Fixing the Living Room

Fixing the Living Room

This is hopefully a motivational story about tackling a living room fixer upper project with clutter on top.  This first picture shows how the living room started.  Pretty hard to picture a final result at this stage. 

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology this picture is a digital plan of what we were hoping to do with the living room.  Clean, bright colors, and simple.  The picture below only shows half shelves in the corners but we planned to keep the ones that we have which extend to the ceiling. The program I used is http://www.homestyler.com/ and it is free. 

Stage one is cleaning up the clutter. We made lots of runs to thrift stores and sifting through piles of family stuff.  This house has been in the family for 4 generations!  So we have to tread somewhat carefully lest we throw out a family heirloom.

Lots of clutter to clean up!  How are we ever going to get down to the room to start fixing it??

We were so grateful to get this couch from Aunt Sue!  Try going a week without sitting on a couch.  Absence does make the heart grow fonder.  We went 9 months without a couch and it was painful!  Despite still being a first world problem. =)

This corner was not used for anything so we were planning to use it for storage.  No one really likes to sit in the corner... unless we used it for time out for children. =)

It begins.  We started the careful demolition of the shelves here so we could rebuild them later.  Part of this project was also drying walling over that door so we could put in more seating.

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We made our first hole in the wall to check and see if there was any insulation.  There was none!

Seriously, who puts a wall together in New England with no insulation?  I bet in the 1920's when the house was built it was not "against code".

Starting to put in insulation with the drywall removed.  This is messy business.  I have found a lot of construction is messy business!

So thankful for help from friends and family during this crazy process.

Making a lot of progress on the drywall.  Felt like this project took forever!  Again my Mom was a huge help with the drywall.

The drywall is up and you can see the new windows that were installed when we first purchased the house.  It is starting to look like something new.  A blank canvas to be put together.

This corner has an angled wall because there is a heating vent in the corner.

Here is my attempt at an artsy shot of the beveled edges of drywall and how they are tapered so the mud will make the wall smooth over the gap.  Clever!

Lots of mud on the walls!  Lots of sanding and then more mud.  This is once again messy business.

It is starting to look like a room again.

Here we are trying to choose if we should do a stain or leave the floors natural and just do polyurethane.  Because we want the room to be light and bright we went without any of the darkening stains.

For the paint on the walls we picked out some very light blue colors.  We tried to go with cool colors on the walls because the wood provides a lot of warm colors.

Here is the living room with a new light fixture, paint and finished floors!  Starting to look nice and more like our original planning picture.

Rebuilding those corner shelves was quite a bit more difficult than I thought! There were no instructions.  We also ordered some carpet samples.

We purchased blue carpet tiles for the living room because we can install it easily, easily replace any section the kids might destroy, and make the rug larger or smaller as needed.

Here is the living room.  Pretty much all finished.  I rebuilt the other shelf, put in a shelf above the TV, put back the trim and we put up plain white curtains. We are going for an ocean nautical theme.  We just need some bright red and white pillows with anchors on them.

Before and after

Digital plan vs real end result

Very homey!  Clean and simple with nice bright colors.  Some good vertical storage in that corner.

The kids got some friendly nooks out of the project as well, such as this little library in the corner cabinet!  Olivia loves it!  Again I hope you home owners out there find this motivational.  You can do it!

7 Years and a 7 month old

A few weeks ago Eric and I celebrated our 7th anniversary.  We enjoyed a date night out (thanks to some super hero friends!) after first running to Home Depot for paint and carpet samples, Target for diapers and then Savers to get Josiah some new toy cars.  That's the season of our lives right now--house, babies, toys and rare special moments when we get away from it all for some time together.  One thing we enjoyed doing this year was reminiscing about where we were and how we spent each anniversary celebration leading up to this one.  I thought I would post some pictures for your own reminiscing and maybe it will spur on a fun conversation with your spouse of various ways you have celebrated over the years.

So, here we are getting married 7 years ago on June 28, 2008.  It was the beginning of the biggest adventure of our lives.  Many of you were there to support and celebrate with us and we are so thankful!  

Year 1:  We were living in Tucson, AZ and traveled to the Grand Canyon to celebrate our first anniversary.  We returned two more times while we lived in AZ because it's that awesome!  

Year 2: We stayed at a B&B in Prescott, AZ which included a gift certificate to go horse-back riding.  It was our first time riding horses together and we've been a few more times since then because we liked it so much!  

Year 3:  We went to Phoenix, AZ to spend the night in a hotel before flying east for a Reinhold family vacation.  While in Phoenix we had sushi at a top-rated and very expensive sushi restaurant and then went to a less fancy place for the rest of our dinner.  

Year 4: I was too sick from being pregnant with Josiah to do anything on our actual anniversary.  I think we may have gone out to get dessert and walk around after I fed Eric ravioli at home.  In September though, we went on an anniversary/baby moon trip to celebrate marriage and our coming son.  

Year 5: 5 years and a 5 month old now on the scene!  Thanks to some great friends in Tucson, we spent the whole day by ourselves first eating out for breakfast then lounging around at home and then eating out for dinner at one of our favorite spots in the city.  It was the last anniversary we celebrated in Arizona.  

Year 6:  6 years and another baby on the way!  This time Josiah stayed with his grandparents for a whole week while we enjoyed some time away in Bar Harbor, ME.  Despite the pregnancy sickness and Eric getting a horrible sunburn, we had a great time getting away from the craziness of our new life on the east coast.  

Year 7:  Here we are celebrating 7 years (or at least here I am).  Even with a toddler and 7 month old at home, we managed to get out for the evening after running errands for our house and children.  We ate some great food and enjoyed reflecting on how good God has been to us.  

The second half of the title of my post is "A 7 month old" so here are a few of my recent favorite pics of the cutie face we call Olivia.  

She is just a darling!  It's harder to get pictures of her brother these days because he is hardly sits still and doesn't look at the camera for very long.  

Anyway, here we are 7 years later--a family of four living in Beverly, MA working on our house and raising our kids and although we do it very imperfectly, by God's grace we hope it glorifies Jesus.  

Next year both kids will be headed to the grandparents while we take a week to sleep and then who knows what the years ahead will bring.  If we keep up with our pattern--5 month old at 5 years, 7 month old at 7 years....actually, let's just take it one kid at a time!  

A 2 year old and a 2 month old

A belated Happy New Year to any and all who read our blog!  Due to starting 2015 off with 2 children instead of 1 we have put the blog on the bottom of the priority list after feeding children, cleaning children, cleaning up after children, putting children down for bed, feeding ourselves and putting ourselves to bed.  God in His infinite wisdom, however, has decreed for a cumulative total of 83" of snow to fall on us in the past month so while we are stuck inside, we wanted to update you on how life with 2 children is going.

Josiah turned 2 on January 29th and our sweet little Olivia turned 2 months on February 8th.  According to the doctor, they are both growing beautifully and we are thankful for their health and growth thus far.  Josiah seems to enjoy having a little sister and Olivia is all smiles when he comes over to say hi to her.  He likes to check in on her and hold her hand sometimes.  I do hope they grow up to be great friends and we are so curious to find out how their personalities mesh and bump into each other.

So far, Olivia is quite the opposite baby that Josiah was.  Josiah took forever to eat and still didn't grow as fast as the doctor hoped.  Olivia eats super fast and is putting on pudge everywhere.  Josiah did and still does prefer to be awake due to his insatiable curiosity.  Olivia prefers to sleep.  It seems like she sleeps all the time and when she's done being awake she lets us know and falls asleep as soon as we put her down.  They both, however, were and are very smiley and I think that is one of my favorite things about my children.  Their smiles do wonders for this mommy's heart.

Although I called this an update, it doesn't feel like there is a whole lot to "update" everyone on.  Our life is busier with another little person around but also full of more smiles and laughs as the little ones keep growing and learning.  Josiah continues to amaze us with his memory and his vocabulary and makes us laugh when he confuses the state of Arkansas with Esau from the Bible.  Olivia has found her vocal chords and we think she might actually give our first little chatter box a run for his money when she starts to learn words.


We are enduring a very snowy February and sometimes it feels like we are always stuck inside.  I do miss getting out and seeing friends or going shopping which feels so much harder in the snow with two kids to tow around.  But we still have many many reasons to be thankful.  Our home is warm and dry and food is always on our table.  We continue to have steady income and get to enjoy small luxuries like an occasional date night or an occasional 8 straight hours of sleep!  God is so kind to us and we are amazed at the grace He bestows on us each day.  We are looking forward to the melting of snow and getting outside again but until then, we press on with the daily mission that He has given us to love Him and love each other with the strength that He gives each day