We Haven't Fallen Off the Face of the Earth...

Yes! We do still exist, and are still working on our home! I kid with the title of this post because we haven't fallen off of the face of the earth, we just have traveled quite a bit over the past several months! Thankfully, we have quite a bit that has actually been accomplished, and are in the process of getting some serious work done!

Since our last little chat, we enjoyed Thanksgiving and Christmas with our families, experienced a snowstorm in February, been to Albuquerque, LA, Taos, Bloomfield, NM and a few other places. My grandma also suffered a pretty serious car accident, and God has been so faithful and gracious to begin her long journey of healing. To say it has been a whirlwind would be an understatement, but God has been so faithful through all of it. We were so grateful to be able to go to every place!

Thankfully, we have also got quite a bit done on our house during that time. Thanks to the help of our family and several of our students, we have been moving gravel off of the side of our home to make room for grass, moved all of the shrubs off of the front of the house, dug up the planter beds on the front of the house, had a stump ground to make room for plants, and so many other major "victories" for our home! Tim has done some pretty serious man-handling on our home and some of the huge shrubs that we thought we would never see leave! More pictures of the changes on the outside will come in a later post.

We have also changed everything in our guest bathroom with the exception of the tile (That is our project for this weekend!), put ceiling lights in our dining room, hung curtains, finished all of our flooring with the exception of our bathroom and may other things! Obviously, I'm overdue several posts, but know that they are actually coming!

Hope to have more for you soon! Thanks for still keeping up with us!

Outside Help!

We've just been able to start turning our thoughts to what the outside of our home will look like some time next year. Thankfully, I have really creative family, from my husband to my brother-in-law. The exterior paint colors had already been picked out, and the more we see them, the more we love them! We are planning on using the sage-like green with a tinge of grey for the main exterior color (including covering the brick) of the house. The dark charcoal color will be the color for our trim, underside of the eaves, the garage, the siding on the peaks the house, the chimney, and our cinderblock fence (the previous owners had already painted over what looked like some graffiti). The red will be our front door and shutter color.

Tim and I had already decided that our house needed something to draw the eye to the front door, but weren't really firm on what that meant. We also knew we wanted to make some shutters for the outside windows and some beautiful window-boxes to add anther depth to the landscaping. The whole house was in need of some TLC for most of the eaves around our house, so Tim had the great idea of using bead-board over what already exists to add a little interest to what is otherwise a really simple feature. Chauncey added that we should make the exterior trim around the roofline thicker to give more prominence to our trim color.

After we talked about our plans for the outside and looked at what we really had going for us, Chauncey just "whipped up" this little something. He even drew in some landscaping for us! In addition to the shutters, bead-boarded eaves and thicker trim around the roofline, we will add clean-lined corbels across the front and side of the house to add some much needed architectural interest. Our house is currently a pretty plain-jane box that could use a little loving on the outside. This will definitely help! On the front of the house, larger beams will frame out the front entryway and provide an avenue for us to add lighting to our entryway. A tongue & groove ceiling will line the front porch to create a more defined and prominent front porch. They talked about a lot more stuff with the front porch, but I didn't necessarily understand all of it!

The side of the house will get a small arbor coming off the side of the peak to break up what is a REALLY LONG side of the house (the drawing makes up for where my words are lacking here). A small, slow-growing spruce will frame out the side of the house and really finish everything out. On top of this, we will plant more grasses, bushes and probably a tree in the front to really give our house some great curb appeal. I could not be more excited to see how this turns out in real life!

The front door actually got a little hint of the change that the rest of the outside of the house will get. Chauncey was gracious enough to spray it while he was out here, and a brand new door handle really tied it all together! We will replace the storm door next year so it doesn't hide our beautiful new door.Hope you enjoy our dreaming as much as we do!

A Little Bit of Fall!

Throughout this whole process, we really have been focusing all of our attention on getting the inside of our house finished. As a result of that, the outside of the house has gotten little attention. The extent of what we have done has been limited to taking out most of the old landscaping and simply cleaning up the appearance of the yard, and most of the clearing out is thanks to David Conklin! The exterior had a lot of well-established bushes and trees that, sadly, were just cluttering up the exterior of the house. All you could see was our HUGE bushes and trees!

When my parents came out, they helped us work on some of the huge New Mexico weeds that had grown in the gravel on the side of our yard and get some of our trees and hedges trimmed up and looking much better! As a result, I realized how much our yard needed a taste of fall! I usually love putting pumpkins on our front porch and planting some beautiful mums, but hadn't thought of it yet. Thankfully, our yard looks much better (and hopefully gives our neighbors hope that we will work on the outside extensively next year!).

We've been really brainstorming on what we can do to really change the curb appeal of our house, and hope to add some architectural as well as landscaping elements to really make our transformation on the outside as dramatic as the inside!