Homestead (Not Child-Related) Happenings

01/09/2014

We’re building a privacy fence in our backyard. It’ll be a modern wood fence very similar to our last house. I did an extensive tutorial on that fence three years ago, as well as the process of enclosing our courtyard at this house, so I will not be documenting our process this time. We managed to get all 23 posts set in the ground just before the great Flash Freeze of 2014. Now Jason’s touring schedule is rolling again so we’ll have to wait for some warmer days to line up with the days we’re both off work so we can start on the pickets.

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We’re getting chickens! Two years ago Nashville passed a new law allowing backyard hens to be raised for eggs. Jason was interested right away but it took me a while to get on board. Now that we have the fence started and Jason got this new book for Christmas, I’m all in. I’m so excited. We’ll be getting our chicks in the next month or two to start raising them inside until we have the coop done and it’s warm enough for them to move into their new house. We’re allowed to have up to 6. We’re planning to start out with 3 or 4. We eat a ton of eggs around here (18-24/week) so I’m excited to start getting them fresh from our own backyard.

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The foster kids’ room (which I’m tempted to call the little girl’s room…or is it the little girls’ room…) is getting a mini makeover. We’re repainting the walls. We got some new art and moved art in from a different room and I’ve moved some furniture around. Bee is gone for 25 days and with the possibility of baby Trust coming, well, I guess I’m nesting. We decided to paint Sherwin Williams Ellie Gray just like the first foster kids’ bedroom at our last house, which ended up being Ali’s nursery. We were very happy with that color and we’re not so happy with the neon green I chose for this house.

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Our master bedroom has been slowly getting designed. We realized one day that it’s sad how neglected it’s been design-wise. Last June we celebrated 10 years of marriage and decided that it’s time for a properly designed room. I’ll share more about it when it’s finished. We started out with a dresser and curtains. We added some art. New bedding. A new bed frame and lamps. Still to go: paint and wall/headboard treatment. Rugs. More art.

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Ali’s room got a mini-makeover too. She mastered climbing out of a pack-n-play while we were staying at my brother’s house for a few days and quickly transferred her skills to her crib at home. She’s now in a big girl bed again (side off her crib for now…eventually that KURA bed in the foster kids’ room will be hers). I’ll post more about that transition later. It’s going so much better this time around. She got a new lamp, owl poster and hot pink dog-butt hooks for hanging her dress-up clothes from IKEA.

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Blog Update

03/06/2013

I updated a few things on the ole blog design last week. If you, like me, use Google Reader or some other RSS feed to digest blog material, you might not have noticed. Click here to check it out.

I updated my blog header (which still had pictures from from 1-2 years ago).

I changed some of the main links at the top. Now I have:

Home | About | Inspiration | Timeline | Tour – New | Tour – Old | What is “MCM”?

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I also updated most of the pages those links go to… Inspiration is a combo of 3 pages I had before. Timeline is new and gives an overview of our lives. Tour – New is a landing page for the New Home Tours I’m gradually revealing. Tour – Old is a tour of our old house. The others didn’t change.

Thanks for coming to my blog! It’s means a lot to me that people enjoy my ramblings enough to come back over and over again. I love interaction and it keeps me going to know that others read what I write. Please feel free to comment or email me anytime! I read each comment and respond to most.


House and Home Update

02/20/2012

• This week movers are coming to clear out our old house. Everything that we don’t antipate we’ll need in the next 6 months is going into storage. We sold our big IKEA living room sofa sectional so we’ll be couch hunting in the next couple of months. We also sold our IKEA MALM bed frame. We’ll also be searching for new furniture for our master bedroom, preferably vintage but we’ll see what we can find. We have a lot of hunting to do this year at estate sales, thrift stores, yard sales—and I’m really looking forward to it!

• Our architect is finishing up our house plans so we can start getting bids from contractors. We’re getting antsy, excited! We close on our old house on March 1. Once we close we’ll be completely debt-free! For a few days, at least. Until we open our construction loan. Haha… but it still feels freeing. We have just a tiny bit of debt right now besides our mortgage and with the little money we’ll make off our home sale, we’ll get rid of the last (less than $3000) we owe on our school loans. The rest of the profit will go straight back towards the new home.

• We don’t know the construction timeline yet because we haven’t settled on a contractor yet. That will depend on who can give us the best price and is someone we can trust and want to work with. I’m not really looking forward to the contractor selection process… Pray it’s an obvious choice and we find the right guy (or lady, I suppose.)

• Precious just turned 7 months old. She got her two bottom teeth and has been trying lots of new foods. (Pictured eating broccoli for the first time above—she loved it!) I’ll give a more thorough update once I edit her monthly photos. She is a beam of sunshine on these gray winter days. We’re still waiting to hear from our attorney on the court date for the adoption finalization. I’m eager to know because I want to plan a big adoption day party!

• Jason just wrapped up a busy two months of travel and he’ll be home a bit more now. Travel=work=pay so these past two months have been great. But I’m also happy that the longer stretches are done for a little while. The awesome thing about his job as a traveling musician is that he gets to spend a ton of time at home when he’s off. He calculated it once, just to prove it to himself, and even with the number of days per year he’s traveling, he gets to spend more time at home with Precious than he would if he worked a 9-5 job. We feel like it’s the best of both worlds. He gets to make a living doing what he loves and he gets to spend a lot of time at home with us.

• Jason’s Acoustic Lullabies album is finally OUT! I am über proud of him. It’s selling well on the road and we’ll have it up online for sale soon. More about that coming soon.

And lots of pictures of Precious, just because…


Summer Days (Daze?)

06/01/2011

It’s been a busy past few days and I don’t have time to write any of the posts I have in my mind to write. For now, here’s a picture of where Jason and I have been eating a lot of our meals lately:

And an update on recent goings-on:

• We’re 2/3 of the way through our foster parent certification. Paperwork is done. Classes are done. We’re waiting for the home study writer to contact us to set up home study interviews. We’ve been waiting for 2 weeks and it’s been a relief, actually. It kind of feels like the calm before a storm. Not that we’re dreading it but we’re just savoring the (potentially) last few weeks of just the two of us.

• But, of course we’re staying busy! We have the kids room almost all the way finished. There are just a few pieces of art left to hang on the walls. When it’s all done I’ll do a proper photo tour. And we’ve been painting. Now seemed like a good time to paint the rest of the house. So far we have the living room (and the kids room) done. The kitchen, master bedroom and hallway are next in line. The project to do list that’s taped on the wall of our hallway is almost done.

• Our new van has one tire that’s mysteriously worn much more than the other 3. We’ve been planning to replace all 4 tires soon. After an almost-blow-out last night (we have a rubber flapper), now is the time to replace all four. We were hoping we could wait a few months but ack! Oh well.

• Have you heard about the cicada invasion in the middle Tennessee area? It’s a 13-year cycle. I’ll post more about that later in case you’re curious…