March 6, 2016 No Comments  

Dining Room

It has been a while since my last post and I must apologize for that…things got really busy and after the pool was done, we spent a lot of time outside 🙂

However, here are some pictures of the dining room.  Not 100% complete but pretty much there.

As you know when we first purchased the house, the dining room roof and ceiling had problems.  There was a massive hole in the roof which had caused all the ceiling and the outside wall to be completely rotted and moldy.

We were very lucky to have Sam and Jessica come to visit and they helped to pull down all the bad drywall on the ceiling and walls, remove the bad framing and roof.  WOW what a mess, that is for sure.  The smell was not particularly nice because of the mold.

Here are some pictures from the inspector and from when we arrived in October 2014.

This picture actually makes the dining room look respectable…all the bad parts are behind the camera.

So after all the bad had been removed, Kevin started the long process of replacing.  Below is a picture of insider to the right of the window after the wall has been cleaned and the new roof is on.  Below is a picture of the area for the final piece of drywall.  I might add here that Kevin hates drywalling with a passion so we are really glad that there is only a small amount of drywall work left to do in the blue room.

Once the drywall was all completed, the next step was to paint the walls.  The window wall we wanted to be a dark forest green and the other three walls an off white color with a hint of yellow to work with the green.  All trim to freshly painted white.

For the ceiling we really really wanted tin tiles, but cost was way way above our tight budget.  The room is 15*20 and for actual tin it was going to cost about $8000, for the “fake” tin tiles you can get at Lowes it was going to cost $3000.  Pinterest came to our rescue…someone had posted that they had used a wallpaper with a tile design on it and then painted it with metallic paint.

So with the help of my quilting equipment I cut the wallpaper into squares so that it would be easier to put up on the ceiling.  Here are some pictures of the wallpaper and paint.

Once the wallpaper was up on the ceiling and had dried we set about painting it.  First a light brown primer and then the metallic paint.

Light fixtures were a challenge as I wanted sconces on the wall and I wanted the candelabra to have crystals.  I couldn’t find one that I like at the right price, but Charlie and I found a matching set of candelabra and wall sconces in Lowes one day.  I purchased some crystals from Ebay and voila, a perfect set.



We still have to put up new molding and finish the floors but apart from that the dining room is complete.

August 30, 2015 No Comments  

Swimming Pool

Well, the swimming pool….the one item that needed renovated that we all seriously wanted to get done first, but the whole being able to live in the house came up as a higher priority.

The words “swimming pool” was not really the right words that should have been used to describe what our pool used to look like and was definitely not somewhere I would want to swim in.

Here are some pictures of the pool from when we purchased the house…it was a swamp, piled high with trash, broken pool loungers and way too many frogs and other animals we were unsure of.

Above and Below – The pool when we arrived in October 2014

Below are some pictures of the work that Kevin and Charlie (with some help from Kevin’s work friend Paul) completed.  The pool is 40 feet long by 18 feet wide and 10 foot deep at the deep end and 4 foot at the shallow end.

So with the new liner attached, the process of filling the pool started….because of the way you have to fill it up bit by bit to cut out holes for the filters and pump outlets, we had some challenges.  It took over a week to get the pool filled and ended up with algae.  However the right chemicals have killed the algae.  Below are some pictures taken once the pool was filled.

Erin and Jordyn…plus Charlies feet 🙂

Jordyn

 

Shelby taking a swim

Tracey cleaning the algae

Nearly there

We are still struggling with keeping the algae at bay, but plan to empty the pool before winter, refill and winterize.

Just ordered a cover…the costs that we have incurred for the pool are $800 for liner, about $200 in chemicals, $100 for the cover and $30 for winterizing chemicals.  Luckily our water bill has not increased because here we have a standard fixed city utility bill of $35 that does street lights, trash and water.  I am sure because of running the pump our electric bill will increase as well but have not seen that bill come in yet.

So next year I estimate that it will cost us about $300 to keep up and running for the summer.  Well worth it considering that I have spent an hour a day swimming since we got it set up, Charlie loves it, as does Kevin.  Tracey and Erin certainly spent a lot of time swimming whilst they were here too!

April 22, 2015 No Comments  

The Front Yard

We as a family have always enjoyed sitting down at the front of the house and to watch the world go by….

We had a porch when we lived on Harrison, but mostly used the back yard there because Charlie was so little.  Also, the kids just loved the trampoline.  My Dad can agree that the squirrels that lived in the trees there were rather entertaining…

When we lived on Twin Lakes we had a very small porch and the neighbors were far from friendly, so sadly we rarely spent time outside at the front of the house..

At Gloria, we had no porch so we had a swing in the front yard for some time and have lots of memories of sitting there and enjoying watching our cats and the kids playing in the cul-de-sac…

Here in Mississippi we are lucky to have a larger porch that allows us to have three chairs, a couple of tables and some plants.  There was a local flea market in town and we purchased three Adirondack chairs and the tables to match when we first moved here.  We also found an awesome garden center in Magee and got a green chiminea as well which has an awesome grape design on it – perfect for any wino!  It had a small amount of damage that is hardly noticeable so we got it for a cool $25.

I have lost count how many times we have sat out there to eat, have a glass of wine/beer or to just chill and chat…

So we have focused on working on the lawn and the footpath, although the path needs a little more work as some of the bricks have come loose.  But below is a before and after photo of the front footpath.
After

Before
The “lawn” and I use that word very loosely was mostly weeds and moss when we arrived covered with a deep coating of leaves (and a set of house keys somewhere Kevin).
Its amazing how quickly things grow here, you lay down grass seed and within a week you have 2 inch high grass.  So some before and after pictures.  We probably have cut down over 50 trees from the front yard that were in different stages of growing.  It was so totally overgrown when we arrived in October that we could not see the house.
We now have a lawn that my father would be proud of, however still more work to do around the big trees and on the north side of the front yard.  And of course, cant’t wait until we have all the trim painted and the porch roof fixed.

BEFORE PICTURES

Overgrown and barely able to see the house

Overgrown front…the ivy on the left was all over the side of the house.
Sad and unloved.
A staple it seems for anyone who wants an ant free zone….

Finally, to make people feel welcome, we picked up an awesome sign that we have set up by the front path…
April 13, 2015 No Comments  

Kitchen finally complete

Our kitchen is finally complete (except two very tiny jobs left to do).

We took the kitchen from a grimy, bug invested space of nastiness to a cool, fun kitchen.  You have already seen some pictures that I posted of the kitchen when we purchased the house, and even some pictures of the process….but now the final results.

Here is a short reminder…

And here are the results…let me know what you think!

So our new fridge/microwave and dishwasher are shown in this shot…just love the bottom drawer freezer…Not sure why we choose orange for the walls, but we have always wanted orange somewhere in our house (even in Colorado).  Here we know that we will never be selling the house so its OK to have any color we want…surprisingly, everyone that has seen the color so far loves it.

We had to use vinyl tiles on the floor…eventually we will put hardwood floors down once we have done some foundation work, but this is perfect for now.  I love how we put the tiles down…we put them down diagonally and rotated the pattern.  Makes the room feel much larger.

Of course, we also had to put back up our wonderful under cabinet lights.  All the colors look awesome on the glass tile back splash.

The cabinets have been cleaned, painted inside and then stained and clear coated on the outside.  We got some awesome brushed nickel handles that have a antique style, but are modern due to their color.

The hallway beyond the Kitchen going to Charlie’s bedroom on the right, and the bathroom.  We plan to replace the bathroom door and get a handle to match the hardware on the kitchen cabinets.  Found a place in North Mississippi that sells old refurbished panel doors, so one day we plan to head up there to check out what they have.

Bell’s picture has pride of place beside Charlies bedroom door 🙂

This picture shows the great job that Jessica and Sam did on the cabinet doors.  They are chocolaty and very rich in color.  We followed through with the brown colors in the glass back splash and the counter tops.  The bright orange on the walls and the awesome new windows brightens the kitchen up perfectly.

So, old kitchens typically do not have a built in trash can so I searched the flea markets for something that might work to hide our trashcan.  I found a box that was originally used to store sweet corn.  It needed a good clean and I used Olde English dark oil on the exterior.  Turned out perfect.  You can see the dogs water peeking around the corner, so I have been on the lookout for something that can hide the bucket but still give them all easy access.  Our little spice rack is holding the spices that I use the most regularly.  The rest are in a kitchen cabinet.  One of my favorite pictures is on the wall and finished off the hallway perfectly…Thanks Dana for the picture 🙂

Finally our new gas stove, which I love and a low hanging pot rack…so glad I can reach them all easily now :).  Don’t you just love the purple lights 🙂

Awesome job all the way around.  Love my kitchen so much that I even like cleaning up and emptying the dishwasher!

So call out to Jessica, Sam, Charlie and Kevin on helping to get the job done!

February 11, 2015 No Comments  

The Mustang needed some well overdue love

We desperately needed to replace the roof on the mustang.  Hail damage and sun damage from Colorado had caused it to crack and leak badly.  We kept on meaning to replace it but just never seemed to get around to it.  So finally, Kevin decided to dedicate a weekend to the mustang and put on a new roof!  I have such a great husband that is for sure!

January 6, 2015 No Comments  

First Christmas in Mississippi

I thought I would post pictures of how we decorated the Living Room for Christmas.  This room is probably one of the rooms that needs the least work.  We have to paint the ceiling, strip and stain or paint all the trim and sand/stain/finish the floors.

January 4, 2015 No Comments  

The Kitchen

The kitchen was rather disgusting.  In fact it was really disgusting.  Your feet stuck to the floor as you walked.  The cabinets had years of grease on them and the windows were filthy…one of the windows was held in by expanding foam a previous owner had used to fill in the holes in the frame.

Inside the cabinets, the previous owner had lined them with a sticky back plastic film…hunter green for the sides/walls, and white with green flowers for the shelves.  You could see quite clearly where insects had walked. The smell was really not very nice.  We did our best to try and clean things, but soon discovered that just cleaning was not going to work.

Here are some before pictures of the kitchen.

Original dishwasher which even had some dirty plates in it…

An outlet and wall covered in fly droppings

A good picture which demonstrates the foam under the window and level of grim that was on the kitchen floor and cabinets.

Even with all the grim, I could still see that this kitchen could be reclaimed.  Eventually of course we will put in a brand new kitchen, but we were working on a budget and figured that at least the cabinets would work for us for a few years.

Just look at the color of the water in the red bucket!!!  Yuck!

Betty trying to clean the floor with her tail!

The fan with pretty gross too – we decided to throw away the fan because after trying to clean we knew that it was too far gone!

Below is a picture of Betty trying to hinder our chances of working on the kitchen cabinets!

So, Charlie, who is an awesome little worker, decided it would be his job to pull up all the nasty sticky linoleum from the floor.  He ended up having to pull up 2 and sometimes 3 layers of linoleum from the floor. I think it took him 3 days to finish. Once complete the floor finally looked clean, and then we moved onto the cabinets.  I removed the doors, and removed all the sticky back plastic from the shelves, walls, and drawers.
Again we were hoping to just be able to clean the doors, but we had to scrub so hard to clean, the doors were losing the polyurethane finish and were patchy and really did not look very nice.  For a couple of weeks we had doors stacked up on the front porch in varying levels “donedom”.

Between Jessica, Sam and I we managed to get the all the doors sanded, stained and clear coated the doors, drawers and cabinets.

Below are some pictures of the kitchen in varying stages.

January 1, 2015 No Comments  

What we found when we arrived in September…and nasty stinky carpets!

1.  A totally overgrown garden.  You could not see the house for the 8ft tall weeds, over grown trees and bushes.  When we were here in March when we first got the keys, things were over grown but no where near as bad as this.  I can only assume that the bank who owned the bank paid for a landscaper to come in and cut everything down when they listed it for sale.

2.  More trash than you can ever imagine.  We knew that under the house there was a lot of trash, and also some littered around the garden.  It seemed however, that since March, our house had been used as the local dump.  I even found several broken garden chairs, and of course in the pool….uh pond….there was tons of trash floating around.

3.  The dining room roof was far worse.  Where we had laid down plastic in March to somewhat protect the floor, there was now a pile more of roofing material and drywall that had fallen down from the whole in the roof/ceiling.

4.  An even nastier smell in the house from all the mold in the dining room.

We got straight to work and our focus was the kitchen, pulling out and removing any wood in the dining room wall and ceiling that had any mold on it whats so ever, and pulling out any carpets that were in the house (Living Room, Office and Blue Room)

Jessica and her boyfriend arrived and were a great help with all of these things, although I believe we had removed all the carpet before they arrived.

In the Living Room, there was hard wood floors under the carpet.  Sadly in the office and Blue Room there is no hard wood floors so we will have to put some down.

Below are some pictures of the before and after carpet in the Living Room and the Office and the cleared yard.

Living Room before walls and doors being painted and the carpet being removed…you can see the beautiful hard wood floors that were revealed when the carpet was removed.

This is the office prior to carpet removal – sadly I have no pics of the office carpet during removal or after, but will post some when we finally get around to putting down hard woods.  This carpet though was more disgusting than the one that was in the Living Room.  Once both carpets were gone, the difference in just the air in the rooms was remarkable.

December 31, 2014 No Comments  

The Journey to Mississippi

As you all know, we recently moved to Mississippi and purchased an old house that was built in 1907. There are always pros and cons associated with such a big move.  The biggest con, has been moving away from our friends, who are all very much and very intensely missed!

Selling of our house on Gloria Ct was incredibly stressful, but we made it through all the stuff associated with a house sale and having to deal with Realtor’s and loan companies who really didn’t care about the whole situation of us moving out of state on a tight budget.

Once the Old Dominion trailer had been picked up and we were left with just us and the animals to get moved, we got out of Colorado pretty quick.

I want to say a big thank you to Jennifer and Rob Mills, who allowed us to park the Old Dom trailer at the farm whilst we were packing it…it was a great help to be able to get everything out of the house and not worry about being on a tight deadline with a pending sale.

I also want to say a big thank you to JD LeClair – our horsey veterinarian, who got all of our paperwork inline with the big move to Mississippi for the ponies.  It is really quite shocking the amount of paperwork needed which included a health certificate, negative coggins tests, vaccinations and State entry paperwork for each scheduled stop along the way.

The journey down to Mississippi with the ponies was scheduled to be over three days.  Jen and Jordyn came with us with their truck and towed the ponies.  I drove the Mustang.

The horse trailer was packed with stuff.  The dogs, cats and guinea pigs traveled in the back of the truck, apart from Shelby who seemed to prefer the back seat of the mustang.  It was definitely a challenge to feed all the gp’s and cats whilst worrying about them getting out of their travelling boxes.

We stopped in Kansas and Missouri.  The stop in Kansas allowed us to see a beautiful stables that both Jen and I were incredibly jealous of.  They had an awesome pot bellied pig there that Jordyn wanted to keep. The ponies enjoyed a night of running around in a big arena and talking to the other horses.  We didn’t get there till gone midnight so I was glad that they had such a big space to stretch their legs.

The next morning, we load the ponies, get ready to leave only to discover we had a flat tire on the trailer…Kevin used his portable air pump to get some air in it.  Luckily we found a local tire dealership that had a tire, and who was willing to change the tire without unloading the ponies.  Amazingly with all the loud noises from air tools, Kaylie and Bold weren’t even a little bit upset and carried on eating their hay!

The journey to through the rest of Kansas and into Missouri was pretty uneventful.  Our route allowed us to miss St Louis and stop at our next boarding facility which was in the beautiful Missouri hills, tucked away.  A totally cute barn and arena with wood fenced pens and shelters.

We arrived again the dark but the ponies were super stars.  They unloaded from the trailer and enjoyed the time that they had to stretch their legs.

We stayed in a Best Western that night…not gonna say which one as you may not want to stay in one of the rooms.  Bob who does not do well travelling was a little constipated and we had to give him a bath as his bottom had some nasties there.  We did clean up and wash out the tub afterwards…I promise!!! 🙂

We went out to dinner at an awesome place called Steak and Shake.  Had a great burger and some awesome milkshakes.  It was really good to relax.

The last leg of the journey did not go quite as smoothly.  In Arkansas, I got pulled over by a State Trooper because one of my lights was out on my license plate.  He stuck his head in my window with his flashlight and Shelby put her head out the window and gave his face one big lovely lick.  He let us know about the light, I showed him the spare bulbs in my glove compartment and said we would replace at the next gas station.  He said have a safe trip and we were on our way again.

About 10 miles from Mount Olive, Charlie decided he had to stop and go to the bathroom.  We pulled over at a gas station south of Magee.   I went back to check on Kaylie and Bold.  Right when I went to shut the door she got her head trapped between the wall of the tack room and her body in the trailer.  She couldn’t get it up, and we all started to get worried.  We unloaded Bold and then tried to unload Kaylie.  She was so stressed she was pushing back on the butt bar and we couldn’t get it undone.  After what seemed like hours (which in fact was probably less than a minute) of struggling, she managed to free herself and her head was back again above the wall of the tack room and she was looking out the door as if to say, what are we all stressing about.  This experience has proven to me that I really need a slightly larger trailer as Kaylie really does fit in their – its a bit of a tight fit!

With less than 10 minutes left to drive, this was a sure sign that Kaylie was getting tired and needed to get out of the trailer so we dragged Charlie out of the bathroom and hit the road.

We arrived at our destination in Mount Olive shortly afterwards.  Audrey (who owns the property where we keep the ponies) was there waiting for us and had two stalls all ready and waiting for us with hay and water. We unloaded the ponies and let them munch on some grass for a while.  They seemed happy to have escaped the trailer.  Audrey also had a small house in town that we were staying at, but before then we had to take all the animals to our house and get them settled.  In the dark, in an old house it was an interesting process.  We put the dogs in cats in what has become our bedroom, and the gp’s went in the other room at the front of the house which is now the living room.

We finally went back to the rental house and all collapsed into a heap – just such a relief to get here with no injuries and no accidents.

We spent the next few days having fun and getting the ponies settled into their field and new home.  We went to New Orleans and Jen got to see some cool graveyards.  We walked Bourbon Street and had lunch in town.

It was good to relax and take things easy for a few days.  Kevin had to go back to Colorado for a few days for work, so he and Jen hit the road back to Colorado – it was a tearful farewell for both Jen and I, but I have the knowledge that we will be hanging out again in October for Halloween…which I am already planning for 🙂

Kaylie tail hanging out of the back of the trailer – we removed the top doors so that they had plenty of air and ventilation for the trip.

First stop in Kansas above…see the pot bellied pig?

Swimming pool at hotel in Hattiesburg

Jordyn giving a tough time during lunch in New Orleans

Two pictures above are Charlie and Jordyn on an ANT sculpture at the Hattiesburg Zoo.

Kaylie and Bold in their new field – lots too eat and lots of shelter

Jen’s favorite part of Mississippi – the bugs – this spider’s body was bigger than a quarter!

Driving over the bridge for Lake Pontchartrain – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Pontchartrain – Interstate 10 – takes you straight into New Orleans

Charlie having lunch in New Orleans

Jen on Bourbon St in New Orleans