Part Two -- A Whole Lot of House

Welcome back ladies and gentlemen! Please join me while I take you on a tour of -- Our House. Thanks to some VERY kind friends here in Cincinnati, I was able to get rid of almost all of my children for an entire week as I worked to make our house PERFECTO (which just carries so much more weight and importance than plain old perfect, don't you think?) Over the course of the last month, my children have become very familiar with the word perfecto and all that it entails. While the repairmen, the painters, and the yard people were busy doing their jobs, I was as busy as the proverbial bee in setting my house in order. The spring cleaning and organizing that we accomplished prior to our moving news definitely helped in getting things ready on time. Bear with me as I lovingly showcase all our hard work.

But first -- here is a shot of the sweet little Sugar Pop. She just didn't get enough attention in the last post. This precious little lamb endured being handed off from person to person and house to house with nary a complaint nor cry for almost 2 weeks straight. I just love her. If only they were all so easy. Hahahaha. (For the record I love the others, too.) The painting lady told me on two separate occasions that I'm doing "a helluva job," so it must be true. Hahahaha. That's always good to know and nice to hear.




Our tour begins with a view from the front. Changes include new light fixtures (which you probably can't see from this picture), a replaced front column (which you shouldn't be able to distinguish from the rest), freshly painted pillars, soffits, and eaves, and a newly black door and shutters.




Once inside you'll see a straight shot through to the Kitchen with the Living Room off to the left, and the Family Room off to the right. The whole main floor was neutralized with "Antique Bone" by Ralph Lauren. Although I'm pretty sure we didn't pay for the name brand paint but used the color code in a generic base instead.



A couple of views of the Living Room -- first from the front hall and next from the Dining Room:




And a couple of views of the Dining Room -- first from the Living Room and then from the Kitchen:

(the accent color on top is "Baked Brie" -- a Behr color I think)

The kitchen is next and stars new paint on the walls as well as a fresh coat of paint on the cabinets. Redoing the cabinets and countertops was most definitely not in the budget, so we made do with re-facing the cabinets and replacing the old appliances.





The Family Room is next and once again the main improvement was the newly neutral paint on the wall. If only we had chosen this paint color in the first place we could have saved ourselves a whole lot of money when we painted it ourselves :( First is a view from the Kitchen and then one from the Front Hall:

(the french doors also received a fresh coat of paint)

While we're in the Family Room we'll give you a quick peek at the Back Porch, the Back Yard, and the Laundry Room/Mud Room that connects the Family Room to the Garage. (Do you like how I'm making all these categories Proper Nouns and thus capitalizing them? Hahahaha)

(We were able to save a little bit of money by me painting this baby all by myself. Let's just say it took over 3 hours and was extremely labor-intensive.)

Next up on our tour are the Upstairs Rooms. (hahaha) First we have the Master Suite featuring Antique Bone wall paint, the first bed skirt I've ever bought in my life, and our brand-new duvet cover and shams that I got on sale at Pottery Barn and LOVE. Seriously, every time I look at them it makes me happy. If that makes me a shallow person then so be it. But after 8 years of marriage and never having "real" bedding I figured it was a worthwhile purchase:



Jane's room is next as we make our way down the Hall. There's really nothing super exciting or special about her room other than the fact that it is actually clean and not housing diaper boxes full of outgrown and soon-to-be-grown-into clothes:

(it even has vacuum lines on the ground!)

Grace and Sophie's room is next and the main thing you'll notice is that the hideously dark "Snow White's Song" pink pepto-bismol wall color is gone! It took 2 coats of paint to cover it, but I think it was well worth it. After sleeping on a mattress on top of a box spring on the floor for the last 2 years, I finally splurged and got Grace a "real" bed. Lucky for me it was on half-off clearance at The Salvation Army and I only paid 20 bucks. Sophie's bed was a bit munchkin-sized in the last post's picture (due to no box spring), so I neatly solved that problem by spending 8 dollars on risers for her bed rather than another 25 or so dollars for a box spring at the thrift store. You can hardly even tell they don't match, right? With the beds made up this way, making their room perfecto should be a piece of cake. After all, they merely sleep on top of the bed and cover themselves with their blankets each night and fold it back at the foot of the bed each morning:

Ethan's Room is the last stop on our tour of the Upstairs. His was the only bedroom we didn't repaint. The color on his walls is pale enough not to be obnoxious, so "Bibbity Bobbity Blue" stayed. The main pain of getting his room ready was making up the bedding on those darn bunk beds! One bed-wetting instance later and Ethan has been sentenced to wearing an Underjam every night until we move. He's not so very happy about this. But he also doesn't want to do the laundry and make up the bed himself either, so he has agreed to the plan. Hahaha.

(one of these days we'll get around to buying him a real dresser -- the plastic one has seen better days for sure.)

For the last portion of the tour we'll head on down to the Basement where -- for the first time since we've moved here -- it is completely and totally cleaned, organized, and set up in an efficient manner. Here is the view on the right as you come down the stairs:

A close-up of the desk area -- this was previously upstairs on the main floor in the Family Room where the bench is now:




Another angle of the Basement so that you can see the TV viewing area:

And the back corner of the Basement houses the "Home Gym." Hahahaha. Unfortunately for me and my Weight Watchers Lifetime Membership goals, that treadmill has not been seeing a whole lot of action lately. It's all good though because as it turns out working and cleaning non-stop all day long for weeks at a time is pretty good exercise in its own right. Cleaning and organizing the Basement alone took me about 3 hours of high-intensity work!




As we come down the stairs on the right the kids' Toy Area/Play Area is highlighted. Please ooh and aah over the shelves of labeled storage bins -- these are the fruit of my spring cleaning labors. The definition of organized? A place for everything and everything in its place. We now have a place for EVERYTHING we own. Just about.

(After 2 years of laying in piles on the Basement floor, I have even organized all of MY junk. The sewing, quilting, and crafting supplies have never been so easy to find!)

(Game and Puzzle shelf with Dress-up Bin and Miscellaneous Toy Bin underneath.)

Well, folks! That's basically it. I figured no one really wanted to see pictures of the bathrooms (because toilets are not all that attractive) so I skipped those, but other than that the house was represented in its entirety. This house has been such a wonderful blessing to live in and we're really going to miss it. The irony is that we got such a steal on it because of the market when we bought it 2 years ago, but things have gone so much more downhill since then that whoever buys it NOW will get an even bigger steal. Here's to hoping it sells quickly.

It was a HUGE ordeal getting everything ready to go to list it so quickly but now that it's done, it hasn't been quite as bad maintaining everything as I thought it would be. To preserve the perfection as much as possible we try to vacate the premises OFTEN. Our first such outing? Memorial Day weekend with the fam! After one final wipe down and sweep out we locked up the house on a Friday afternoon, listed the house, and headed out of town to visit my sister Sarah up in Akron. My mom and Amy and Jacob were also en route from New Orleans and the result was a fun and fabulous time marred only slightly by the occasional (and not so occasional) meltdown and misbehaving from the kids. The funniest comment of the whole weekend, however, came while we were dining as a family at McDonald's before hitting the road on Friday night. After an oh-so-delicious dinner of a Hamburger Happy Meal I was contemplating the decision of whether or not I should do dessert. Scott was going to order the kids some ice cream cones and asked if I wanted a caramel sundae with nuts -- which is my absolute favorite treat. As I was waffling back and forth Ethan wisely counseled me that if I was over 28 (Weight Watchers) points for the day then I shouldn't do it. Hahahaha. He is a bit intrigued by my tracking and the number of "points" I use everyday. I guess I should feel embarrassed to say that I went ahead and got the sundae, anyway, but I kind of consider it 8 points well-spent. Hahaha.

Stay tuned for the concluding segment of our mini-series which will cover Memorial Day weekend, the end of school, and the beginning of our summer vacation. I know you can't wait. It's all coming up in Part Three: I'd Rather be Busy than Bored.

(a quick visual to whet your appetite for the tale of Puppy -- Lost & Found)