Making do

Living in an unfinished house with a multitude of things that need to be done a.s.a.p. on a limited budget has a way of helping your priorities stay in order.  When your showering and you feel a breeze so you look up and at the ceiling, spying between the rafters and the insulation and spot daylight, it's hard to justify buying a new rug whose main purpose is to just sit there and look pretty.  Or how can you justify buying $60 worth of paint just to paint the subfloor which will be covered someday when after storms you have to add a few more staples to your two year old house wrap, hoping it will hold up just a little bit longer?  And when you see that it's time to roll on a new layer of contact paper that serves as your counter top because you've got a few to many knife holes and pasta sauce stains on the current layer, it is again hard to justify buying new living room chairs.  Especially when your old, oversized, ugly brown chair is still holding up just fine...but I did it anyway.  I caved.

I'm chuckling to myself as I type about the breezes, house wrap and contact paper.  While true, I happen to find it humorous.  My kids are going to enjoy telling their own children stories of their "impoverished hardships" growing up and laugh to themselves as the little ones gasp in disbelief.  Heh, heh.  It also helps me keep things in perspective by remembering that we chose to live this way.  I know there are far too many people in the world who are truly impoverished and suffering while I am truly blessed beyond measure.

I didn't buy a lot of new stuff or anything terribly fancy but it was just enough to perk the place up a little for me.  And like I always have to preface...it's still unfinished, as if you couldn't tell.

Let's start with a before picture, because if you've ever caught the tail end of a before and after program on HGTV and have been disappointed with the after and thought to yourself, what's so great about that?  And then you think, maybe this is a flash back to the before shot, until you see the homeowners come into the room and start crying and/or laughing and you realize it is, in fact, the after and then you think to yourself, I would be crying and/or laughing too if that was my house.  Yes?  You know what I'm talking about?  Okay, then you know why it's necessary for me to show you this terrible, awful picture. 

Brace yourselves for sheer horror because here comes the before (which is actually from shortly after we moved in because it was the ONLY picture out of literally thousands of pictures that I have of what it all once looked like.) 

Yes, I'm stalling.

Sorry you noticed. 

Okay, here we go.  Just take a quick peek then turn away, mkay?

Before

Welp, that was traumatizing.   

Okay.

As you can see, all of our living, dining and kitchen space is in one room that's 20' x 22'.  Just a mere 440 square feet.  That's about the size of a lot of peoples living room alone. 

Part of the problem for me (besides all the obvious stuff you can see in the picture) was actually the openness of the living room furniture.  The living area is about 14' x 20' which isn't too terribly small.  In fact, it was too big, too spread out and not well defined.  Because of the open rafters in the ceiling sound doesn't travel very well which makes it hard to have a conversation with someone across the room without yelling, and if we have company and there are multiple conversations going on at once, it turns into a yelling match.  On the plus side, it is very quiet in here most of the time which is essential to my staying alive.  I must have quiet and lots of it or my brain and nerves absolutely start to fry.

Moving on.  Let's start with the kitchen and what it looks like right now.  I just can't bring myself to say after because I haven't really done much in there and it's by no means finished and after sounds like it's done, final, finished, but it's not.  Sorry.  I'm stalling again.  I'll try to stop that from happening in the future. 

So here's the kitchen currently,

Eventually I'll have real cabinets and counters and a real floor and maybe even matching appliances but this is what I have for now and I'm content...for now.  I suppose if it never progressed any farther it wouldn't be the end of the world but I hope that doesn't happen.  (The blue between the rafters is foam insulation which will be covered in wood someday.)

My appliances are a hodgepodge of finishes.  Black, white, stainless and turquoise, so to bring them together at least a little bit, I bought matching vinyl stickers off etsy for my fridge and dishwasher.

They're a little on the frilly side which I'm not super crazy about, but it does kind of help bring the kitchen together a little bit.

I still have my turquoise blue stove which goes well with the styrofoam insulation.  (The small cat-like creature is my little Chili-choo-choo chihuahua, dining at his favorite fast food joint.)

In the dining portion of the room, Jeff added another window not too long ago to give us a little view of the back woods.  (Don't look at my highwaters!  I'll extend those or replace them someday!)

The table is a little 3' x 5' table that everybody and his brother had fifteen years ago.  It seats all seven of us just fine for now, but as the kids get bigger it might become too cozy.  Then, of coarse, I'll just have my personal man servant build me a newer, nicer, bigger table.  (I love you so much, Shnookums pooh bear!)

And last, but not least, the living room.

I arranged all the furniture on one side of the room for a cozier layout and we can actually have real live conversations with eachother now.  It's nice that way.  On the far right is our current computer cabinet in the hole where the fireplace was.  Jeff and I pulled it out and plan to build in a computer cabinet/entertainment center instead.  I've decided I'd rather have the fireplace outside on the back deck.

After I painted the subfloor (which I love better than the unpainted subfloor but hate how it now shows dirt like crazy, by the way) I bought an 8' x 10' jute rug off Amazon for a mere $1,444.00 including $1,200.00 in fraudulent credit card charges.  (I should have used paypal, but at least it's been resolved.)  I love the rug.  It's already been through a violent hazing when all of the kids had a nasty stomach bug a couple of weeks ago.  It cleans up nicely.  You've gotta be tough to survive around here.

 

I also bought a couple of matching chairs which the children are forbidden to even look at let alone touch.  (I'm so mean.)  They came with lumbar pillows that match the green fabric, but I made these blue and white ones for them instead.  I can't have things matching too much.  That wouldn't go with my home's chaotic theme.

Behind the green chair I have some fancy, shmancy wainscoting made up of a couple of old doors laying on their sides.  Nice, huh?  I'm still working out in my head what kind of a wall I want separating the kitchen from the living room.  I'm currently thinking a half wall behind the stove across to the far right counter that meets a full length wall right next to that counter for a little extra visual separation.  That's where the dirty dishes get stacked and I wouldn't mind if I didn't have to see them every waking moment. 

I think that about wraps it up for now.  If you made to the end of this post, I thank you...and I'm sorry you had to see all that.  I'm glad I got this out in the open though, so now maybe I can start lookin' you people in the eye! ☺

The Dreaded Post and A Gooseberry Pie

Okay, here's my confession.  I've been putting this post off ever since I figured it would make sense to clue you all in on it.  So here it is.  Please don't judge us too harshly.

Up until two and a half years ago, Jeff and I were entrepreneurs in the new home construction business.  I would design the houses and Jeff would build them.  We were both doing what we absolutely loved and having so much fun with it while it lasted.   Can you already guess where this story is going?  If you haven't heard (ha ha,) the housing market kind of turned into the Titanic and is now resting at the bottom of the ocean.  We were on the ship when it went down and barely made it out alive.  Okay, maybe that's a little dramatic.  We went bankrupt and lost a lot including our house.  I don't care to relive the details but that was a major turning point for us, naturally.  It lead us to where we are now though, which in a lot of ways, is exactly where we always wanted to be...building a modest (albeit weird to some) home in the country.  I say it's weird to some people because there are those out there who just don't get it.  "Country???"  "Wood plank walls???"  "Corrugated metal in the shower???" And the biggest conundrum, "SMALL???"  You all get it though, don't you?  Yes, I'm sure you do.  It's not half as "weird" as we'd like it to be but it turns out weird can also be quite expensive.  Now, I have to stop saying weird because it's almost convincing me that my home is w... well, you know.

(I'm going to interrupt this dreadful post occasionally with pictures of a gooseberry pie my 11 year old daughter made from scratch all by herself today, including picking the gooseberries from a few bushes on the property.)   

Two cups of freshly picked, green gooseberries.

Just days after the bankruptcy closed, and due to some strange mysteriously divine intervention that I won't go into right now, we were jobless and also facing homelessness literally within a day or two (although we had both family and friends who all offered more than once to take us all in (4 little ones at the time, no less!))  Jeff's first day of joblessness we spent hunting for a place to live and by the end of the day we found a home and began moving in the very next morning.  Two days later, Jeff had a successful job interview and was able to start the following Monday morning.  I can't even begin to explain how or why God laid everything out in the way He did so I won't even try, but just let me say, it was amazing.

Gooseberries with 1/2 cup of water, 1 cup of sugar, 1/4 cup of flour and 1/8 tsp. of salt heated over medium heat until thickened.

About a year and a half later, Jeff's sweet grandma passed away leaving him an inheritance that we used as our seed money to finally move out to the country and build a house we can hopefully stay in till we die!  We moved a lot while we were in the business.

Our original goal was to use $15,000 (not including the price of the land) to build the house to the point that it was livable yet unfinished.  During the building process, which was done by Jeff and a few friends and family members on weekends and after work, we decided to push it just a little further than we planned and went ahead and built all but one of our interior walls on the first floor which cost a few more thousand dollars doing it. Yes, we were planning on living in a house with no interior walls (except around the bathroom.  Even I have my limits.)  It was money well spent even if it put us over our budget a little.

 

Pre bake a pie crust.  We like to use a no-roll crust that tastes similar to a shortbread cookie.  Yum!

Now that we're living in the house, we thought we were ready to finish it.  The weather is nice and the days are longer so we decided to finally go to the bank and get a smallish construction loan to finish the house that would convert into permanent financing in a certain amount of time (six months, I think.)  It would mean another summer of long hard weekend work, but I'd be able to help out since I'm not pregnant.  That's a rare thing for me.  Soooo, about a month ago, Jeff met with a banker who said he thought he could help us and we started getting plans lined out to finish it...hence the May 10th "Recap" post.  Welp, it was a no go "due to the current status of the economy..." we now have to be four years away from our bankruptcy to qualify for a home equity loan.  A decent one anyway.  Jeff thought about looking elsewhere but then things really, REALLY picked up at work and he just got too busy.  As usual, it has turned out to be a blessing that the loan didn't go through because Jeff won't have time to work on the house for several months.  Don't tell Jeff, but I'm alright with not having a home loan, even if it means living in an unfinished house for longer than planned.

Pour the gooseberry filling into the baked pie crust and top with meringue made from two egg whites and four tablespoons of sugar then bake it at 350 degrees F for twelve minutes.

 One of these days I may get the courage to show you pictures of just how unfinished parts of our house really are...but don't hold your breath.  Confessing our financial statuses past and present, has caused me a little mental discomfort and strangely desiring to suck my thumb.

That's were we are in a nut shell.  A big nut shell.  Things will move on as time and money allow which both will result in slow progress.  That's okay though.  I feel like I've kind of left the rat race and it's been nice.  Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go suck my thumb eat a piece of gooseberry pie.

☺

P.S.  Is Blogger acting retarded or is it just me?

Recap

Thanks to everyone that shared advice with me about my last post.  I'm going to give Etsy a try, God is watering my garden this week (thank you Lord) and potty training is just plain hard.

It's time for a reminder of what this blogs all about and where we're going.  Things around the house have slowed down as we've taken time to work around the property.  We'd like to have a well groomed area around the house to enjoy which has required cutting down a few trees and a lot of mowing.  The property is wooded and most of the front two thirds is so thick with woods it isn't mowable, but the area where the house is tucked away is really shaping up.  As far as the house goes, we're hopefully getting ready to kick into high gear again and get it finished by sometime this fall.  We've already got nine or ten months in the house but we've Jeff has done all the work in our Jeff's spare time with the help of friends and family.

This was originally the look I was going for...

Bora Bora.

but it just isn't happening. 

I couldn't convince Jeff to haul in a bunch of sand and flood the place with salt water.

Here's what it still looks like on the outside minus the building debris and the kids zip line.

Things haven't changed since the winter due to the weather and short daylight hours, but we'll be adding siding soon and a front porch that goes across the front of the house.

Amelia Park, Fl.

This has the colors of siding we want and the front porch look we want.

This little cottage is just adorable.

Lowe's Kit House

For my greatest and favorite inspiration you'll have to visit Ross Chapin's super-duper-amazing cottages.  I love the details and the efficiency of his houses.  Jeff and I have been fans of his for a few years and I get weak in the knees every single time I browse his website.  I'd love to incorperate as much similar detail into the exterior of my house (the interior details are wonderful too.)

Another big undertaking will be the upstairs.  Nothing has changed up there but we'll have two bedrooms and a half bath all clad with the wood planks on the walls like the first floor. 

The larger bedroom will have four built-in twin beds with storage under the beds and the smaller bedroom will have two built-in twin beds.  It will be all about efficiency and organization up there because that's how my kids are.  (Ha!  I wish.) 

I love the simplicity of this bedroom.  

Country Living

The kids rooms will have vaulted ceilings too.

Now, back to the first floor.

 

We need to finish things like trim, floors and kitchen cabinets and when the kitchen is done I'd like it to have a similar look or feel to this one.

Coastal Living

We'll have white painted cabinets and concrete counter tops and, of course, my blue stove.

I'd love to have a Big Chill refrigerator too, but at $3,500 a pop, I'm not holding my breath.

The bathroom is getting closer to the look I love.

Mine.

Country Living's.

And the master bedroom is coming along too.

  Right now I'm trying to decide if I'd rather have wood or carpet in there.  There are things I love and hate about both and I'm leaning toward wood, but we'll see.  We came EXTREMELY close to buying carpet for it yesterday but I really think I'd rather have all wood on the first floor and a few large area rugs. 

What do you guys think about carpet vs. wood?

Budget Wrap Up

These are our last five days for working on the house before we move in.  Our plans on what we want to have done before then have been constantly changing.  Now, however, it's all being finalized and strictly directed by our last $2,500.  I'm sure you're all curious how much everything has cost us to date.  So am I.  Let's get out a pen and paper and see what we can figure out.  Here's a list of the funds we used to build the house:  $15,000 inheritance from grandma Jones and $6,500 in good old credit cards, totaling $21,500.  Then there's the $31,500 loan for the land.  That gives us a grand total of $53,000.

For the house itself, we originally planned on spending only $15,000 but that meant doing without things like interior walls, a second floor bathroom (or at least part of one) and going with sheetrock on the walls instead of pine planks.  It also didn't include purchasing all of our windows and doors upfront or unexpected expenses like upgrading the electrical wiring, well pump, and well house.  We also included in the house budget:  utilities (electricity only), monthly land payments, and the gas money to drive to and from the project all for the past six months.  This totaled approximately $3,200.  Jeff may have a few corrections to make to this little improv list but, more or less, I think that about covers it.

Take a look here to see what our initial plan was. 
http://cottagedreamers.blogspot.com/2009/08/phase-one.html

I think we've managed to come out ahead, depending on how you look at it.  Yes, we went over our $15,000 budget and now we have credit card debt, BUT, the house is much closer to completion and our overall debt is being so greatly reduced that it's worth it. ($31,500 for land plus $6,500 credit card = $38,000 debt versus the balance of our current mortgage of $104,000 means a reduction of $66,000 of debt!!!)  The credit card debt should be easy enough to pay back quickly and the money for the rest of the work we need to do to finish the house will come from our own pockets as we can afford it.  We're so close to the end of the line time wise as well as financially that at this point I may not have kitchen cabinets.  If I do, we'll only get lower cabinets to begin with and the temporary counter tops will be made of plywood until spring or summer when we can do our concrete counter tops.  This is no big deal to me, I'm just ready to move in.  Plus, I've lived in a house without a kitchen before (for four months, no less!)  At this point, we'll only have a toilet upstairs without walls or anything.  Don't worry, the downstairs bathroom will have everything plus walls, except the door.  (Visitors beware, but feel free to use our bucket in the woods!)  The main deal with that is, with so many girls in the house, we must have more than one toilet!  Having the toilet out there in the open will only push us to get the upstairs finished all the sooner, hopefully!  For the time being, my floors throughout the house will be painted advantech flooring, unsanded.  There just isn't enough time to sand them.  Which reminds me, yesterday, our friend Chad Miller (not to be confused with Chad, the doctor's husband) and his father-in-law, Sid, helped Jeff all day on the house.  Chad Miller also talked Jeff into painting the walls and ceilings before we move in instead of after.  (Thank you!  Thank you!  Thank you!)  AND, we've never even met Chad Miller's father-in-law before.  He just came to help out of the kindness of his heart!  (Thank you!  Thank you!  Thank you!)  Sid also works for a local cabinet company and took measurements of our kitchen to see what he can find for us for cabinets when we're ready.  I've been amazed at how kind and helpful people have been throughout this whole process!

Anyway, back to our haves and have-nots.  The second floor will not be anywhere near finished when we move in.  There won't be any bedrooms or walls yet.  But, like I said earlier, there will be a toilet up there.  The end.  Oh, and a hot water heater.  The end. We have interior doors but, for the sake of time, they probably won't be installed until sometime after we move in.  We won't have all of our light fixtures right away, but I have lots of lamps.  The fireplace flue will cost another $1,000 so that will have to wait but we only had to pay $320.00 for a never before used, pre-owned fireplace that had a retail price of $2,000.  We don't have exterior siding on the house but we have most of the materials already (our privacy fence pickets!)  There will still be a lot of work to do once we've moved in, but the biggest hurdles will all be behind us.  I consider myself blessed and my "haves" list the winner.

P.S.  Bathroom update.  I said, not too long ago, that we were going to hang sheetrock in the bathroom, but we decided to do the pine wood in there too. 

We'll primer and paint the wood, as well as, caulk between them to try to keep moisture out.  Then for the bathtub surround, we're planning to use corrugated metal like someone did in this bathroom:

Courtesy of Country Living

Jeff has worked things out at work so that he can take off from work after their Friday morning meetings which will give him three day weekends to work on the house. Hopefully that will help thing move along a little faster. Working on the house at night after work just wasn't working out.

I may not be out there at all this weekend. Evelyn is coming down with something so I'm staying home with her till she's better. One of the things I hate most about one of my kids getting sick is it's usually only a matter of time before it spreads throughout the whole house and wipes us all out, sometimes more than once because by the time the first person is getting over it the last person is just coming down with it and gives it back to person number one and here we go again! Not much fun. Anyway, I figure I'll post while I still have a chance.

Today I'd like to talk about the ladder stairs. We haven't decided on the particular look we want yet so I've been scouring the Internet for ideas. Here's an interesting one. It doesn't take up much more space than a ladder but I'm afraid I would become dizzy or confused just looking at them and wind up in a pile of broken bones at the bottom.

I like that these stairs have a hand rail, but the alternating steps might be difficult for a small child to navigate.

Here are some that are similar but simpler.

I'd have to say, these are my favorite. I love the color of the wood and the depth of the treads and the little slots for your hands. Yeah, this might be exactly what I want.

However, anything would be better than the ladder we've been using. It's just plain scary!

Plank Walls

Tonight we'll be going out to the land to get started on another weekend's worth of work and the weather is going to be great! Sunny and low 70's. It doesn't get any better than that!

We've been going back and forth on some of the details of the house and some of those details are the walls. We're leaning toward wood planks on the walls. For Jeff it's because it's easier for one man to do than sheet rock which he hates to install and for me it's because I LOVE plank walls!!! I can't decide if I like it better vertical or horizontal though. There are things about both ways that I love.

Here's vertical...

And of coarse, this just happens to be exactly how my bedroom will look with the exception of the bed size. It will be king size.

And here are the vertical planks upstairs...

This also just so happens to be exactly what the upstairs will look like too! Amazing!

I like that the vertical style is very traditional. It's hard to go wrong with traditional.

Now, here's the horizontal look...

I personally like white paint on the planks the best but I'm loving this green color too!

Horizontal planks seem more old timey, more authentic, you just don't see it as often. I'm pretty sure it's my favorite and what I really want but the vertical seems safer. What do you all think?

I even love the way it looks in this kitchen. There's no need for a separate style of back splash.

But I don't want to get my hopes up too high in case things turn out badly and look more like this...

I hope you all have a nice weekend!

Change of Plans

Several posts ago I showed you all the "livable" phase floor plan that's our first goal. Well, it's changed a little since then. Jeff gave me a deadline for deciding on a permanent floor plan and I'm pretty sure I've finally got it. My deadline was to get it figured out before he starts the framing which would be tomorrow except the ol' Suburban broke down and needs attention from Jeff's magic, mechanic hands! Have I told you I'm pretty sure he can do, fix, build, etc. anything? It's a HUGE blessing too because we're, as usual, broke!


Back to the floor plans. I want to share with you how/why we came up with the basic design we did. First of all, it's 20'x40'. We chose a depth of 20' because we can easily use regular lumber for the floor joists rather than the expensive engineered lumber usually required to span greater lengths. Then we settled on 40' wide because that gave us the smallest, hence the least expensive, amount of space we would need to be comfortable including a second floor. That, and 40 is divisible by 8. The sheet goods come in 4'x8' which means less cutting to fit and less waste. The total square footage when done will be approximately 1250 square feet. I know that seems small for a family our size but plenty of bigger families have survived in smaller houses for generations and generations! We really want out of debt more than we want a "big enough" house. We have plans for future add-ons if/when the need and the money line up.



Now, I know I said I'd use a scanner next time I shared floor plan pictures with you all but I didn't preplan this post and I'm not feeling patient enough to wait a few days to have it scanned so here's what I've come up with...


I know...get out the magnifying glass. Does this picture even make sense to anyone but me??? Sometimes I wonder. The door at the bottom of the picture is the front door which opens up to the living room and the ladder style stairs. The only interior walls to begin with will be around the bathroom which is in the upper right hand corner. Next to the bedroom (lower right) is a small walk in closet and laundry closet. I think the rest of it looks pretty understandable. Now to show you what a nerd I can be when it comes to this sort of thing...








Don't confuse my use of the word "nerd" with smart. It's nothing smart at all so maybe I should use the word "dork." I go so far as to make little paper cut out pieces of furniture to match my real furniture and then laminate them so I can play, I mean figure out if a floor plan will actually work the way we need it to. I start, however with a pad of graph paper. I LOVE graph paper!!! I have one pad half filled with plans and sketches of this one little house. It's so grungy with everything from dirt and grass stains to tea stains and sticky kid prints, I'm embarrassed for anyone to see it. It goes out to the land with me every weekend which maybe explains it's dirtiness.



Once I get it how I like it on graph paper I then move on to a big sheet of vellum paper and drag out the T squares. With the thickness of the walls drawn into the final draft, the actual amount of floor space shrinks up a bit so it can require a few more small changes as I'm drawing it up.



I don't have drawings of what the second floor will look like finished because that's still up in the air. Our future additions will be decks, front and back, a master suite on the back and a new living room on the front. We'll then move the dining area to where the old living room is so it will be nice and big. Someday I hope to have a lot of grand kids coming back with my grown children and their spouses for big Thanksgiving dinners and such. Won't that be fun?!!



Speaking of fall feasts. My fall garden produce, a.k.a. pumpkins, have turned out to be a lot of work so guess what I'll be working on this afternoon again. Mmmhmm. Look what else I got from my garden.


From five seeds I got about six or seven spaghetti squashes (my favorite!!) and from five seeds I got three watermelons, one of which was completely devoured a few nights ago by some little critter thugs!!!

I hope everyone has a nice weekend and I hope I have a baby!!!

Katrina cottage

Maybe you've seen this sweet looking little cottage before. It's a Katrina cottage. They were designed and built to replace the yucky FEMA trailers some folks on the gulf have had to live in. I want one! They are so cute, like a life size doll house! Wouldn't it be fun to have one as a retreat by the lake?






This one has some similarities to what we're wanting for our cottage home...a galvanized metal roof with a very small overhang and exposed rafter tales. That and all the pure cuteness!



Take a look at the adorable little kitchen. It's small but efficient and still has style. This one might be a little small for our growing family but it's definitely inspiring. They say that men never really grow up but the same could probably be said for those of us ladies who would love to spend a weekend "playing house" in these tiny little cottages. Could you imagine living in one? It actually sounds kind of fun to me.



Downsizing can be so freeing. Letting go of all that "stuff" that has such a strong, controlling hold on us. Finding out just how little we really need to live and still be happy. Don't get me wrong, I still have a lot of stuff that I love and I'm convinced I can't live without but sometimes it all has a way of bossing me around, telling me what I can and can't do. It's going to be hard to get rid of some of it when the time comes but we've done it before and lived to tell about.



It's almost the weekend again and you know what that means. A little more progress. This time we'll finish the electrical, set the piers and do some tree trimming so the big trucks delivering our lumber can make down the drive. It's supposed to be almost 100 degrees tomorrow and we're all still singing the chigger blues. I'm not sure I'm up for it again but the show must go on. Now I'm going to leave you with a song...



Have a great weekend everyone!

Phase One

If our current printer has the capability to scan documents to the computer I don't have any idea how it works. So rather than messing with figuring it out right now, I used my camera. It's not the best but there aren't many details on the plans anyway.



























This is a general idea of our first phase. The "livable" phase. Like I mentioned the other day, the only walled off room to begin with will be the bathroom so I'll start there. Jeff's mom is having her bathroom remodeled and trading out her jetted tub for a huge walk in shower, soooo...guess who's getting a big jetted tub in her new bathroom. I am! Thanks Bob and Jackie!! They give the best hand-me-downs ever! We'll probably have a concrete counter top vanity with open shelves below and for our linen cabinet, I'll probably start with using a medium sized book case we built this past winter.

I love concrete counter tops. Jeff made them for a couple of our houses in the past (have I mentioned we move a lot?) Concrete is great. It can be stained or acid washed, sanded to show the aggregate or whatever you put in the mix (shells, colored glass...) It's very durable, versatile and cheap! ...if you do it yourself. Jeff says it's really easy.

The bedroom area will be closed off for privacy with big canvas painters clothes. If I remember right they're about $20.00 for 9'x12' at Harbor Freight. I'll let you know if that's right when we actually get them. I love their natural linen color and because they're canvas they'll be heavy duty curtains.

While we're starting with only four windows and one exterior door on the first floor we'll go ahead and frame in where we want future doors and windows. That way, when the time comes we'll just open up the correct spot on the wall and pop in a new window. I'm sure it will be just as simple as that too. heh heh.

The washer and dryer, also temporarily closed off with canvas, will eventually be in a laundry room next to the bedroom beside a walk in closet. The fireplace (or wood burning stove) will be placed permanently where you see it and with a coil going up the flue, will be a part of our radiant floor heating system. The other source of heat for the system will be from the water heater on the second floor which will eventually be in a small closet of its own, surrounded by a bathroom and two bedrooms. We'll be using some type of ladder style stairs, thanks to little to no building codes, to get to the second floor which will eventually have an open balcony overlooking part of the living room. The stove and refrigerator are in a temporary spot until we build another interior wall to place them on.

The exterior of the house dimensions are 20'x40' (a small 800 square feet) and the roof pitch will be 12/12 which will mean the second floor interior ceiling height will be approx 10' high and slope down to 4' high side walls. (The side walls are in the future so they're not shown on these plans.) Taking into consideration the open space for a balcony, this will gives us roughly 1200 square feet of living space including three bedrooms and two bathrooms. We also have hopes of adding on more space in the future but we have to move in small steps to avoid taking on more debt.

Jeff may have some editing to do or comments to add later but from this woman's point of view, that's about it. As we move along I'll share future floor plans with you too (scanned, not photographed.)

In other Dixon news...check out some of my fresh from the garden produce.

Yes, I'm in Missouri and just now getting veggies from the garden. With our looong, never ending to do list our gardening fell behind and I didn't plant anything until the first weekend in June. I should have started in the middle of April but I cut myself some slack (I am, after all pregnant with #5) and decided that if June is planting season for my sister in Iowa, surely I can plant a few things then too. The shell peas didn't agree with me on that but the other plants are putting better effort into feeding us.
One of the things we're most looking forward to is the Dakota Black popcorn. I hear you can pop it right on the cob!
I know it looks like Sadie's doghouse in the garden but it's actually in a pen behind the garden. My garden is strictly "No Dogs Allowed!"
Here's something we made the other night with the squash and tomatoes...

Pizza! Just put whatever toppings you like on a flour tortilla (precook the meat) and pop it in a 400 degree oven for 15 minutes or so and you have these yummy, little, crunchy pizzas. Don't think squash and pizza doesn't mix because it does! Even the kids love it.



Never mind the small pile of tomato bits on Isaiah's plate. I'm sure those just fell off on their own.