Cottage Details

My last post about the cottage was the tour of how we are almost done with the interior! We are so in love with our favorite spot and love to go there to get away. If you missed that post you can read it all here and see what we have done with the place!

I thought I would get a little more in depth and talk a bit more about decor and pieces that I have picked up along the way that I love. The feel of the cottage that I am going for is acquired. I don’t want a feel that we went and bought everything new but rather I am going with a collection of pieces and momentos that we love, that bring us joy, and that will give the place a curated feel like it’s been in our family for generations rather than a few years. To do this I look for pieces everywhere: at thrift stores, flea markets, my grandma’s house, and things that we have at our house.

I will also say that by doing it this was it is such a neat experience to see how God provides. For example, this summer we have been getting serious about stocking our kitchen with more gadgets that we need while not going overboard. After all I don’t want a ton of items to have to take care of, put away, and weed through when I am looking for something. Not cool. However necessities like a pizza cutter and an ice cream scoop have proven to be missing items that are desperately needed, especially when you have kiddos. Well, I didn’t want to go and spend a ton of money on buying a bunch of stuff. I wanted this to be a thing of collecting items. It was hard to go without but I knew the pieces would come. Sure enough, last week I was at my moms and she was giving a bunch of kitchen gadgets away. She pretty much had everything that we needed for the cottage.

All of that to say, we are going slow with filling in the gaps of needed items, knowing that we have all the time in the world and that God will provide in His time.

All that to say I am thrilled to be able to show you a few of my favorite details of the place:

Nick built these shelves next to the kids bunk beds (they are a total mess in this photo but you get the idea) and we love them! He built them out of salvaged lumber from a bookshelf that was in the office of my childhood pastor. How cool is that? The biggest obstacle we’ve had to face with having a tiny place is the lack of storage. There just isn’t room for furniture to store things so we’ve had to be really creative. The shelves have really helped to keep all of the kids things at bay and provide them a solid sense of belonging in their bedroom.

Hello my name is Lindsay and I am sucker for fun towels. Seriously, give me all of the towels. It’s a real problem, folks. I love this one I picked up in Middlebury, Indiana.

I picked this pillow up at an antiques store in Nappanee, Indiana. The color scheme for our cottage is gray, blue, white, and a teeny bit of green. So this fits in great. I love it because my Grandpa was in the Navy at Great Lakes. This is totally something he would have sent home to my Grandma. It is so special to me because of that.

Does anyone else love old boxes for storage or is it just me? This box holds a lot of the kids toys and books…and a shirt apparently.

We found this cold brew coffee press at Bloomingdales and love, love, love it! It works so well, the coffee tastes great, and there have been no grounds in the coffee. This has been perfect for super hot days. Also, I love these cute cups we found at Homegoods and gifted ourselves at Christmas (does anyone else do this???). Sorry guys but I scoured the internet for ours and can’t find them, but I adore these and think they would be a great gift idea!

This fan was a Goodwill find but was a really ugly taupey kind of brown color. Nick spray painted it and now it is so fun. All of the windows that face the lake are in our kitchen so sometimes it gets toasty over there while cooking. The fan helps provide just a touch of a breeze.

I adore our dishes. They are vintage Corelle and they belonged to my late Grandma Wannie. They are one of my most treasured possessions. They make me think of her every time we use them.

The blue dishes on the right were a gift from the sweetest Mother-in-Law ever and I just love them. They were a wedding gift they received and I love using them. They are fun for desserts with friends and other snackys.

Our indoor/outdoor rug was the most expensive decoration we bought for the cottage ($60!) but it has been perfect. It helps it is indoor/outdoor because it can be scrubbed or even thrown into the washing machine. I found one that is pretty darn close here if you like ours.

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So those are some of my favorite little details of the cottage! I am always looking for tiny house storage ideas so if you have any pointers or tips for how we can keep clutter at bay, I’d love some ideas!

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?