Neat Stuff Friday | 5

Baking
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Happy Friday, and happy December! It's been a long while, but I thought I'd do another neat things Friday with you all today.

Christmas is right around the corner, and I'm starting to feel festive! I still have to finish decorating my little trees but I spent most of my week trying to settle back into routine after being in Idaho for Thanksgiving. Does it take anyone else forever to get back into the swing of things after being out of town?

I've also been brainstorming some fun new projects for blog posts coming up too, and I'm pretty excited for them. There's just something about the Christmas season that gets me feeling all creative and wanting to make all the things!

Next week I'll start sharing those, and I'll also have a house update post too! But in the meantime, here's some neat stuff I'm thinking about this week :)

Neat Stuff

  1. I've been wanting a classic, neutral apron. I'm a mess when I'm in the kitchen, and it might make my clothes last longer if I start wearing one! I really like this half size and this full one. Both so classic, and definitely a kitchen staple I could use!
  2. We opted out of putting in a bathtub in our house, since neither of us are bath takers and we loved the idea of having a larger shower. After reading this article, it seems like we aren't alone in the idea. How about you? Is a bathtub a necessity?
  3. My grandma makes the best, most chewy and delicious ginger-molasses cookies, and not being able to eat much sugar means I can't really enjoy them any more. I tried a modification on this low carb version which turned out pretty good, but I also want to play around with a variation on my grandma's and see what I come up with. I tried one batch that was a fail haha, but I'm going to keep trying!
  4. We get together with Dane's family every year for an annual white elephant Christmas Eve, and this guide of gift ideas is just hilarious! It's giving me ideas for sure ;)
  5. I mentioned on instagram the other day that my parents got me Floret Farm's Cut Flower Garden book, and I'm so excited to grow my flower garden for cutting bouquets next summer. I discovered them in a magazine last spring, and I love that they sell coordinating seed collections that you can grow together to make beautiful, cohesive bouquets. One thing that always kept me from trying was not knowing what kinds of flowers to grow, and they took all the guess work out of it! If you've been wanting to do the same, definitely check them out. I ordered the Dusty Rose collection, and I can't wait to get my seeds in the mail!
  6. Since I'm on more of a low sugar kick, I might also try to re-make this recipe from a couple years ago, but in a lower sugar version. It's Dane's favorite, and I really enjoy it too, and Christmas is my favorite time to make goodies so I think I'm going to have to give it a try.
There you have it, all my neat stuff for the week! I hope you all have a beautiful weekend, and thanks for stopping by!

P.S. - Did you hear I'm doing a giveaway and a sale? 30% off all printable, free shipping on orders over $10, and there's still time to enter to win a free Christmas printable design for  your cards this year! Check out more information here. 

The Forever Cottage Inspo: The Exterior

Before

This last weekend was a busy one for working on the house. Well, it's always busy I guess, but it's been a while since I actually worked long and hard on something myself, Dane's been doing most of the work lately. But he needed help putting up fascia board (the edge board you see that covers the end of the joists) and I started paint prep!

We get so much rain here in southern Oregon, I wanted to get the exterior painted before it really gets going. Usually it hits in October sometime, so we're kind of racing to get the roofing done and most of the exterior before that happens. It's still showing clear for the 10 day forecast though, so fingers crossed it will stay nice weather for a while!

There isn't really much I need to do to the new part of the house as far as prep before painting (although there will be a ton of caulking at some point soon), but the original part of the house really needed some attention before I could do any painting. It's obvious it hadn't been painted in a really long time, maybe over 20 years! And most of it was peeling and flaking off.

To get a good adhesion with the new paint, I had to get all of the loose stuff off, which required going over it with a pressure washer, going over it all by hand and scraping it, and then pressure washing one more time! It was as much work as it sounds. It took me three days!

Now that it's done though, it looks so much cleaner without all the flaky paint and cobwebs, in spite of all the missing paint, haha! And now I have a smooth slate for priming and painting. I wrapped that up today, and here's what it looks like now.




The plan is to start painting this week, and since I will definitely be sharing an update when that's done, I thought I'd show you some of my inspiration for it!

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I had a really hard time deciding on a color for the house, because I actually really loved the green it was originally, and I also love super dark colored houses. But when it came down to it, I decided to go with white, since I've been wanting a white house for years! I figured I'd regret it if I didn't do it.

We're also doing a gabled front entry, that will be enclosed on the sides and only open on the front. Our house is far from a Tudor style house, but I kept coming back to them for their front entries and so I took inspiration from them for ours. It's not built yet, but it will be done soon!

And lastly, I know we're doing a wood front door, and I got some brick on craigslist for our front steps and walkway.

It's going to be so exciting seeing the outside come together, and it's a pretty big check off the list. Soon, we'll be moving onto the interior, and man am I ready for that!

So what do you think? I know white houses are very trendy right now, but I just love them so much! Are you on the white house bandwagon too? What are some of your favorite exterior details?

Have a great rest of your day, and thanks for stopping by!
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The Forever Cottage: Framing and Siding

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I'm finally back with a house update for you all!

It seemed like a slow summer in terms of progress, but we've actually gotten a ton done since the last time I posted an update. Right now we're in the process of trying to beat the rainy season and get the outside wrapped up and roofed. So far we're on track, but we really only have a month or so until the rains usually come, so wish us luck that we can get it done!

Dane's been working on things like crazy, and I'm so appreciative :) I have my own list of things I need to do while the weather is still warm and dry, and then it'll be onto the best part: the interior!

But first, let me run you through our progress.

We got the foundation poured in June, and let me tell you, that part took so stinking long! There's a lot of little details and when you're mostly a one person operation, it takes a chunk of time. Then we got our rough plumbing done, and subfloor laid.

After subfloor came one of the most exciting parts, the framing! It took a couple of weeks to get the framing completed, but it was so fun to see it start taking shape. To actually be able to walk around inside and see the sizes of the rooms was so awesome, I was practically giddy!



Next came our outdoor siding, and now it's really looking like a house. We decided to match the existing siding on the old part of the house instead of re-siding the whole thing, and I actually really like the siding. It's not something I've seen very often, (it's more common to see it where the gaps are spaced farther apart) and I think it's pretty cute. Dane got that finished last week and sometime in the next few weeks I'm going to start painting! :)


Our list for the coming month includes: building our front entry (which should have been done already, but I didn't finalize what I wanted until a couple weeks ago. Whoops!), fine tuning where to two parts of the house connect, installing ceiling joists, new fascia, roofing, and painting! In fact, our joists are coming in this week and they'll be going up this weekend!

After a summer of what felt like crawling at a snail's pace at times, it feels so good to be making some big, visible progress. And I should say, I am way better at sharing up to date progress over on my instagram stories, so if you aren't following me over there, you should ;)

That's all I have for today, but soon I'll be sharing all of my light fixtures (which I did already share on instagram), and some more inspo posts. I hope you all have a great Thursday, and thanks for stopping by!

The Forever Cottage Inspo: The Kitchen

Decor

We're trucking along and making somewhat slowish, but steady progress on the house. If things go as planned, I should have an exciting update on it next week! But for today I thought I'd share some of my kitchen inspiration. 

One thing that we've already bought (because they were on sale!) is our windows. I really wanted black windows, and so after some research, I found the best budget friendly option for them out there! We went with Andersen 100 Series windows, and we ordered them last spring during Home Depot's windows and doors sale. But, since we were no where near ready to install them, they've been in storage ever since. 

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This picture is a big one on my list of inspiration. I looked at a ton of pictures of kitchens with black windows, but this one is my favorite. I love the white walls, and the way they make the windows really pop. And it has all of my favorite things, black+white, warm wood, brass hardware, and greenery!

Here are some other things I'm looking at.

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I love inserted hood ranges, and I think it's necessary anyway because I'm not planning on doing any upper cabinets at all! Call me crazy, but I just love the look of open shelving, and there will be plenty of storage without them. Dane loves the idea because it's cheaper haha ;)

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There are several cabinet color options that I really like (I love those wood ones), but I always keep coming back to black. It's always been a favorite of mine, and I feel like you can't go wrong with such a solid neutral color. But, I have tossed around the idea of a dark olive green, so I could surprise myself and choose that when it comes down to it!

Right now I'm planning on medium brown wood floors, white counters (maybe concrete) and a subway tiled backsplash. I've been hearing rumors that subway tile is out, and I get it. When something dominates as much as subway tile has, people get tired of looking at it. But, we used it in our last two remodels and didn't get to enjoy it at all! Literally weeks after tile went up, we moved out :( I may decide to try a different tile layout, but I still do love the classic.  I also thought about some pretty patterned cement-like tiles, but honestly, I think I would get tired of that really fast, in spite of how pretty it is. So, tried and true it is.

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The layout of our house is a little different than most people are probably used to, like I mentioned in a previous post. You walk right into our dining room/kitchen, so I want it to make a really good first impression. Something cozy and welcoming, with lots of character. And our dining table is going to float in the center of the room, so I'm picturing something old, rustic, and warm. These pictures above  are really pulling that off!

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Some of these pictures might not seem that similar, but they all have colors and details that I really love. Plus, I'm focusing more on the mood and feel I get from them, and trying to incorporate that into the plans than trying to copy every exact thing. There's a particular feel that I have always loved in houses, no matter what's currently trendy or popular, so I think if I focus on that, maybe I won't get tired of things quickly as trends start to change. 

And, let's be honest, some of these places (like so much of Pinterest) are much higher end and extravagant than our house is going to be! So my goal is to focus on the things that I know I like (warm wood, black+white, olive green, a touch of rustic, a touch of traditional, a touch mid-century) and make it work for our home :)

There you have it, our new kitchen inspiration! What do you think? Should I continue to do these posts for some of the other rooms in our house? Let me know!

Happy Wednesday folks, and thanks for stopping by!

The Forever Cottage: Where We Started

Before

In my last update on our new home, I shared some of the exterior photos of the house and the surrounding property. Today I thought I'd share the interior before pictures, fresh from when we first looked at it. As a warning, these pictures are very raw and not pretty at all. This is what a screaming real estate deal looks like in our area!


Entering the house, you walk into the dining room and kitchen from the front door, which is so British. Check out Escape to the Country on Netflix if you don't know what I'm referring to, haha!



Off of that is the spare room and laundry, which at one point were separate rooms but had been opened up into one. We knew that we would be putting that wall back up and separating the two.



Through the kitchen was a big selling point, and that was the large living room. Large for the house anyway, and large enough to have friends and family over. It also had nice big windows with a great view of the back property! Obviously, when I took these, the owners still hadn't removed all of the stuff, so it seems a little smaller than it really is in these pictures.





Off the hall is the bathroom, and what will be the master bedroom. Not big by any means, but we've had tiny bedrooms and we've had huge bedrooms (our Idaho house had a massive master suite!) and this seemed like a good size for us.

There is also a deck off of the living room, and while it's not the worst, it needs a fair amount of work, like everything else.



We knew going in that this place needed so much tlc (aka, a complete gut job!) and we knew that we were going to be running into some electrical and foundation issues with it. Just so you know that we had no illusions this was going to be an easy job! We were working with an original half of the house that was built in the 40s, and that had been added onto in the 60s.

Plus, whoever built it initially had to have been pretty small. The ceilings were only 6'11"! Now, we aren't the tallest people, so it wasn't all that bad to us, but we knew that raising the ceilings was going to be on the list, at least for part of the house.



On top of that, it was very, very dirty and hadn't been maintained very well at all. The owner who did the addition lived (and smoked inside!) for the last 50 years, and there had been some animals in and out of the place in the last decade. Mmmm, smell that??.....

But the bones seemed good (and in parts of it they were), it was cute, and overall it checked most of the boxes we were looking for.

Then we started demo. But I'll get to that later :) We ended up having to make some pretty major changes to the plan after we really got into it, so I figured it warranted it's own post, and that will bring us up to it's current stage. So stay tuned for that!

Thanks for stopping by :)
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Bedroom Refresh: Transitioning to an Adult Room

Before and After

A couple months ago I went to Idaho on for a little trip after my best friend had her baby :) I was there for almost two weeks, and while I was there, I got bit by the project bug HARD!

Some of you might have seen on instagram stories or snapchat that I helped my little sister Amber re-do her bedroom. She's turning 21 this week, and I thought her room looked like it could use a little transition to a more adult space.

Now, I should start this by saying that home decor and organizing are not her thing. And that alright. She's into a lot of other things, but those aren't it haha. And this has been her room for years, and she had never really had an excuse to go through and get rid of things. Let's just say that all of those years had amounted to a lot of stuff that never got used and wasn't serving any purpose other than taking up space!

The room also hadn't been re-painted in the almost 14 years since my parents built the house, and it was one of the last rooms to be re-done. There were holes in the walls from when it used to be my room and I had posters hanging up! 

With just a little convincing, she decided to let me help her and we tackled it all in a long weekend.

One of the first things we did on was go through her stuff. This was mostly her job, but I helped out a little. She had a massive collection of movies and books, as well as a lot of crafting supplies. We were able to get rid of so much, and that was honestly one of the biggest improvements to the space that we made!



The things she wanted out of the space were a nicer work space/desk area, a reading nook, and to keep her bed (she loved how comfortable her mattress was, even though the bed was a twin).  I wanted to pull the decor into something more co-hesive, paint the walls, and give her more organization. 

We found a bought several things for her room, some thrifted, some from craigslist, and some from Ross and Target. 

Thursday we spent the day in town shopping and we picked up:

  • Paint and supplies
  • A thrifted desk chair
  • Curtains and rod
  • A new laundry hamper
  • A desk off of Craigslist
  • Organizing baskets
  • A thrifted headboard
  • A bed frame off of Craigslist
  • Wall art 
  • A blanket basket
  • A new lampshade
  • Rug
  • New sheets
  • A new bed comforter
Later on Saturday, I also picked up some supplies for hanging some faux floating shelves above her desk.

Friday, she painted her walls and Saturday I cut in and we spray painted her head board and her desk chair. In that time we also continued to go through her stuff and the amount we got rid of was crazy!

Sunday, I finished cutting in and some touch ups on her wall paint, and I organized all of her things, including her closet. I cut the wood and we hung up her shelves, and then I painted them. It was all a joint effort, but we got this hilarious picture of me working while she's laying on her bed doing nothing, haha!


I think there was a little more passion for the project on my end!

Monday, I put the finishing touches on the organization and put everything on her shelves. It was so exciting and it quickly became the favorite room in the house! My mom and sisters and I would go back and hang out in there chatting, and Amber just wanted us all to get out so she could enjoy her new space in peace ;)





She was really happy to have a nice, organized space and I'm glad she let me help her. It's nice that she has a fresh, relaxing room since she spends a lot of time in there.  

The one big mistake I made though, was with her headboard! I bought it thinking it was a twin, and it turned out to be a full, ha! That's why you bring a measuring tape folks! But it worked out ok. The bed frame we got is adjustable and she says she may upgrade her mattress in a few months, so we decided to keep it and for now it stays in place between her bed and the wall.




So what do you guys think? Suitable for a young adult who still lives at home? And do you ever get bit so hard by the project bug that you knock out a big one in a weekend? Let me know! 

Thanks for stopping by!

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