January Photos

We kicked off the New Year with our friend's annual New Years Day brunch where they added a balloon drop for the kids this year.

It's been a really warm winter so we got to spend lots of time outside at the Nature Center and Red Top Mountain with friends.

We got one little cold spell where did get some snow and ice.

We visited Fernbank Museum.

 And lastly, we visited Eric's family in Knoxville.

We hanging in through our home rebuilding for another month here but will have exciting updates to share soon!

Ice Art

It doesn't feel much like winter now but last month we had a brief spell of ice and snow and the kids and I took advantage of the cold weather to make some ice art. It's such an easy, pretty project and the girls really enjoyed it. To make your own you will need:

*A small plastic container (we used the plastic containers that Chinese take out soup comes in)
*Water
*Natural materials such as berries, leaves and pine needles
*Glitter
*String
*A freezer or freezing temps outside

Have your kids collect natural items from outside and make a pile, then pour about half an inch of water in to your container. Arrange your natural materials in the water and add glitter. Loop your string so the end are submerged in water and freeze overnight. The next morning, hang your ice art in the sun. The girls also really enjoyed watching these melt and seeing the glittery puddles they left behind!

Living Room Vision Board

It's been really hard being out of our house the past month (a month already?!) and progress has been slow lately so I am keeping my eye on the prize and planning for the future. I have really kept myself busy thinking about new furniture, paint colors and design elements to keep myself distracted from the fact that nothing is happening.

We are doing some redesigning of the space and getting rid of the fireplace altogether. Instead we will have a door and lots of windows on that wall and it will open up to a patio space that will connect with our new deck. Of course our front wall we will keep all windows, it's what made us fall in love with the house to begin with!

The loft stairs are being replaced with a spiral staircase and since we get the chance to repaint I am obsessing over picking the new color for the living room, dining room and loft space. It's such a big continuous area that I still want to go neutral, right now I'm leaning towards this Mocha Ice color. We will have cedar trim and are talking about going with a slightly darker color for the floors as well.

We have been looking around at a ton of furniture and are seeing a lot we like at World Market. We are leaning towards this blue velvet sofa with some leather and graphic accent chairs and end tables that double as laptop desks. Throw in some graphic pillows for punch and we have a good idea of where we want to go with this room.

While it's depressing how slowly things are moving with the rebuild it's fun to think ahead and plan for when we get to do the exciting parts like rebuild, pick paint colors and go furniture shopping. I'll do some more posts on plans for the other rooms in the near future :-)

December Photos

Aside from the fire it was a nice December with lots of fun holiday activities. We went away to the mountains for Christmas to Unicoi State parks and it was a really nice little escape. Here's some photos of what we were up to last month.

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!

New Deck

Well we have lived in our house for almost 6 years now and we are starting to fix some of our big ticket issues that have been on our list forever. We started with the foundation problems which we fixed earlier this year. The much more exciting project that just got completed is our new back deck!

These first few picture are the befores, This deck served us well but the railing was too short, it was smaller than we wanted and it was basically starting to rot and fall apart. We definitely didn't want it collapsing on us so we decided it was time to replace it!

One of the best things about this was that it was a trial run for a contractor that we were considering for rebuilding our front windows (hopefully this will be happening soon!). I'm happy to say we were really pleased with this company's work and will definitely be using them again. http://www.barefootdecks.net/ if anyone is looking for a good contractor. 

Here is an in progress shot of them tearing down the deck. They got slowed down by the rain so it took longer than expected but once they got going it was pretty quick. As they pulled the deck apart we could see just how rotten the wood was, good thing we had it replaced!

And here is the finished deck, hooray!

We went with mahogany for the decking and railing tops. It was only a little more expensive and should hold up much better than the cedar. The rest of the railing is black aluminum and treated wood.

 I love the way the did the corners of the railings.

The new deck is much bigger and wraps around the side of the house instead of having stairs down to the backyard. It feels so big! I think it is probably almost twice the size of the original deck.

Here are the stais on the side of the house.

They also put little solar lights by the stairs which I thought was cool.

Even the cats approve!