sam would have to paint at the previous house while I focused on unpacking at the new house. We'd be at around a 2 week countdown for Christmas - and Sam's Mom & Dad were coming to stay with us for a few days.

I'm cracking up as I'm typing this. Did we actually do all of this?

That was the plan. And, can you believe it, that's what we actually did.


Frenzy.

Thankful for... Today

Are you busy cooking goodies for tomorrow? Getting the house ready for family to arrive? Or are you the family that will be arriving?

We're heading over to my sister and her husband's home tomorrow to share the day with them, their 13 month old little girl, and my parents. Today is full of cut out sugar cookies, stuffing, and other goodies. Plus, some morning lessons thrown in for good measure.

Around here before noon today...

Math, handwriting, spelling, and...

chess?

With camo-bear pj's, of course :)

Haven't managed to dress Little Dude, but at least the rest of us are out of jammies. My tootsies like to stay comfy, though :)

Mr. Breadman Ultimate kindly offered to take care of the bread for the stuffing. Can you see any screws on the door back there? More on that soon!

Plenty of good books...

... and the promise of something sweet.

I have a fancy camera, but crummy camera skills. Otherwise, I might have managed to get all four children in focus in just one shot ;]

So, now the cookie dough is chilled and ready to roll out. We'll throw some lunch together and hopefully get the cookies baked before nap. We'll be icing them later this afternoon. Yum!

Thanksgiving Week 2008 was a BIG deal in house terms. Look out for a Frenzy-versary post (or two) on Friday. Oh, and Monday and Tuesday of next week will be a BIG deal of their own, so check back in after all of your turkey eatin' :)

May you all have a blessed Thanksgiving, and may your heart draw near to the One from Whom all good things come. I'd like to leave you today with part of a Puritan prayer:

"Plough deep in me, great Lord, heavenly husbandman, that my being may be a tilled field, the roots of grace spreading far and wide, until Thou alone art seen in me, Thy beauty golden like summer harvest, Thy fruitfulness as autumn plenty.I have no master but Thee, no law but Thy will, no delight but Thyself, no wealth but that Thou givest, no good but that Thou blessest, no peace but that Thou bestowest. I am nothing but that Thou makest me. I have nothing but that I receive from Thee. I can be nothing but that grace adorns me. Quarry me deep, dear Lord, and then fill me to overflowing with living water."

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

One Year Frenzy-versary Part 3: You Put A Contract On It?!

I shared a few weeks back about how we had first come across this house, and how we were not at all thinking of moving at the time. We first saw the house on a Sunday in early November (the ninth, actually, my birthday). After determining that we could, technically, swing two mortgages for a while we decided to schedule a showing with a realtor. The way that I remember it, we saw the house with the realtor two days later on Tuesday.

It wasn't so much that the house was gorgeous. The house we were living in at the time was only 4 years old and much nicer, really. We were the only ones who had ever lived in that house. We bought it when it was 4 months old. It had 2800 sq. ft., lots of light, everything was brand new, and the subdivision pool was only a short walk away. There were walking trails, a fishing pond, and shops built at the entrance. It was a quiet neighborhood, nice families, a gazebo on the main boulevard, for pity's sake. In a lot of ways that whole housing development had the Charmed Life thing going on...



So, what were we thinking leaving it all behind? Well, it's a little complicated to explain if you haven't been in our shoes, but our house was 30 minutes away from the rest of our life. Literally. My sister and her young family were 30 minutes away. Sam's job was thirty minutes away. Our church was 30 minutes away. My closest friends were 30 minutes away. Everything else in life (except for our house and parents) were in the same town, 30 minutes north of where we were living.



We had moved to Ohio from a suburb of Washington, D.C. At the time, living 30 minutes away seemed like a dream. What a luxury to only have to drive 30 minutes! Sam had all too often commuted an hour and half one way in Virginia. My closest friend there lived 45 minutes away! After a few years of living in Ohio, it was becoming clear that not everyone in our new home was used to that kind of driving. Friends confessed that our house felt like a looooong drive away, and the two hours on the road each Sunday (a morning and an evening service) were starting to feel long to us, too. My sister had gotten married and moved away the year before. She had also had her first baby in early October. I missed her. With four kiddos of my own in tow, 30 minutes there and 30 minutes back was a little hard to work around with regularity. This "new" house was a 2 minute drive from her home :)

We weren't considering buying this house because it was bigger, prettier, fancier, or better in any way other than its location. We wanted to buy this house so we could be closer to so much that is important to us. Family, friends, church, and closer to work could mean less time driving and more time home. We knew that by moving to that town and by owning an older, less attractive home, there would be some losses materialistically speaking. But, those losses didn't even begin to outweigh the gains for our family as a whole. 9 foot ceilings gave way to a 25 year old tri-level... in just the right place.



In just a few words, we knew life isn't all about big houses and stuff. They can be nice, don't get me wrong. A part of me does wince a little to look up from these photos of our previous home only to be face to face with our real life home - damaged wood floors and sparkly gray toilet seats from 1983. There's so much still to be done, I can wonder why we made the choice we did. Ultimately, though, I know it was the right one. These few years of WORK making this house more our own will be nothing compared to all of the benefits for many years to come. Ours was a case of giving up the good to get the better.



So, after getting a quick preapproval for a loan and after having some "financial people" double check our numbers for us, we put a contract on the house. I can't remember exactly when, but it was within 10 days of that initial visit. It was quickly enough that, when we told our friends and family, they all unanimously responded with the proper level of shock. "You put a contract on it?" We did. And, after a little going back and forth to get the price down to where we could swing the cost, our offer was accepted.

It was about 10-14 days after we first saw the house on November 9th. That means it was around November 19-23rd. We were scheduled to close at the beginning of December, so packing started immediately. Crazy, crazy.

Happy Frenzy-versary :)

P.S. We like to keep our actual city of residence on the down-low. If you live in our area and have a pretty good idea of where we've lived or are currently living, please do not name the cities in your comments. Thank you!!!