*Thank you to Z Counterform for sponsoring this post.
Alright, here it is...part II of my concrete countertop series! I know a lot of you have been patiently waiting for this post and I’m excited to share all the details. (Read part 1 here if you haven’t already.)
Before we get started on the tutorial, let me just tell you that neither Adam or I have ever worked with concrete, we are truly newbies at this. We spent a ton of time watching videos and reading tutorials online, but had no …
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DIY Concrete Countertops, Part I- Setting the Forms
Well, we did it...we actually poured our own concrete countertops! Adam and I spent hours and hours (and hours) researching this before we did it. We read tutorials and watched YouTube videos and generally felt prepared and confident...but honestly, the process still didn’t go quite like we thought it would. Turns out no amount of research or reading can compare to actually getting your hands dirty. I already knew that...but now I know it better.
There are a lot of steps and information to …
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House Regrets, Second Chances, and Glorious Glorious Beams
I have a story for y’all. It’s a story about regret, catastrophe, and despair. A story about second chances, a story about hope, and redemption.
It’s a story about beams. Glorious Glorious beams.
So a couple of months ago our area was hit by a series of massive hailstorms. The kind of hailstorms that hit hard and fast at 3am, bringing baseball sized hail to pelt your house and terrify your children. The kind that slams into your roof, breaks your windows, turns your car into a golf ball, …
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Installed Cabinets
Happy Fourth of July everyone! I was scrolling through Facebook today and looking at all the festive pictures and memes, and interspersed between and the red white and blue was this gem...
It made me laugh out loud...so I had to share, of course.
Anyway, in the last post I left you with a trailer full of cabinets...
and an empty kitchen.
Then one day this happened...
And now we have the beginning of a kitchen!
So, would you like a quick tour?
First up we …
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Cabinet Beginnings
One of the main ways we are saving huge amounts of money on the kitchen is by building our own cabinets. Way back when Adam and I were dating (as teenagers about 14 years ago) his family ran a custom cabinet shop. They built the cabinets themselves, which means that my handy husband isn’t new to this whole cabinet building thing. We got a quote for cabinets anyway (just to make sure building our own was worth the time and effort) and it came back around 10K. So far Adam has built and installed …
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Designing a Kitchen
Alright, it’s time to start talking about the kitchen in the new house. We’re moving in just over a month, (because we sold our old house! In a day! More on that later) and in order to move in we need a functioning kitchen. As a reminder, here is what the kitchen looks like in the blueprints....
Actually, here is the complete floorplan so you can see how the kitchen relates to the rest of the house.
As you can see, it is really really open. Which means not only does the …
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Painted Interior – Sherwin Williams Silvermist & Shoji White
A couple of months ago (how has it been that long already?) I wrote a post about choosing interior paint colors for our new home.
All those vertical paint samples above were the contenders, with the top white stripe being the trim color (SW Alabaster) and the green stripe being the kitchen cabinet color (SW Herbal Wash, but I later changed it to something even bolder).
In the end, Sherwin Williams Shoji White was the winner. I liked that it was white without being too blinding, and it …
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Interior Limestone
When designing and planning this house Adam and I knew we wanted a lot of rustic features inside our home. Metal ceilings, antique beams, shiplap siding, brick flooring, rock walls, and rustic wood ceilings and floors were all things we wanted to incorporate in one way or another. We particularity wanted an entire rock wall on one of the walls in the main living space. After finalizing our blueprints we were like “We’re going to put the rock wall HERE. Okay, no... here? Well, that won’t …
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Grout mistakes and installed bathroom tile
*Thank you to Floor & Decor for sponsoring this post.
Last month I shared with y’all the process of picking tile for our kids bathroom, and I’m happy to say that it's all installed, and we are that much closer to having a livable house! As a reminder, here is the tile we picked - a brushed marble tile for the floor, a tumbled marble subway tile for the shower walls, and a linear blue glass for the backside of the niches (all from Floor & Decor).
Originally Adam and I had planned …
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Choosing interior paint colors
I don’t think anyone here would disagree with me if I said choosing paint colors is hard. There are just so many options, and they usually look very different on the wall than they do on a little paint chip. Saying you're “just going to paint it a neutral color” doesn’t make things any easier either...even though it may sound like giving up. Neutrals are hard to choose because their undertones are all over the place and they change so much from house to house, room to room, and even depending on …
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Texture and Primer
For a long time I was doing really great at keeping up with blogging about progress on the house, but I’ve since fallen a bit behind. I’m going to do my best to catch up though, and today we have a thrilling post about texture and primer (which actually happened about two months ago).
So the last time I updated y’all on the inside of the house it had just been drywalled.
The next step was texture. I know that texture is very different based on where you live, and around here walls …
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Boys Bathroom Tile
*Thank you to Floor & Decor for sponsoring this post.
Alright, so it’s time to start diving into all the finish selections for the inside of the house. Up until now we have concentrated on exterior stuff, but the exterior is almost finished and so is the builder... which means that Adam and I have a whoooole lot of work to do in a relatively short amount of time. (We’re only having the builder build the “shell” of the home and are doing most the interior work ourselves). We have a lot to …
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Exterior Limestone
Okaaay....that was awkward. Totally did not mean to take nearly a month-long blogging break. I assure you I got lots of important things done and didn’t just sit around binging on New Girl and Fuller House and going to bed at a completely reasonable time each night. (That’s sarcasm, I did and it was awesome.)
So, where were we? I believe I owe y’all a long overdue post about the exterior rock on our house.
Before we talk about the rock though, lets talk about these …
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Drywall Changes Everything
If you’ve ever built a home, you know how big of a deal drywall is. It takes your home from feeling like a cold, empty skeleton to something you may actually be able to live in (and decorate!) one day. Last time I wrote about the house we had just filled our skeleton with spray foam insulation, and it looked like this...
And then a crew of miracle workers showed up and changed everything. There were about ten men and they had the whole house drywalled, taped and floated in about two …
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Spray Foam Insulation
I’ve come to learn that people in the construction industry have very strong opinions about insulation. There are basically two categories, people that love spray foam insulation and people that hate it. Adam is firmly in category A, while our builder is firmly in category B. It seems that builders either exclusively use it or won’t touch the stuff.
Reasons people hate spray foam -
It has been known to have issues with rot and mold
Price (it’s about twice the cost of regular batt …
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Choosing a Rock (is making me crazy)
There are so many decisions you have to make when building a house. Lots of them are small, quick decisions...and some of them are big 'ol monster decisions.
Choosing rock is a big 'ol monster decision. Rock is a big investment, and you can't change it. I feel like exterior paint was a big decision, but the fact it is, it's just paint. If I had decided to paint my house purple and a year later I was like "wow, that purple paint is really obnoxious", then you just paint it again. Rock though, …
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Beams, beams, and more beams
I've always loved beams. Big, chunky, rustic beams ... the more the better. So when I started thinking about what I wanted in our new house, a boatload of beams were pretty high on the list.
Farmhouse Kitchen by Austin Home Builders Dalgleish Construction Company
Farmhouse Entry by Washington Architects & Building Designers Donald Lococo Architects
Rustic Porch by Waynesville Building Supplies Appalachian Antique Hardwoods
Rustic Porch by Comfort Architects & …
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A Shoji White Farmhouse
I think my favorite week of the whole year is the week between Christmas and New Years. I love Christmas, but it's nice to have all the chaos behind you and a fresh new year in front of you. Plus, it's the only week of the year where it's not only okay to be lazy, it's actually encouraged. I'm happy to report that I've slept in past 8 am every day since Christmas. I feel like a new person.
Anyway, enough chit chat...let's get to the good stuff. Check this out...
The house is …
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New house update – plumbing, HVAC, electrical, and fireplace
It's been over a month since I've blogged about the new house and you're probably wondering what the heck is going on. Honestly, not much... it's kinda slow going these days. Well, I say that..but since the last update we have had plumbing, HVAC, electrical, and the fireplace installed. Which is actually a lot, it's just not the most fun stuff to share pictures of or blog about.
Not that I'm going to let that stop me or anything.
So the first thing to go in (nearly a month ago) was the …
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Darin and Jody’s House – it’s our house, but different
This summer when I started blogging about building our house, I mentioned that some good friends of ours are building the exact same one. In case you just went "WHHHHAT?", here is the paragraph about it from that post...
"We have some very good friends, Darin and Jody, that bought land shortly before we did. One day the four of us were sitting around talking about our future homes (probably sometime around last Thanksgiving) we realized something…we wanted basically the exact same thing, we …
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Picking an exterior paint color
Who here loves paint? Do you love staring at all the different colors selections at you local paint store? Buying a gazillion samples? Agonizing over making a selection while your husband rolls his eyes and tells you that they all look the same? Do you love talking - in detail - about extremely subtle differences in various shades of white paint?
Me too. So let's find an exterior paint color for the new house, shall we?
First, a disclaimer. The sun hasn't come out in what feels like …
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