Let's take this outside

Now that you’ve had a tour and have a good idea of the inside of the house, it’s time to take a look outside.  Be prepared to be unimpressed people.  Most people would look at our lot and think “why would a family buy this?  There’s no real yard”.  I can see how you would think this, but we see it differently. VISION, people.  

Lets start by looking at the front of the house.  You’ve seen the big picture of the outside, but closer up we have a good sized porch on the front of the house that we’ve thrown some colorful furniture on for the time being.  Don't mind the dead poinsettias hiding behind a column from street view. 

   

  

We plan to repaint the front door.  It’s currently black, which isn’t bad, but we want to give it a little more life.  Several colors have been thrown out but we’ll do a post when we get to that so you’ll be able to see the decision process unfold. Also, other little things like replacing the crooked house numbers and getting a larger/prettier mailbox is on our list. It is also early February so any porch plants are pretty much nonexistent. But we do imagine this adorable little bench to house some flowers and other items

All the landscaping at the front of the house is sad.  Forgotten little holly bushes, lots of leaves from the giant trees, and some uneven ground because the city came and dug up old pipes a couple years back.

 

The driveway is on the left side of the house.  Slightly treacherous but thankfully we own large vehicles that can handle the slope.  For now the driveway is gravel, but that will one day change.  Priorities, keep this in mind.

When you head up the driveway toward the back of the house you notice some lovely empty lots where homes were torn down fairly recently on the left. That is where the infamous coffin house used to be.  

 

Thankfully, a very well known builder in Starkville has bought this property and will be building two homes next door to us in a similar historic style to match the neighborhood.  

 

As ugly as this little walk is, there is hope as we see the beginning of spring and some budding daffodils. They run the entire driveway and are particularly plentiful in the back left corner.  This will be pretty very shortly!  

The driveway empties into a pretty large parking area.  Because this house was a rental for so many years, just imagine the amount of college kid cars that were stored back here.  Made perfect sense.  Well, we don’t really need all this parking space.  Sure, it makes it nice because I can turn around back here easily without having to back out onto a busy street, but still, we don’t need THIS much gravel parking space.  

 

At the back of the property lives this little red barn.  Our dismembered play set is sitting here until the new fence goes up so we can place it accordingly.  It’s too cold for the kiddos to play on it anyway.  When we were looking at the house the previous renters actually had a rooster back here.  A small part of me actually hoped they would leave it.  He was cute and pretty funny.  Can you imagine adding a rooster to our mix?  It would make good blog material if nothing else. Again, George does not agree.

Behind the shed is the rest of the yard that slopes down a little but we will build that up a bit.  It’s pretty shady because there are a lot of trees, but some of them will be coming out.  My dad is a forester and that’s pretty handy when you have this many scary looking trees on your property.  We’ve mentally mapped out what trees will be going and what will be staying.

Turning around facing the back of the house you’ll notice the outside addition that was added maybe 40 years ago?  We’ll eventually be replacing the outside of this with another material (or completely tearing it down and rebuilding to our liking…). Notice that there is a little covered area and door to get into the house, but unfortunately that goes to the sitting room and the "master bath".  So if we enter that door our whole family (and any guest we let follow us), will have to walk through the sitting room and our master bathroom before entering the rest of the house.  Not ideal.  Also, living in the sitting room and master is our grumpy cat, Gumbo, and he does not like to be disturbed. 

Walking around to the other side of the house is a pretty sizeable side yard.  It measures about 15 feet wide.  If you look closely you’ll notice a LOT of vines.  

 

 Some are pretty thick and scary.  These aren’t your run of the mill vines, we pretty much have a wisteria factory of this side of our house.  At least it will be beautiful come spring!  We will be chopping out a lot of it. 

On this side of the house this is where we plan to put the French doors.  This will be our main access outside for the kids as well as the dog.  This will all be fenced in so there is no fear of kids or dog running into the street.   

 

Unfortunately, fence can’t go in yet because we have to have this stinkin' gas meter moved for the doors to be put in place of these windows.  On a bright note, these windows are probably the worst windows in the house so it's pretty exciting we have a good reason to completely rip them out to put in a set of insulated french doors. 

Gas companies don’t actually read the meters like they used to, but they do need to have access to them if there is a problem, so they’d like it to be on the outside of the fence, even if we weren't doing the doors and deck. This will require us to actually move the meter about 8 feet toward the front of the house so we can get it out from behind the imaginary fence that will go up sometime at the end of February. 

We’ll be adding a ton of grass, landscaping, fencing, and yard work. This will be a pretty slow process though as the inside is much more a priority for the short term!

Color Explosion

Now that we have the living and dining pretty spruced up, our painting expedition will continue upstairs in kid-topia.  This is literally their domain.  They sleep up here, eat up here, watch tv up here, play games up here, go to the bathroom up here, and stomp around a whole lot up here. Wood floors are great and all, but having small children chasing each other with light sabers before dinner time makes it sounds like a stampede above head, I hope Mufasa makes it out ok :/  If they end up falling through the floor I’ll tell them “I told you so”. 

Like these previous photos show, upstairs was a blank canvas when we moved in.  

 

White walls, white trim.  I appreciate this more than you will know after the HOURS spent on the trim downstairs.  Granted, they are not a bright a BRIGHT white, so they will still be painted, but it will be a much less painful process and results will be much quicker to see. 

When choosing colors for the walls I thought back to my childhood.  I always wanted to paint my room a fun color.  Maybe a fun green, or yellow, maybe even a cloud sky on my ceiling??  However, my house was not a democracy, I had no vote, and my walls were always some form of beige. Super exciting, I know.  And for the record, I have nothing against beige, but for this space I felt like I had room to be adventurous.  Be BOLD! 
 

And hey, if I end up hating it, guess what?  I can buy a new bucket of paint and re-do it pretty easily!

The second floor consists of a living room, dining room, laundry room, 2 bedrooms and a bathroom.  For this post we’re just focusing on the living room, but also peaking into the dining room and boys bedroom.  We went through a few color options but have landed on this color for the living room.   

 

It’s bright, we know.  But also, very restful, as the name would imply. That’s kind of what we are going for up here.  It’s a kid’s space, and with the bold colors the white moldings will really pop and green is Jude’s favorite color.  Green also felt like a good color because it’s not completely masculine.  We will have a little girl joining our ranks later this year and although upstairs might be overrun with little boy items right now, our little lady’s toys will still go well with the green.  However, we aren’t super worried about gender stereotypes with our kids.  If we hear one of our boys say “that’s for girls!” they’re sure to get a pretty stern look from me and my husband.  A week or so ago George had the boys to himself and they had been given some McDonald's gift cards from a family member.  As random as it seemed at the time, it was a blessing in disguise during the un-boxing/painting/fixing phase of our house.  Anyway, he got them both happy meals and when asked “girl or boy” he responded with “boy”, but they were given girl toys anyway.  They got a kick out of it at first because “these are the girl happy meals!” but then proceeded to play with them for the next 2 hours.  Something shopkins? 

Anyway, the painting took us a solid afternoon and evening, helped out by an early dismissal from school (which prompted me to leave work early) due to rumors of snow and ice.  What to do with an entire freezing afternoon at home alone with the kids??  Put on a movie for them so they will be good and quiet, and PAINT!  

 

Two coats were necessary for the color to really sink in and we had to go back and redo some of the trim, but overall, we’re really happy with the room.  The boys LOVE it, but I’m pretty sure they would love any big colorful change we made to their walls. They are easy to please. 

 

And don't mind the mess.  Again, this is kid domain so they aren't quite masters at keeping their bookshelves tidy.  This was also a pretty lazy cold day outside so lounging on bean bags seemed like an appropriate afternoon activity. 

 

This big blank walls needs some art, but before I just hung anything up, I remembered a certain piece of art I saw a few months back while in New Orleans that will be taking a trip to Starkville in the next few weeks.  I'm pretty stoked about it, I'll update when it's hung. All I can say is that it will make the space, very, worldly...

 

You know how I mentioned having ideas for the dining room and the boy’s room?  Well, lets take a look.  Here are the actual online color cards. 

 

The bedroom was easy for us.  That's the one on the left. Before we even moved Aidan wanted a color that was mostly a dark blue but with some green in it.  You can't tell as much from this online color card, but there really is a tad of green to it. I think this color has accomplished his wishes quite well and I’m slightly in love with it’s deep rich tones.  I've never even come close to painting a color this dark! I’ll update when this room is finished with paint. 

 

Next is their dining room. The dining room is really the room that they do homework in, draw pictures, arrange puzzles, etc.  So don’t think of it as a traditional dining room in any sense.  It just happens to have a casual dining table placed in the middle of it.  I’m thinking of chopping it down a few inches to be more accommodating to little ones, but haven’t decided that yet.  Anyway, I wanted this room to be a little softer in look as far as paint, but still plenty fun!  I had in mind a celery type green color, really light green, but with a hint of yellow…the color above is actually MUCH lighter (and brighter) in person.  So much so that it's really hard to get a good picture of. Here is a big wall test swatch but it's pretty tough to get a good idea of the color. Also, the trim is not bright white and that will make a big difference.

 

Here is a picture of the actual test pot so you can see what the wet paint looks like, plenty bright!! 

 

I’ll be honest that I’m not 100% sold, but I don’t completely hate it and think it has potential to be pretty great in this space.  It's neutral enough to be a good color to connect all the spaces pretty well, and might even flow into the little bitty hallway that connects to the bedrooms and bathroom. Similar to the bedroom, I’ll have to paint the entire room to see how it really comes out but I’m going to take a leap of faith and hope for the best!  Keep posted for after photos in the next few days of our color explosion! I've already got a LOT of the painting done with the help of an early dismissal yesterday due to bad weather!!