Back to School!

How is the summer over already?!?? I'm glad we were able to fit a lot of fun things in even with all of the house chaos, but man, did that summer go fast!

We did something really smart at the end of the last school year: because we weren't sure if/when we'd be moving, we ordered school supply kits for both boys through the school. Staples puts them together for you and ships them directly to the school with everything they need, and it comes labeled. The price wasn't much more than we expected to pay for their supplies, and we took advantage of it!

However, as Paige is entering middle school, we had to buy hers. Thankfully we had a lot of hers either leftover from last year or in our school supply cupboard. I couldn't justify buying all brand new pencils and binders when some of hers still looked brand new!

Sorting through our supplies on hand

Does anyone else ever feel like kids grow more in the summer than any other time? Cause I swear my kids do. These pants were a little long in the spring:

The boys grew so much this summer that Nate didn't have any pants for school and Ry had just a few shirts. My house looked like a clothing store exploded all over it while we sorted through their clothes!

Paige had fun going through her clothes this year; this is her new favorite hoodie! She's making her "GRRRRR" face to match it ;)

And we of course had to do some shoe shopping! 

All three kids needed sneakers, and Paige needed some new flats. She doesn't wear sneakers for most school days (unless it's a field trip), and as her feet haven't grown in about 3 years, she had worn out her flats. We found this cute black lace flats that have sparkles on them!

We totally timed our shopping right; Famous Footwear had a buy one get one half off sale plus an additional 15% off coupon. We were so under budget that this mama got shoes, too!

Last Wednesday was the first day of school. This was the first year that my kids didn't have their picture taken together before school! Paige has entered middle school, and the middle and high school kids start an hour earlier than the elementary kids. I wasn't about to wake the boys up really early just for a picture, so separate will have to do this year.

Here's my 7th grader!!!!

And my 6th grader....

And my 2nd grader!

Okay Time, we can slow down now. Thanks!

Ryan wanted me to have my picture taken as well...so we did a selfie! He is my mini-me!!!!

We are looking forward to being in our new house really really soon! It was sad knowing that this was the last first day pictures at this house...but being so close will be worth it!

Vacation Day #1: Travel and Museum

Day #1 of our vacation started out smoothly (we had hoped and prayed all the bumps were out of the way already). We left the house two minutes before we were scheduled to, and it was a beautiful morning for travelling...

...and falling asleep withing minutes of leaving the house!

We had hotel reservations in Virginia, about halfway between home and our house at the Outer Banks. We divided our trip down into two days last year, and it was such a great way of starting off our vacation! Our first year to the OBX we did it in one day and were exhausted and cranky the first couple of days. Not a great way to start a vacation!

Travel went really well. We made great time, and the boys did really well in the back of the car. They got to watch movies on a laptop and Ryan shared colored pencils so they could both color!

 Before we went to our hotel, we made a side trip to the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center! This is the companion facility of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum!!! We had so much fun looking at planes, jets, helicopters, blimps....

A Ryan plane!!!!

aaaaaand.....

A look of amazement!!!!!

THE SPACE SHUTTLE DISCOVERY!!!!!!

I don't think the kids (especially Ryan!) liked it at all ;)

An astronaut, Mom! Look!!!!

Watching a video ofthe last time Discovery went into space

Watching space videos

Nate also participated in a paper airplane contest! Although he didn't win, he had a lot of fun participating.

Waiting to get started!

Watching and cheering from the side lines

Getting ready to throw his plane through the hula hoop

After we left, we had an hour or so drive to our hotel. Apparently museums tucker out little astronauts! 

We got to our hotel, checked in, had Chinese for dinner, and were asleep by 9!!!

Up next: Saturday morning fun and arriving at the vacation house!

Vacation Prep (AKA Needing a Vacation to get over Vacation Prep)

Oh vacation, how I love you.

Every year my in-laws rent a house somewhere big enough for the entire family to go stay and be together for a week. We've done Honeoye Lake twice, Autumn Lake (Adirondacks area) twice, and this was our third year in Salvo in the Outer Banks. We stayed in a different house than the previous two years and really enjoyed the new place!

Now I don't know about you, but planning for a vacation is hard. It's easier now that the kids are older and we don't have to worry about diapers and all the other baby things, but still trying to get a family of five packed for a week and getting two animals prepped to leave is challenging.

To Do Lists!

And this year decided to throw us a couple curve balls.

We knew this year would be a little different. Our house still has a For Sale/Sale Pending sign in front of it, and even though we don't live in a village or city, a lot of traffic goes by here everyday. We were a little nervous about leaving our house vacant for a week, but we took steps to make sure that it wouldn't look fully abandoned: our cat was going to stay here and our neighbor would check on him nightly, and some friends were also going to come and harvest our garden while we were away. It's not as much movement at our house to make it look occupied, but we thought it would be enough. (And it was!)

The one problem about the house still being Sale Pending was that we didn't know if we'd need anyone to come through the house for various appointments during the week, and one even got scheduled for the morning we were going to be leaving....meaning we had to leave the house SPOTLESS. That's hard enough to do on any given day, but trying to get your house spotless while trying to leave for vacation is a whole other level of craziness!

The biggest curve ball of them all we didn't even begin to expect.

We swung by my in-law's house on Wednesday to drop off some things, and my father-in-law commented on how our exhaust was sounding loud. We thought it was just a heat shield, so he said to bring it over early Thursday morning and he'd help Pete take a look at it.

Thursday morning came, Pete took the van over. I'm home with the three kids, babysitting an additional two, and trying to pack. Pete calls: the fixed the heat shield, didn't really see anything wrong with the exhaust, but there's a squeaking and squealing noise. They took it to the mechanic's, and the water pump is dying. And two front bolt springs (I think that's what they were??? Definitely part of the front suspension...) were completely broken and could cause real damage at any point....also known as, van isn't leaving the shop OOOOR going on vacation. Big $$$$$ flashed in front of our eyes!

So Pete and his dad checked into rental vans, and we didn't want to pay the price to rent one. We decided to take our car, and my in-laws graciously offered to take one of our kids in their vehicle so we wouldn't have to have three kids crammed in the back of our car. Thankfully we had fixed the car and it's issues earlier in the summer so all it needed was for the air conditioning to be recharged for it to be ready to go.

Even with all of the craziness and our plans going straight out the window, we are so thankful. We are glad Pete's dad had the wisdom and foresight to check our van, thankful there was space for Paige in their truck, thankful our friends and neighbors were able to look after our house, and just so thankful that we didn't try to take the van on vacation (we probably wouldn't have made it out of the state, or at least through Pennsylvania....it definitely wouldn't have made it over the bridges and bumps on the OBX island!).

We were able to leave our spotless house at 5:58 Friday morning (two minutes ahead of schedule!!!!), with Paigey securely in the back of her grandpa's truck and the boys snuggled in the back of our car. We were Virginia bound for the night, and were praying that all the bumps in the road were already behind us!

Up next: Friday afternoon fun in Virginia!

Summer Bucket List Bingo Update #3

We're slowly making our way through our bucket list!

Over the past week or so we've crossed off:

Dinner at Five Guys! This was Nate's biggest wish for the bucket list this summer, so it made perfect sense to have it double as his birthday dinner! The kids absolutely loved it and are begging to go back.

Pretending to be sleepy :-P

Dewitt Park and walk to Blondie's for ice cream with our friends! It was a great afternoon hanging out with our friends Jess and Aaron. We don't get to see them outside of church that often, and we really enjoyed catching up with them. We haven't really explored this park before, and I can definitely see us coming back to explore more, especially now that we know the secret path to Blondie's!!!!

Proof that Ry will talk to Jess!!! He loves pretending to be shy around her.

Aaron playing with the kids

Family baseball! Okay, so I wasn't feeling well and while I technically didn't play, but I was umpire, so that counts for something, right? Pete and Ryan were on a team against Paige and Nate, and while we didn't officially keep score, it was a really close game. We're really looking forward to our bigger yard so we're not playing around our vehicles anymore :)

While we probably won't be crossing everything off of our list this summer (yet again), I have to remember to cut us some slack. We've been so busy with house things, but I'm loving how intentional we've been about taking time to fit in some fun things along with the chaos as well!!!

What fun things have you been up to lately?

New House Inspiration: Sunroom

Can I just begin by saying how excited I was about having a sunroom?

One corner of the sunroom

I loooove the sunshine. During the cloudy and cold winter months, I definitely get depressed and don't feel well without the sun around. Having a room where I could enjoy the sun for most of the year without getting rained on just seemed like a perfect situation to me.

However, Pete wasn't as excited about a sunroom as I was, and he was thinking about turning it back into a covered deck. The room isn't insulated, so we wouldn't really be able to use it any longer than a deck would be, so it's just a wasted space in the winter. To turn it back into a deck, we'd pull out all the sliding glass doors that make up the windows in the sunroom, add some supports to hold up the roof, and put in a wood deck floor above the current concrete floor. I definitely saw the potential in this as we'd have an outdoor eating space and a place for grilling (as we didn't know where the grills would go), and thought this would be just as great of a space as a sunroom would be.

I looked up some inspiration, and thought some of these ideas would be amazing!

I really liked the curtains around the deck sides for privacy as well as the lights strung along the ceiling for mood lighting:

I liked the lighting for this one as well, as well as the privacy screen created by the trees. The dining area as well as a seating and relaxing area is really really nice, too!

While I was a little sad about possibly giving up my sunroom, it made sense to turn it into a deck. The grill would be right outside the future kitchen, it's less work than updating the sunroom would be, and we really like having an outdoor hang out space.

Buuuuut, my husband is full of surprises. He mentioned that keeping the sunroom might not be such a horrible idea, that with a little work, we could definitely transform it into a four season room (it's currently a three season space), and even have part of it be a greenhouse area for growing some things during the winter.

Genius.

So, you know what came next, I turned to Pinterest and looked up more inspiration!!!!

While this look is a little too messy for my taste, I really love the idea of a hammock chair by the plants. We are obsessed with our hammock, and getting to sit in a hammock during the winter while being surrounded by plants? Bye bye depression!!!!

I thought this was really cute for a corner of the sunroom! I can see herbs being grown like this:

This was my favorite idea: shelves installed in front of some of the windows! The big wall of the sunroom faces south, and I can see even one set of the sliding doors having plant shelves in front of them. Spinach, green onions, and lettuce would be happy here!

For the rest of the room, I'd love to take some of the deck ideas and bring them inside, like having the lights still hung on the ceiling and some indoor/outdoor furniture for eating and relaxing:

I also loved the idea of curtains being hung! It would be great for privacy, more insulation, and just giving it a more finished and homey feel.

The main problem with keeping the space as a sunroom is that we still don't have a space for grilling. We have two grills (propane and charcoal) as well as a smoker.

We looooove grilling.

Yes, they can live in the garage and be pulled out into the driveway to be used, but we like grilling year round. Having to pull them out into the garage without a roof to protect from the elements is not an ideal situation, so I wanted to find something that would work without turning into a super big project.

While this isn't completely perfect, I really liked adding a deck space attached to the sunroom space. I love the pergola idea (and the lights! oh the lights!!!! must get lights!), but that doesn't really help with the grilling while being protected issue. Adding a little roof (or a clear roof like in the top deck idea picture) could easily remedy that, though!

The next reveal is the current kitchen space, which will come out on Tuesday. What would you like to see after that? We have two bathrooms, dining room, living room, kid's play space, office, laundry room and (I forgot this before, oops!) the entrance/mudroom left! 

New House Inspiration: Kitchen

Now that all of the bedrooms are planned and revealed, the kitchen was the next room requested.

Let me just warn you: this post is going to be interesting. And probably confusing, too. But please bear with me!

The kitchen was THE #1 REASON why we didn't want to go look at this house. Yes, we don't particularly like the outside, but that's easily fixable. But when you look at the pictures online, see a tiny kitchen, and have a family of 5 that loves to help cook? Yeah, it's not going to work out.

But we looked and loved the house so very very much we wanted to work something out.

While Pete was thinking about visiting the house a second time, I was spending so much time (while I wasn't finishing prepping this house to sell) researching how to make tiny kitchens workable. I stumbled across one pin (because Pinterest is always my go to for anything!) showing one woman who converted her garage into a kitchen, and I thought that was just plain silly. I commented about it to Pete, and as soon as the words left my mouth, we had a light bulb moment.

One of the garage bays was already converted into living space.

Living space we weren't sure what we were going to do with.

And it's right next to the current kitchen.

We started brainstorming ideas on how to move the kitchen from it's current space to the next room over. How would we run the water pipes and gas line? Is it even possible? What would we do with the old kitchen space? HOW MUCH WILL THIS COST?!??!!!?

We were able to check it out more on our second showing. The family room space (hopeful future home of kitchen) is elevated to match the rest of the house's flooring, and the entryway mudroom is not. Behind the mudroom paneling is an access point to get under the flooring in the family room and run the lines! YAY!

During our inspection we asked our inspector what he thought about it, and he thought it was a great idea as well. The structure will work nicely for a kitchen, and he even helped us figure out a couple things while he was there!

The wall that is between the current kitchen and family room is going to get opened up a little bit like this. We're so used to more of an open floor plan, and that will help keep it open. The counter at the window will also help for parties (able to get food from either side) or holiday, when not all the food will be able to fit on the table:

We want to do the same counters as we just put in our current kitchen. We love them, and we have a ton of pieces left. We'd be able to save money by probably just buying one more piece of laminate and building the counters ourselves rather than buy premade counters. We've always wanted dark counters and gray floors (to help hide dirt), but us agreeing on cabinet color has always been a bit of a struggle. We actually both really like these cupboards, and it's almost exactly what we're looking for in terms of counters and flooring colors:

I really really really wanted a buttercream yellow kitchen and dining room for our current house. However, our rock wall around our coal stove clashed with the cream color, so I had to choose something else. I think this color would be perfect, keep the room nice and light, and really give you a hug as you walked it (it's the first room you'd walk into from the mudroom):

Having a big family who love to eat and cook means a lot of food and dishes/pots/pans/small appliances that need to be stored. Having a house closer to school and being by friends means more mouths to feed, too. I really want a pantry, and I found a corner one like this that would work out amazing in the space:

I like the lower shelves of this pantry being deeper for more storage and for the appliances to have almost a counter to sit on:

 Now, I really really really want an island in my kitchen. I'm so used to having a peninsula (and we loooove it!), but the kitchen really isn't going to be big enough to have one. There's a certain amount of space you need for walking space in a kitchen, and having an island is just not feasible in the new space. Buuuut, IKEA to the rescue! I love this little cart! The side with the shelves would go towards the oven for things like cast iron pots or even our regular pans, and then the two stools on the other side are great for the kids to sit at while helping prep dinner. It's the perfect size for what we have space for AND it's movable, so if for some reason we need more floor space, we can move it. I'd probably recover the top to match the counters, though, just for continuity:

When you enter the kitchen, the fridge will be immediately to the left of the door. I like the idea of building a wall there to keep it in it's place and having a family command center there:

A lot of this room may change depending on the budget. We will hire someone to run lines for the water and gas, but we can probably do everything else ourselves, allowing us to keep the costs low. This is definitely one of the bigger projects (if not THE biggest) that we have planned for the house. The one great thing about doing this is that we can keep the other kitchen up and running for most of the project.

Four rooms down, so many to go! What would you like to see next? We have two bathrooms, dining room, living room, kid's play space, my office, laundry room, current kitchen space, and sun room left! Let me know in the comments below!