House Update

This house update is long overdue, here is a glimpse of what's going on as the house feels more and more like home. The first picture is our play/art room. We are getting so much use out of this space and everyone is happy with the new arrangement of the girls sharing a room.

 
Some views of the dining room and kitchen areas. Since these were taken the kitchen cabinets have gone in and we are now just awaiting the plumber to hook everything up so we can have a fully functional kitchen again.

The living room is feeling a lot less like a construction zone lately and we are getting to enjoy our new furniture. Also pictured: Clover being a ham.

Eric set me up this little corner as my work space and I couldn't ask for a more lovely spot! Perfect for my computer or doing some watercolor painting with beautiful views and good light. It makes me so happy :-)

We are busily unpacking boxes and rediscovering our belongings and we are soooo close to being done with this ordeal. We now have a working washer and dryer (yes!) and aside from the kitchen the last step will be the spiral staircase.

We are also in the middle of a bathroom remodel that needed to happen but was unrelated to the fire damage but that deserves it's own blog post. I'll try to get it up on here soon, we are very excited by how it's coming together!

House Update

Here are some pictures of the current state of the house rebuild. Siding went up at the end of last week and a little over the weekend. we are replacing the cedar with hardy plank so hopefully we won't have to replace it again.

The windows are looking beautiful, they make me so happy!

Unfortunately the inside of the house has kind of stalled out. We are having major problems with our electrical inspection, which I always feared would be our biggest obstacle in rebuilding.

In the mean time we are still fixing up the back bedrooms. Eric and his parents scraped all the popcorn ceilings and we repainted the girls rooms. Eric built a cool bunk bed mostly out of wood scraps we already had. We will put a floor bed under the lofted bed for Clover and Echo will sleep on top.

This weekend I painted the bed purple with white clouds per the kid's request :-)

Fire

If you know us at all you know that we had a house fire just before Christmas. I honestly don't even want to write about it here because I have told the story so many times now but since I started this as house blog and it has evolved into a blog about everything that means home to me I know the fire deserves an entry. It was a chimney fire that started on a Sunday night (get your fireplaces cleaned and inspected people!) and thankfully all people and pets made it out of the house just fine.

Now we begin the slow process of rebuilding, tearing down the old and putting in new. The hardest part of this for me is that our house was such a labor of love. We put so many hours into this house, working towards making it better over the years, doing so much with our own hands and the hands of friends and family. It's hard to see all that burnt away. 

I'm realizing through all of this how tied to my home I am. It is such a huge part of me, I put so much into it and it's so hard to be away from my home. I'm very fortunate that I get to spend this time at my other home however, the home I grew up in. I can't explain what a comforting feeling it was to be able to go to my parents house after the fire and they are kind enough to put us up until our house is rebuilt. 

So this will be the only mopey, emotional post about the fire. From here on it will be all about rebuilding and plans to improve the house. We have a lot of ideas and the bright side of this is that we are finally getting a huge chunk of what we want done to the house knocked out. When all this is done the house will be amazing with all new flooring, walls, windows and much more. It almost feels like we are having a house built from scratch to our specifications. For now we are keeping the end goals in mind and moving onward and upward. Here's to a speedy recovery and better luck in 2017!