July Current Project Journal

As I write this Nick is in Toronto. I’ll pause while you sing a roving rendition of Oh, Canada! Steve Martin style.

I thought it would be fun to begin a journal series about our Current Projects if for no other reason than to give you something to laugh at. I mean, we have high hopes around these parts. And let me tell you, owning two homes is not as glamorous as one may think. Like how this past weekend Nick spent THE ENTIRE Saturday repairing a leak in our roof that we discovered after being down at the lake for 3 weeks and having lots of rain. Oh, how fun.

The joys of being homeowners and living in an old house.

If our list of current projects doesn’t make you laugh I hope it at least helps you put your own list into perspective. After all, no one is without the to-do list that must accompany one’s home.

That being said, here is what we have going on currently and what we will be tackling soon:

With the roof fixed, we will now be repairing the part of our bedroom ceiling where we found the inevitable leak.

Repair the ceiling in the blue room after an electrical upgrade and repaint ceiling

Continue putting together the rescued fireplace mantle.

Whittle down the never ending mountain of mismatched socks.

Pack for the lake and get ready to take an enormous box of items to move in…slowly but surely we are getting everything there that we need.

Make a list of what we need for our upcoming school year.

Find someone to wallpaper the stairwell.

Keep the new rosebush alive! Research!

Put up random trim piece in the downstairs laundry room.

Caulk and paint the chalkboard frame

Defrost the freezer

Plant flowers at the cottage

Paint the exterior of the cottage

Repair Cal’s window pane

Those are our current projects going on.

What projects are you guys all working on?

Does anyone know anything about roses? We have a new rosebush and it seemed to do this weird thing where it flattened itself out. It looks like a flying saucer. Now the outer edges have roses and the middle is dying. I told Nick since he’s a Landscape Architect that he should be able to help me. He told me to find a gardener. He just plans them out, he doesn’t keep them alive.

Changing Classrooms is Hard!

Y'all change is hard!  

It's hard on me mentally, physically, emotionally, gah, it's just hard.  

These past few weeks we have been working on the transition of flip-flopping our playroom (affectionately known as the blue room) and our classroom (formerly located on the third floor of our home).  

These changes have been really hard on basically no one...except me.  I am such a weirdo.  

You can see some of my favorite photos of our classroom in this blog post.  

Our classroom has always been on the third floor.  Nick had to custom make our shelves and book cases to get them to fit to the pitch of the roof.  It was a really, really special place to me...in my mind.  

The reality of the situation was that we found ourselves in a predicament that we were hardly ever able to get everything accomplished when we had school up there.  We were lucky to start our day on time and if we didn't finish by lunch I could pretty much kiss any chance of finishing our work goodbye.  

In addition to that, the homeschool room very often during seasons of the year looked like a clumsy SWAT team had been searching for something amidst holiday decorations.  Things were strewn all over, nothing could be organized amidst the chaos.  It was bad.  Bad, folks, bad.  If you need to see something to understand you can read this old post but I'm warning you...it's bad.  

Why was schooling so hard up there you ask?  Well, it was really hard to pinpoint the reasoning...I always blamed it on a multitude of things which included it being so far removed from the rest of the house, it being too sunny and warm in the afternoon, it being really dark in the morning hours, it being too cluttered, and on and on and on.  

A couple of years ago God started working on my heart.  I still wanted to homeschool but I wanted it to be an ever-present pulse in our family.  For us it had always been something we do only up in the classroom and then we come downstairs, shut the door, and put it out of our minds.  I didn't want that anymore.  I tried incorporating school more into our every day life.  We did more school in the dining room over tea and after lunch, outside.  While we found ourselves enjoying school more we found our house starting to look like a used curriculum sale was taking place...random papers, books, and projects started to stray to every nook and bump out of our victorian.  And this Momma was getting mad.  

We tried for seven years to make it work.  But there came a breaking point when we decided it was time to change.  For the reasons mentioned above but also with the pitch of the roof it was starting to become difficult for the three of us (including two growing like weeds children) to maneuver around the desks like we had when they were so little. 

So one day on a whim, we changed.  I declared that we were moving the classroom downstairs.  

So we did.  

The toys and craft supplies went upstairs.  We are still muddling through where everything should go on the third floor.  And downstairs we are struggling with where to put everything.  We no longer have an entire floor of the house for our supplies but rather a single room.  Downsizing is now our middle name.  In the process I have found that it was a long over due process.  Projects, books, manipulatives, and supplies for children with much shorter limbs and much chubbier fingers are still hanging around.  Once we've gone through everything I'm hoping it will be a manageable amount for our classroom.  But it will have to be so we will make it work.  

There are parts of the classroom I will really miss but there are parts of the new classroom that I am really starting to find such assets to our family.  For example, our new classroom (the blue room if you'll remember) has three rose of sharon bushes outside of our massive picture window.  Four birdfeeders later and we have officially become "bird people".  Also, the classroom is right off the downstairs laundry room and powder room.  We have a large utility sink for washing brushes, taking our science experiments, and more.  I can also now fold laundry while watching them do their math.  Very convenient.  

Before the move, our families biggest arguements were about legos.  Dumb I know.  But the kids legos were in the blue room, which we have to go through to get to the laundry room and we have to pass through to get to the dining room from the kitchen.  It was always a fight to get them to pick up their legos in the middle of creating something or to at least scootch them over so I didn't have to plow through them with laundry in tow.  Now the legos are upstairs and, while we still insist on them picking up, they can at least display their finished projects without fear of someone stepping on them.  Where the legos once were downstairs is now a monstrous desk we found at Restore.  

With the children getting older, needing more head room, using less supplies, and wanting to create, this is a better solution for our family.  We also have school books on hand in the room off our dining room now for more dialectic discussion around the dinner table.  Words are starting to be debated and chewed upon.  

All that to say, the whole "still in transition" business is so hard for me.  At least once a day I find myself having to re-convince myself that this is a change for the best for the whole family and one day, eventually, I will love both spaces as much as I loved our little classroom in the sky.  

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I struggle so much with change.  Do you?  How do you talk yourself down from despair when things are not perfect?  

Welcome to our Cottage

I can't wait to share our cottage with you. 

Ready? 

Come on in, friends! 

In case you missed it in this post you can read all about how my amazing husband took me down and presented me with keys as a birthday gift...keys to our very own lake cottage!  It was so sweet and romantic of him to set the trip up and to give me a lake cottage for my birthday!  He's really upped the ante when it comes to birthday gifts.  Next year I'm going to have to give him a Porsha or something ;)

But anyway...

Welcome to our new home away from home. 

Literally!

We are so, so blessed by this place.   I have wanted a cottage ever since I was a girl but I had never thought of it as a real possibility.  I never really even thought of it as being possible. If it did ever happen, I figured maybe one day when the kids were grown.  Or I was almost dead. 

But a few months ago this all started coming together in one of those events that you just know God is at the head of. We had taken Cal down (Emma had ballet and then was with my sister...boo!  We always miss her) and visited with some friends of ours who have a cottage a few doors down from what is now ours (we're neighbors now!).  They were talking with us about a few cottages that were available for sale.  We looked at them longingly but figured it was just a nice dream and set out on our way. 

On the way home though we were talking about how Cal just seemed to love being down around the lake.  He rode his bike all over and had the best time.  He was so much better behaved after being down there.  Then we started talking more seriously about owning a cottage and God opened doors and paved ways we never thought would be open to us. It's been an incredible experience to be a part of. We have always known that nothing was impossible with our God but this has really proven that for us!

I do want to say that our cottage needs a lot of work.  I don't want to sugar coat it and make it look like it's perfect.  It's not. It's like us: It needs work.  But we have a clear vision together of what we want and we are so excited to work on it together.  Thankfully it is in live in condition...no mold or vermin or missing walls, whew! 

It's totally us. 

Except the furniture.  The purchase came with the furniture so that will be moved out as well.  Didn't want to confuse y'all and have you thinking we already moved furniture in. :)

If you know Nick and I you know that we are kind of weirdos.  And we LOVE old houses.  When a girl who's a history nerd marries an architect you get a really great love of OLD Architecture!  Our home is over 120 years old.  We have changed things and discovered things and polished things.  It's the work we've put into our home that makes us love it even more.  And one another.  Our home (like this one will be) truly is a labor of love.

I don't think that we are "new" home kinds of people.  We love the journey that old homes provide.  Our cottage is one of the original ones on the lake left in the original shape.  It is going to be so fun to tear away the layers and try to find what is still there...to go through the journey together and sift through the past.

So let's show you around...what we love, what we are going to change and everything in between! 

Come on in!

This is the view from the front door.  Currently there is a bedroom that you can see in the photo.  It is actually decent sized.  However we really want a big open space.  I'm envisioning kids sprawled on the floor doing a puzzle, family cookouts with people bustling in and out.  Those type of things.  And with the space so small (less than 500 sq ft!) we really want to open everything as much as possible.  We are planning on tearing down these walls! in the center of the room so it's just a big open area.  We are planning on having a bed down there (ain't no fan of a futon) but it will be in the open space.  Pa and Ma Ingalls style. 

So I can definitely see what others were trying to do in the past with our house.  I don't want to be one to say "what were they doing here?"  because everyone has their own vision for space, their own personalities, tastes, ideas, and budgets.

What we are envisioning is one large area (for now).  Down the road we envision a second floor being added on with the bedrooms moved to upstairs.  Can you picture all of it?  Can you?  Eek, I'm excited just talking about it!

For now though we will have one large room which will serve as the bedroom/entry/living room.  The children have a small room where they will sleep in bunkbeds.  It's an adorable little nook for them.  We also have a kitchen and a bathroom.  and that's it! Let me show you those...

Here is the bathroom.  It looks teeny tiny and it is!  The first time we looked at the cottage I didn't go in the bathroom and then when I went home and thought of the cottage (and dreamed about it even!) I was eeked out by the size of the bathroom.  But this time when I was in the cottage I actually WENT in the bathroom and I was surprised by the amount of space in the bathroom.  Don't get me wrong, there isn't a lot of space. But I could at least change my clothes without knocking something off of the sink.  Whew!

This is the kids nook/area/thing.  Emma keeps telling people that they have to sleep in a closet which isn't true (but it is the size of a good closet I suppose!) The people before us have been keeping this as a little storage area so after a good tidy, some new matresses, and some paint it will be as good as new.  One of the things I think the kids are having a hard time understanding is the lack of personal space.  Living in a large home we all have our own areas of the house to go to when we need to be alone but here we won't have that.  We've been trying to explain it to them but I think it will still be a big adjustment for all of us. 

From the kitchen you can see that this place has not been occupied for some time.  It's definitely going to need some love!  These two photos are me standing in one side of the kitchen and taking a photo and then swapping sides and taking a photo of the side where I had been standing.  Our big view of the lake is out of the kitchen window which placement wise makes it a bit awkward.  But we are going to make it work! 

Here's a very side view (not sure why I didn't take it from straight on) but I just love the view.  We are about 3 houses down from the beach area that has a little playground.  It will just be perfect!

Anyway, the view is one of the reasons that we want to make this as open and airy as we can...we want to see the view as much as we can! 

Well, I hope you enjoyed the tour of our little lake cottage.  We are so excited to bring it back to life and love on it.  God is so amazing friends! 

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I will be posting soon all about the little details of the place that can be hard to see in photos.  With that maybe you can help me with some design questions we are having :).  We plan on posting all about our progress so stick around!