Window Work

Well, it's been a while since I've posted, and it's about three months until Baby Nolan should arrive. Cue: FREAK OUT! After working so much on the house before Sagan's birthday party, we were both ready to take a little break from our projects. A "little" break turned into a few months, but I'm happy to report we are back at it and hard at work to get the living room (and the nursery!!) finished before Nolan's arrival.

The living room...here is what we have had left to do:

• baseboards
• crown molding
• windows (re-run sash cord that has broken, reattach weights, replace sills, and replace trim)
• finish trimming out fireplace/mantle
• mount TV above mantle
• build out cabinets and shelves next to fireplace
• hang chandelier
• place rug and furniture and RELAX!
• (I've probably left something out...)

We decided to start with the windows. The trim has been off of them for months and months! We had planned on replacing the weight/pulley system with springs so we could insulate in the openings around the windows, but decided if we could just use caulk and spray foam to stop any airflow, that would suffice. I insulated around the windows while David worked on making new sills and trim for each window.

We've delayed the project for a while because we had some big decisions to make - however we do the trim on these windows is how we'll eventually do the trim on all the windows around the house. So, the first window took us a bit longer than the rest should. Two of the weights on the first window we worked on were detached, so we had to reattach them. It was a simpler process than I expected, albeit a little stressful! We had to remove the bottom sash, so David first had to pull off the parting bead. Once we got that off, the bottom sash came out pretty easily. Unfortunately, it doesn't move up and down very well, so we used a planer, a putty knife, and some elbow grease to remove the paint from the track the sash is supposed to move up and down on. Made a HUGE difference!

Next, strung the cord through the pulley system and one of the weights, then tied a knot at the weight and at the appropriate length within the window box.

Stringing the sash cord through the pulley system.

We did this on both sides, then put the sash back into the window box and pushed the knots and cords onto each side of the sash.

We measured and marked carefully to make sure the cord was long enough to allow the window to move up and down as it should and to prevent the weight from hitting the top or bottom of the frame behind the trim. 

Once we had the cord attached at both sides of the sash, we made sure it would move up and down freely, then reattached the parting bead.

Bottom sash, weights and the new sill and bottom trim all in place!

Then David measured and cut the rest of the trim and attached it. And voila! We have our new windowsill and trim in place and a functioning window!

Next we had to tackle the double windows on the front of the house. These proved to be more difficult because the weights were detached from the top sashes, so we had to remove both the bottom and the top sashes. By the time we got to the second window of this double set, we felt like old pros (HA!).

We had to remove the storm windows off the outside of the house to cut around the top sash, which had been painted shut. David says if we ever sell this house, we will put in our contract that you can't paint the windows shut! (Suffice it to say this was a tough task...)

With both the top and bottom sashes removed, we were able to plane and scrape the sides so the sashes could easily move up and down on their tracks. Unfortunately (probably many, many years ago), the windows had been painted shut and the tracks had been painted - a big no-no when it comes to keeping the windows functioning properly.

This is what it looks like behind the trim - with the weights and sash cords. When we removed the trim off the double windows, we found that four weights were detached, but two were completely missing. We put out an APB for 7-pound weights, and fortunately we have great friends who are renovating another old home in Murray - who just happened to have two 7-pound weights on hand! Thanks Josh and Ashley!!

After all the blood, sweat and tears, we finally have both windows functioning properly!

This is an exciting sight for us...TRIM on the windows!! 

This project went much more smoothly than we anticipated, but was still pretty demanding. We didn't do everything that we'll eventually have to do to the windows (sand, paint, reglaze, etc.) - but at least they are functioning and we now have templates for the windows in the rest of the house.

And, not to be forgotten...we got the trim around both doorways as well!

I can't wait for this trim to be primed and painted to see how it makes the transom stand out.

Next up: cabinets, shelves, baseboards (which have already been milled and primed!), and 10 million other things. But...yay for progress!

A Different Kind of Construction Project

I promise to get back to posts about the house, but some things can't go unsaid!

Last summer, David and I decided we wanted to try to have a second child. Having kids doesn't come easy for us - we've battled infertility for several years, and Sagan is our miracle baby: the result of our first cycle of IVF. When we had her, many people said "oh the next one will be a surprise and just happen naturally!" Nope - that's not really how it works.

So, we reached out to Nashville Fertility Center, which is where Sagan was conceived, to start a new IVF cycle. I started my protocol in the fall, and on Thanksgiving Day, we had our egg retrieval. We had gotten results from some blood work the day before that showed my body wasn't ready for an embryo transfer. We were scared this meant we wouldn't have any embryos to transfer, but fortunately, that wasn't the case!

Because of NFC's lab or surgery center shutdown over the holidays, we had to wait to transfer an embryo until February. So on February 12th, we went to Nashville and transferred one tiny embryo. Just like our transfer with Sagan, it felt all too surreal and like there was no way it could ever work.

David got to see the embryo through a microscope before it was transferred!

But, it did! I am now about 15.5 weeks pregnant with what we found out today will be our son Nolan Michael. Sagan has been adamant that baby was going to be a sister, so we were afraid she'd be slightly devastated, but she took it like a champ! We went shopping for her "little brudder" and got him some essentials per Sagan: some blue pacis, a couple of sleepers, and a choo-choo train toy.

Nolan Michael at 15w3d (head down and looking a little squished in there!)

So what does this mean? Aside from being very excited about growing our family, David and I have a lot of work to get done between now and the end of October! I hope we can finish the living room fairly soon, then we will figure out what else needs to be completed before Baby Boy arrives!

Paint Party (the fun kind!)

Sagan turned 3 this week, so we had her birthday party at our house today. It was a blast!

She loves to paint, so we chose a paint party for this year. We invited her class from daycare, and with them and our friends and family, ended up with about 15 kids here (plus a few sweet babies!).

I used Pinterest for some inspiration, plus crafted some ideas with my mom and mother-in-law. We got 8x10 canvases for each of the kids, then a large and a small paintbrush, a cup of water, paint palette, and apron. We borrowed the tables and chairs from our church, and covered the tables with brown kraft paper to make for an easy clean-up.

We had such a fun group today. Our hearts are so full because of all the love Sagan was showered with today. The kids were all so well-behaved, and we only had a couple of skinned knees and one skinned elbow (that I know of!) so we will call it a success!

I got the quart paint cans from Lowes, then used my Silhouette Portrait to cut paint drips out of vinyl.

For our birthday party food I have a few go-tos: The Cake Lady in Murray for our cake and cookies, then my mom and mother-in-law for the rest! They're so talented and great cooks, so they always make the party food perfectly.

Vanilla cake pops with sprinkles by my mom. Small Canvases | Small Easels

Nothing beats Cake Lady cookies. The icing is amazing, and they're so cute!

Beautiful cake from The Cake Lady!

Mom is addicted to this popcorn "crack" (recipe on Pinterest) - popcorn with candy melts, and since it was a paint party, we had all different colors of it!

Plates | Napkins | Plates

We served hot dogs, chips, chicken salad sandwiches, and ham and cheese and turkey and cheese sandwiches. I made the banner on my Silhouette Portrait.

The kids had a blast painting! I had wet wipes and paper towels on hand, and it was a good thing. Paint + water + some thick brushes meant for a lot of fun and a lot of dirty arms and elbows. :)

Aprons

While some of the kids finished painting, the rest ran around in the front yard and played with bubbles. 

Then came present opening time. Sagan got so many sweet gifts from her sweet friends!

We finished the afternoon on the swingset!

Mantle Maven

First off, I am going to let you know that I will be unapologetically bragging on my husband throughout this post.

I will say - David is stubborn. I'm impatient. So I'm more prone to "let's buy it" vs. "let's build it from scratch." When he told me he wanted to build the mantle from scratch, I was pretty sure he was crazy, but we went with it.

Back in this post, I explained how we hired a mason to remove the false front of the existing fireplace and patch the brick. And how we went to a salvage yard to try to find a mantle to go there, but couldn't find any that would fit just right. So, David set out to build the mantle himself.

First, we had to get the fireplace prepped. The fireplace looked like this after the mason was done.

We hired a mason to expose the original fireplace

David next had to frame in the fireplace surround. He cut all his boards to length, then pieced them together in the living room lying down on the floor. We raised it up and voila...we had a frame to attach to the existing fireplace.

Cutting the bottom brace off the frame. Love those socks!

The frame in place

Let's take a moment to admire the beauty of that shiplap that I worked so hard on. Just kidding. The frame! David put two 2x6 boards in the middle of the upper part of the frame so that when we hang our TV above the fireplace, the TV mounting bracket can be attached directly to those boards.

Next, sheetrock. Ugh. Heavy, messy stuff. I may have nightmares tonight just thinking about the mess it made. BUT - it went up a lot easier than we thought.

Sheet rock attached to the frame and with a first coat of mud, getting ready to be primed and painted

David then painted the sheetrock (and the ceiling, and the rest of the room). And then, the fun part - he started on the mantle.

Now, our inspiration. You can't see much of it, and it was filthy, but you get the idea! The grooves, the different dimensions/layers, the corbels, etc.

We found this mantle at Hailey's Salvage in Nashville and used this picture and some scaled drawings David made of it to build the mantle for our house

David started with a sheet of MDF, and ripped it down with a table saw to the size boards he needed. Then, he cut the grooves into it using different router bits. That's the part that absolutely amazes me. He cut all those little grooves into the wood like he'd done it 100 times before. But he hadn't. And it's perfect. 

Check out all those grooves masterfully routed into the MDF ;)

So then, the really difficult part. We needed corbels. We should've traced one at the salvage yard, but didn't. So David found a cad program to use online, drew it out on that program, and then sent it to the genius me. I cut it out of card stock on my Silhouette Portrait (it's a vinyl/fabric/card stock cutting machine that's amazing and so much fun!).

Pattern for the corbel that David drew online and I cut with my Portrait

Back to the real work. He cut out the corbels with a jigsaw, sanded them down with a belt sander to smooth out the edges, and then it was all ready to be painted.

We've quickly realized how important the painting process is to making things look professionally finished. David used bin tinted shellac primer to seal the MDF, then used Sherwin Williams oil-based pro classic semi-gloss with Flood penetrol, which is a dry-time extender and leveling agent. (I just spoke Greek. Questions? Ask David.) The finish is so pretty, smooth, and shiny!

After finishing up the paint job, he brought it into the house and attached it to the sheetrock. We were hoping to just use construction adhesive, but there wasn't enough surface area to make it stick. So we screwed it in, and will be covering up the screws with baseboards along the bottom (which we had already planned on adding) and trim under the top.

The semi-finished mantle!

I couldn't be more excited about the way it looks. It's absolutely beautiful. I'm proud of him and how close to the old mantle we found at the salvage yard this one looks (except in MUCH better shape and the perfect size for our opening).

We still need to finish trimming it out (you can see the exposed frame here, which will be covered), but we want to run the wiring for the TV first (HDMI cables and such).

Next up - the hearth. The brick on the hearth had been removed prior to us buying the house, but we didn't like the concrete slab showing, so decided to cover it with tile. We chose this mosaic tile from Lowes and light gray grout.

David cut the tiles to size using a corded Dremel and a diamond blade, which we were afraid would be terrible but ended up not being too bad (says the wife who busied herself in another part of the house while that work was going on and who did none of the cutting work). We laid the tile out ahead of time to get all the pieces cut, then applied the mastic, and slowly but surely laid the tile sheets.

Laying the mosaic tile on the hearth

I have to say this was a process we were pretty nervous about as it was our first tiling job (well David's first...Dad let me tile and grout a step in their garage when I was in middle school). But it went pretty smoothly!

Applying the grout

The grout looks pretty dark here but dried much lighter. And look at that beautifully routed mantle!

The (not quite) finished product

We love how the tile looks on the hearth!

Next on the hearth, we need to caulk/grout by the firebox and add trim around the outside edges (likely stained to match the floor).

I'm so proud of how this project turned out! It's amazing what David has pushed himself to learn and do since we bought our olive on Olive. This home is so full of character, but it's fun getting to add even more with the transoms, the custom mantle and hearth, exposing the shiplap, and other things we have done or plan to do. I can't wait for the living room to be finished so we can put our feet up and enjoy that space!

And for good measure...here's a photo of what the fireplace looked like before we moved in:

Progress

It's been way too long since I've posted, and I have so many fun projects to give updates about! I'll try to get caught up over the next couple of weeks.

Several weeks ago, I posted here about David's work in creating an opening for the transom. Well, we've finally gotten it in place and it looks amazing! It still needs trim and the wall above it in the dining room needs to be sheet rocked, but we have a glimpse of the finished product and I'm sooooo excited about it!

This is the doorway between the living room and the dining room.

We have decided to stain the transoms instead of painting them (since we'll be staining the doors; all the trim in the house will be white), and chose the 9-light pattern to mimic the pattern in the glass cabinets in the kitchen and in the upstairs window. We ordered the transom raw from Transoms Direct - they custom built it, then shipped to us. David stained it, framed the new doorway, and hung it. The doorway still hasn't been trimmed out, but we'll get there. We're hoping to decide what we want to do in the dining room before we place the trim (and replace the drywall above the door in the dining room).

Oh, and the mess. Please pardon the mess in the living room. Patching all the walls and the ceiling, mudding the drywall above the fireplace...I had no idea how huge of a mess that would make! The sheetrock dust was EVERYWHERE. Actually, it still is everywhere. Every time I think it's all cleaned up, I find another coated surface. Regardless, it has been so much fun to paint the walls and ceiling and see it get closer to being finished.

Drywall complete on the fireplace surround, and patching around the windows and doors.

Patched and primed!

Next up...working on the mantle. I can't wait to show you that project. David has done an amazing job!

Brightening Up the Kitchen

The kitchen isn't quite finished yet, but I haven't posted a blog update in a month, and we've made too much progress not to share. So, here goes!

First - a secret I need to share. We are pretty good at getting things done around the house. David can build, we can paint, and I'm A+ at buying things, especially shopping online. But when it comes to picking out things and deciding color schemes, accessories, furniture, etc. - we both freeze. And then I run to my laptop to email Bri Moysa at Emerson Grey Designs. Bri is amazing. We first met her when commenting on a pin on Pinterest of a nursery she had designed. One of my best friends reached out to Bri and got her to design her daughter's nursery, then we reached out to her and she put together a design for Sagan's nursery. It was amazing. The guidance, attention to detail - and she just gets us and what style we're going for. We later had Bri's assistance to redesign our living room and kitchen in our old house, which we equally fell in love with. Her talent is amazing! Out of respect for Bri, I won't post source links to all the details, but will try to include them for main pieces.

So, as soon as we planned to buy the Olive on Olive, I reached out to Bri and let her know her assistance would definitely be needed. All that to say - while we're doing the physical labor here, it's under the guidance of the very talented Bri Moysa. :)

To the kitchen...first, I think you need to see some before pics. Excuse the mess - I'm pretty sure this was the week we moved in, so boxes. for. days.

     

Before: Kitchen Entryway

Before: Light Fixtures

Before: Green Island, Unexposed Brick

Before: Microwave Shelf

First, the island. I didn't mind the green color it was before, but we felt it needed an update. We worked with Sherwin Williams to figure out how to paint over the catalyzed varnish that was on there. We lucked out and found that we needed only to lightly sand the varnish then use oil-based paint with penetrol added to help it self-level for a smooth finish. We chose SW's gauntlet grey. It's perfect - not too dark, not too light. David painted it and I'm so proud of how it turned out!

The island is painted SW's Gauntlet Gray.

Sources: Stools | Print | Sugar Pot

Next, the walls. The walls were a light shade of yellow before. We went with Benjamin Moore's Sweet Spring. It has a hint of green, hint of gray. It's perfect for brightening up a room. It's insane what a transformation a coat (well a couple of coats) of paint will do. ESPECIALLY if you also paint the trim. We are huge fans of Sherwin Williams Pro Classic Semi-Gloss in Bright White. We love the bright white and the sheen it provides. It gives the entire room a facelift.

Another thing that immediately changes a space is replacing light fixtures. We swapped out the brass ones that were there for these, and love the huge difference it made!

Sources: Light Fixture | Pendants

You'll notice a special project we have going on over in the corner. We are exposing the painted brick, and it looks amazing so far! It's taken probably 14 hours to uncover as much as you see there. Slowly but surely, we will remove the paint off every one of those bricks and it will be glorious. I'll have an entire post about exposing the brick, the process we're using, and more.

In the entryway, we wanted it to be functional but still pretty. Bri chose a bench, coat rack, and cabinet for us that we love. I think the olive tree, quote, and tray perfectly round out that space, along with the feather prints and pillows. As for the quote - "today is a great day for a great day" - that was a fun DIY project I'll share details about soon!

Sources: Bench | Pendant

Still to come is a command center (David's finishing up the brackets he's making to hang the shelves) next to the door. We also plan on replacing that door at some point this spring. The one other piece we're missing is cabinet doors above the fridge. The previous owners kept a TV up there, but we'd rather have cabinet doors so it's more functional for us and provides additional storage. One of the biggest transformations on that side of the room is the addition of a new microwave and trim kit. Above the oven was an open space with a microwave sitting in it when we first moved in. We love the finished look of the microwave + trim kit.

We're really proud of how the kitchen is coming along. We still need to finish accessorizing and a few of the projects I mentioned above, but we absolutely love how it's coming together.