I'm BAAAAAAACCCCCCCKKKKKKKK

Things have been a little hectic in our house.  I could list all the things that have kept me away, but I want to document them here so I don't forget this crazy, horrible, wonderful summer and fall.

 Recently Eric decided that we needed to refinance.  It is a smart financial move, based on the original loan we got and the amount of sweat equity we've put in, and the future we have ahead of us, but that means that for the last 10 days we have been finishing every project I started or wanted to do in the last 4 years.  Everything we did would have taken about 6 months for normal people but we crammed it all in in a week and a half.

How did we do this?  Caffeinated soda and candy.  We would get kids off to school, Eric would go to work and I would start work around 8am.  Taking breaks only to get kids and take them to activities I would work until at least midnight almost every night.  Almost, because there were a few nights I was up until 1:30 or 2am.

I feel like I was hit by a truck, I am so physically exhausted.  After hiking Crypt (that will be another post) I felt refreshed compared to what I feel now.  It will have been worth it after a few nights sleep, and a little time, but right now I just feel tired of my house.  OTBS it is really nice to not have projects hanging over my head.

Stott home from Nicole Stott

Overdue Room Reveal

Since I am in this "showing off my mad skills" mood (ha ha) I thought I would show a picture of Ethan's new room. It has been done for a while, but Ethan is not as...tidy as Ella so it took visitors coming to get the room in order enough to photograph it.

Before: After:
Ethan picked out all the color himself. He felt very strongly about them, and luckily I loved the blue, red, and cream. He has also started collecting globes which is a fun and decorative.

Room Redo, Part Deux

Beautiful drawing by my brother James now hanging in the "new" room.

James and Jes are coming to visit for a "fun" weekend adventure here in Scottsbluff. I say "fun" in quotes because I do live in western Nebraska, which although a wonderful place to raise a family, is about a 2 on the fun scale. (1 being Kansas, and Miami being a -5, which means you couldn't pay me to visit there again). I have been trying to get things ready for them, but being the reverse procrastinator that I am (I do, do things, just not the thing I am supposed to be doing) instead of working on the bathroom downstairs like I should, I decided I had to redo the living room.

It was one of the first rooms I worked on when we moved in, and there are several other rooms that still need to be painted, let alone redone totally, but for some warped reason I just had to redo that room RIGHT NOW!!! It has always bothered me that the room turned out nothing like what I wanted, and that it was not a reflection of me in the least. It is the first room you see when you visit, but really there is no excuse. Instead of tiling the bathroom, or cleaning the kitchen, I repainted the living room.

For reference: Before, Interlude, Now First off, I painted all the wood work white, which looks amazing ("I'm very good aren't I", to quote Julia). There are 3 different colors of wood in the house and I've decided that I'm just going to have to paint it all white if the house is ever going to look put together.

It did turn out VERY teal, and not the lighter version I thought it would be (even after hanging those stupid paint chips up for weeks). It is super bright, but I smile every time I walk by. It is just a breath of fresh air after the stodgy darkness of before. It is now a reflection of me. It is my style completely. I may have to repaint if we ever have to sell this house, but in the mean time I love it. I can't wait to hear what my neighbors or ward members think about it! I'm sure they will let me know just how much they love it too (and by love I mean hate, just clarifying since sarcasm is hard to pull off in print).

To Me; From Me

After months of calling, scheduling appointments, having nobody show up to appointments, playing more phone tag, and waiting, we FINALLY got our fireplace fixed (there is only one place in town that does fireplaces). What we thought would be a simple removal of a gas insert and putting on a chimney cap turned into our "Christmas Gift To Ourselves!" (guess I'll have to wait for next year to get an elliptical and loose weight, dang!)

So after a fun afternoon of Livi not napping while the guys worked and worked, we ended up with a real, working, wood burning fireplace. Yeah!!!! The workers kept trying to get me to stay with gas saying I wouldn't have to worry about wood and it would still work in a power outage. I had to explain that Eric and I both adamantly wanted wood. They looked at me like I was crazy but managed to get it switched over.What I didn't tell them is my husband is expecting the apocalypse and wants someplace we can cook our freshly shot deer meat. He wants some type of warmth for when society fails and we are holed up in our living room trying to survive.

Me? This is what I wanted it for:

Fit For A Princess

I thought I should finally post a few pictures of our work around the house. Both kid's rooms are mostly done. Ethan needs a few pieces of furniture (and a good picking-up) but Ella's was basically ready to be photographed. If you remember we started with this:

It was truly the scariest room in all of the house we looked at. The carpet was blue, dirty (cat urine and feces), and worn away in some parts. The window didn't seal at all, and there was scary blue paneling on only one wall. Well, we bought the house despite that room, and tried our best to make it work for Ella:

We put in a new large window so we now legally have a 5 bedroom home. Right before we put in the window I decided I couldn't live with the paneling on one wall, so I started pulling it down. Luckily (maybe) I did, because it turned out our sprinklers were leaking right down that wall and the wall, insulation, and paneling was covered in mold and water. So we fixed the sprinklers, gutted half the room to the studs, sealed the cinder blocks, put in new insulation, put up new drywall (which Eric had help with from our handyman)
and I mudded,

sanded, mudded, sanded, and mudded the wall again all by myself.
I sealed the new walls,

painted, and we put in new carpet. Ella picked out wall colors, bedding and helped arrange everything. I asked Ella her favorite part of the room and she said the canopy and chandelier over her bed.
I like the "Tribute to Aurora."

I had silver frames from my sister's wedding that I filled with various styles of Ella's favorite princess Aurora.

It's lower than I would have liked (like most the room), but I wanted her to be able to enjoy it, and she does!

I Finished a Room!!!!! ....kind of

Before

In the rush to get our house looking as presentable as possible before our parents got here for the baptism I ended up getting one room mostly done. Now when the UPS man comes to drop off my books (we have a horrible library here, and only one little book store) I wont be embarrassed to open the door to him.
The Living Room (stupidly named because you don't live in the living room, you live in the family room) is a hard room because it is long and narrow. I have no idea how to arrange the furniture (I'm standing by the front door), the color on the wall is NOT what I thought it would be and I still need to slip cover the chair, stain the bookcase and add drapes, but it will just have to do for a year or two (until I finally feel up to tackling it again....maybe at Ella's baptism). Even though it turned out no where near what I had in my head I still love it when I walk into it because of a few touches that I adore. Here they are, the things that make this room part of my home:
Firstly the art my mother got me for Christmas. It is a painting by Sandra Rast and the mother and toddler in the picture look uncannily like Me and Livi. It is in a beautifully impressionistic style (which I adore) and I love it.

The second thing is the family rules sign I made. I was looking at some on Etsy when I thought "I could do that." That phrase gets me in so much trouble, but occasionally (like the lego necklaces or this sign) it turns out awesome. Toot toot.
It's twice as big as the ones I was looking at, cost half as much to make myself, and I got to hand pick all the sayings on there. If you can find the Beesley family motto on their props to you! I think my little Stott families new motto should be "Oh, I can't understand whining. Try talking in a normal voice," but that gets pretty lengthy to put on a board so I just put "No Whining."

The third thing(s) are all on the bookcase in the back of the room. There is my princess art book, all our family photo albums, and inspired (directly copied) by my beautiful sister, and the Checkout Girl, the felt 'anniversary' home I made.
Forth is my piano and what is on top. I like the pictures, but the felty I won from my sisters blog makes me grin every time I see it. Her description is pretty awesome too:

"Campfire Stories"
The father hedgehog decided he needed to toughen up his kid, and thus took him to go rough it in the wilderness (I imagine it being in the desert). The son (I'll call him "Mikey") was used to having a bedtime story, and thus asked his father to stand in for what was usually his mother's niche. The father, being what I like to call a "Dad", used this opportunity to tell his son about the "Petshop of Doom". Upon returning home, Mikey was unable to sleep in his own bed for the next two weeks without night terrors, and consequently his mother forbid any more camping trips or scary stories. This scene is the pivotal moment where Mikey and his father got so close to bonding. . . and yet, alas, it was not to be.

If you want to see more of her creations she is on a felty marathon, making 52 this year and they are all funny, so check her out at: thejujubee.blogspot.com

That's it for now. Hopefully we go more than 2 days being healthy and I can get more of my house wrapped up. I'm not counting on it though.

As Demanded

So some of you have asked for pictures of the house. I only really have scary before pictures since everything is still a work in progress. I'll try to post the less scary ones here and then update with completed rooms, if that ever happens.
Here is one part of the front of the house. We got a new roof, and we've been watering the grass, which actually makes a big difference (go figure). Here is the other part of the front, where the bedrooms are. I love the foliage, and eventually I'm sure it will look nice, and not like a jungle. Right now there is a big hole in the front where we are putting in egress windows for the basement, which makes it doubly attractive! This is the great room, and by "great" I mean "where the UPS guy can't see our mess from the front door." It's actually a very cosey room with our furniture in it, and we enjoy hanging out in it quite a bit. The two upstairs smaller bedrooms both looked like someone murdered a box of crayons and the blood splatter got all over the walls. I guess they let their kids "splatter paint" the walls and ceilings. Awesome! One of the reasons we loved the house was the lot. It is a big lot, but not too overwhelming. It's almost twice the size of our last one, but more landscaping and hardscaping had been done. This is a picture of part of the backyard. Another reason we loved the backyard was this covered porch/pergola. There are pretty vines, a flower box, and shelves to put up flower pots. I can't wait for next spring! We've had a few problems we didn't see coming, like broken sprinklers, mold in the basement, rotten windows etc, that have caused the causmetic fixes like paint and decorating to be pushed back on the priority list. It's going to be a lot of hard work, but eventually we'll get there.

Before and Afters - Our Journey in this House

It is official: We are selling our home. It went on the market this morning (or as Ethan told Ella "Vicki (our realtor) will come, pick up the house, and take it to the market.") and I have worked like a mad woman the past few days to get it ready. I am sad to leave this house that has so much of our time, sweat, and blood in it, but there are just too many things we would like in a home, and it would be too much for this house in this neighborhood. Most of the improvements we have done ourselves (except hanging kitchen cabinets, which we could probably do now). I was looking over pictures from when we first moved in and thought I would share the transformations with you. There is a direct link at the bottom if you want to see bigger pictures.

http://s643.photobucket.com/albums/uu155/nikkistott/House%20Before%20and%20After/?action=view&current=c00493b0.pbw

Growing UP and Moving Down

Well, the kids are no longer able to share a room. They were fighting all the time, complaining about each others things in the room, and Ethan was keeping Ella up at night, and Ella was waking Ethan up in the morning. We decided we need a bigger house, so we started doing a budget and determined that wasn't possible. So onto plan B. We got the basement bedroom cleaned up, moved out a lot of the clutter, and voila, Ethan has his own little suite. Not only does he have a closet bigger than mine and Eric's, he also has an attached bathroom. Not a bad set up, except that it's icy cold, he needs to sleep with a heating blanket, and it dark as a cave, but he doesn't seem to mind. I let both kids decide what they wanted as "themes" in the room. Ethan picked transformers, and Ella picked (surprise, surprise) princess'. We went online, picked out vinyl (thank you Ryan for the ebay gift certificate!), picked out paint colors, and got started. After basically an entire week of working hard (and all day everyday of the new year weekend) we have basically got two rooms the kids LOVE. I still have fabric to make somemore "fancy decorations" as Ella says, so if anyone has ideas I would love some!