Change is in the Air

So this post will have no pictures, mainly because we have not accomplished much new on the home front other than replacing our back door and our back door had to be replaced because the old one was smashed in by the burglars who hit our house Monday!

It was such a surreal experience to be the victim of a burglary...and very unsettling.  I am still trying to cope, trying to relax and trying to feel safe alone in my home again.  I am hopeful this will come with time and a few new safety measures that we are taking with the house in the coming days/weeks.

Here is the story of our burglary:

I went home to eat lunch at about noon on Monday and left at about 1:15.  At 2:30, I get a call from the alarm company telling me the alarm is going off and asking if its a false alarm.  I wish I could say I immediately realized we were being broken into, but I didn't.  I did tell them we weren't home and asked them to send the police.  I left work, called Husband, told Husband not to come (glad he didn't listen), thinking the whole way to the house that I was going to have egg on my face when the cops came.  I literally was thinking that I must have left the back door cracked or the dog had somehow pushed it open.

When I got to the house Husband was already there and it was readily apparent from the kicked in door that we had in fact been the victims of burglary.  My immediate reaction after that realization was panicking over where Yazoo was located.  Thankfully, the burglars did not try to go in the back and did not let Yazoo out of the fence.  After I realized he was okay, I alternated between trying not to cry, shock and anger.  I grew up with an alarm system. Every time it ever went off at my parent's house it was a false alarm.  I just knew that the alarm going off at my house was a false alarm, and it wasn't, which was hard for me to believe.

The burglars got some electronics, but thankfully did not have time to get much else.  I am grateful to the alarm company for being on top of everything.  They came out the next day to supervise the installation of the new door, to check codes in the system, change passwords, etc.  It made me feel like I had a little more control in an out of control scenario.  I am also grateful to the Commander of our precinct.  He has taken my phone calls, sent the police to take supplement reports, followed up on tracking our stolen items, etc.  While I don't always have a lot of faith in our local police force, I do have faith that he and his team in our precinct are trying to do the best they can to help us.  I doubt we will ever get the items that were stolen back, and thats fine.  I mainly want to prevent these people from coming back or hitting someone else.  We have several theories on who might have been responsible and hope that with time the person(s) will be caught.

However, one unsettling change in becoming the victim of a crime was followed by another, more welcome change.  After three plus years with my current firm, I resigned Tuesday afternoon to accept a position with a new firm in Jackson.   I am very excited, anxious, nervous, etc.  I have been thinking it was time to make a change and praying about it, but it is hard to surrender control.  In yet another situation, I am having to surrender to God's plan and hoping that this is what is best for me and my career.  I am sad to leave what is familiar and comfortable, but truly believe that it is for the best and that I am headed to a better opportunity.

In the meantime, I am taking some time off between jobs and will be trying to work on house projects solo.  Pray for Husband's patience and my very mixed painting talents:)

I Know, I Know...

Its been a while.

My excuses are very simple.  First, football season started and we stopped working on the house.  Second, and the single biggest reason we have stopped working on the house much, is because we have started playing with our dog!  Meet Yazoo-he consumes about 110% of our free time when we are not at work or at a football game.

He has had a haircut since this picture, but all my recent photos are on my phone and I cannot find my connector cord.

He is the best dog in the whole world!  Yazoo is a 5 month old miniature schnauzer.   We didn't even know how badly we wanted a dog, until we got Yazoo.  He is very friendly, affectionate, smart,  is well-behaved about 95% of the time and has been house trained.  That was a saga!

Yazoo had a sad start in life.  A family in Jackson bought him to replace a beloved pet that died, but the parents realized about three months in that the purchase was a bad idea.  Their kids were teenagers and did not want to play with Yazoo or pay him any attention, so they gave him away to a family down the street.  Well, that family consisted of a single mom, 3 kids and 4 cats.  Yazoo did not fit in with the cats and the mom couldn't really afford to keep him, so he was out.  We came to own Yazoo when a secretary at my office jokingly put her head in the door and asked if we were in the market for a dog because her friend (the single mom) needed to get rid of a dog.  I don't know what got into me, but I told her I would call Jake.  We got more information about the dog and it turned out that his original name (we changed it) was Sam.  My parents' 16 year old dog's name is Sam.  We decided it was a sign and went to get him that very night!

Yazoo had us wrapped around his little paws from moment one.  He is just the cutest, sweetest dog!  Above is a picture of his first bath at our house the night we brought him home.

We have become those annoying people who always talk about their dog.  Literally, we show friends videos and pictures of the dog unsolicited.  We are nuts!

Now, back to the house.  Here is a picture of an almost finished Master bedroom:

We bought the new bedding at Pottery Barn, the lamps at HomeGoods, the curtains at JC Penny and the blinds at Lowes.

On a side note about the curtains from JC Penny.  I was really surprised when I started looking for curtains and JC Penny had the best deal on the blackout drapes that I was looking for. I would never have thought to look there, but I bought 4 panels for $120.  They are fantastic.   I love the way they look and when you pull our curtains closed it is like a tomb.

We still want to buy a chair for our room, I need to hang some prints above the bed and find some throw pillows for the bed, then we will be completely done with one room of our house.  Phew!

Husband also finished painting our guest bedrooms and they look so good!

Large guest room:

Small guest room:

We have set up the furniture in the large guest room, but I am going to wait to take pictures until I buy new bedding, curtains, etc. for that room.

I also have fun pictures of the upstairs hallway and the furniture in the den, but I'll save those for another post.

More updates to come now that football season is coming to a close!

A Splash of Color

Let me start by saying the most offensive thing about our house, to me, is all the dull paint colors and panelling.  I specifically detested the pink colors used throughout the master bedroom and bathroom by the previous owner.  I am not a pink girl.  Pink is my least favorite color and if I could abolish it I would (sorry if you love it).   

For the past two weeks, Husband and I have been slaving away at our bathroom/vanity area to rectify this situation.  There was also a good deal of handiwork that had to be done to tear out the vanity lighting and replace the mirror, etc. Husband really led the charge on painting, dry wall patching and general electrical wiring in these areas, so big thanks if he is reading this!

Just a reminder, this is what that vanity area looked like before we finished tearing it out:

And this is what it looked like after the mirror and lighting was torn out and everything was patched up.

Of course, I thought I took pictures of the master bathroom before we tore it up, but I didn't.

The vanity was made up of three 8-bulb light fixtures separately placed around a mirror screwed into the wall.  We decided to put a much bigger mirror into this space and to only keep one of the fixtures at the top.   Husband lifted the wire a considerable amount and cut a new hole for the top light in the drywall.  We also threw out the old mirror (good riddance).  We clipped off the wiring for the two side lights and dry walled over it.  This took a long time and a lot of dry wall.  The one thing we both wish we had realized before we did this was that there is no electrical socket in this room.  We made this realization at about 1 a.m. on a Saturday morning and by that time, neither of us even considered the idea of cutting back into the wall an option.

This is the vanity area midway through the project:

While Husband worked on drywall and began prepping for paint, I worked on spray painting the light fixture we were keeping.  I had never spray painted before and was a little nervous about how this would turn out.  I see people doing this kind of stuff on pinterest all the time, so I gave everything a good wash, taped up the bulb sockets and went for it.

TA DA!  I was fairly impressed with myself, not going to lie.

I also worked on painting closet shelves, drawers and wall covers to be installed.  That was exhausting work and my back may never be the same again.  Side Note:  Thanks to the TV in our studio, I did get to watch most of Beverly Hills Cop for the first time.

We had to put an old sheet up while Husband sanded, patched and drilled into the dry wall.

More proof Husband is undertaking physical labor per request.

And here are the after pictures for the Vanity area, before we loaded our closets back in:

We painted the vanity/closet area Parakeet from Sherwin Williams HGTV collection.   I love it!  I also think it compliments the blue really well in the master bedroom/bathroom.  I am seriously considering painting our den this color, so speak now or forever hold your peace if you think its too bold for a casual living area.  The only thing left to do in this room is paint the closet doors and we are doing all the doors in the house, at the end of the painting, at one time.

I wish I had before pictures, and pictures from while we were in progress of the bathroom, but the space was so small and cramped with all the equipment, that I really couldn't fit in there.  Husband pretty much lived in here for about a week. Here are pics of the completed bathroom:

Sorry for the information dump!  Now that Internet is up and working, I am going to post as frequently as I can so that I don't forget things that we did.  I feel like there was so much more to capture in the work of the past two weeks and that we should have more pictures!   

Home Ownership Week One

Sorry for the delay in posts!  We aren't getting our cable and Internet hooked up until August 15th so I am posting from work during my lunch break!

The first week of home ownership has definitely had its ups and downs.  Husband and I started our first weekend of home renovation on Friday night at where else:

The shopping trip was daunting, from start to finish.  I had no idea how many supplies we had to buy and things we had to consider in this first round of painting.  We were also fairly stressed because we were trying to get as much painting down above the old carpet that was in our house prior to the installation of new carpet on Monday (which is a whole other story). I will also say that we went to a local location of the Home Depot and were less than thrilled with the customer service provided.  I think for future excursions we will either be going to Lowes or making the trek to Madison.

Once at Home Depot, I had my first mini panic attack which was caused by this:

I had gone into this weekend thinking I knew exactly what type of paint I wanted to use and what colors, but then I realized everything looked so very different up close and personal.  Husband and I both knew we wanted to use really good paint and after a little research we both concluded that it would be best to use Sherwin Williams.  Which, as you will see, I am so glad we did!  It is definitely a little more expensive than a Glidden or a Mystique, but the result is transformative. 

We left Home Depot with plenty of paint supplies, but no paint, and headed to Sherwin Williams.  I again was faced with a wall of color and after my second mini panic attack of the night decided to take a color wheel home before actually purchasing paint.   

So we began prepping the room.  Again, I had no idea how much prep work went into painting a room and you might not either.  Because we had a fairly dusty, unclean space to start with we had to take down all of the curtains (aka collectors of dust) and begin washing walls and baseboards.  This was by far my least favorite task.

Our new drop cloths

Then after the walls were washed we had to putty the 9,000,000 holes the previous owners put in the walls and sand them.  Then, in case washing the walls and baseboards wasn't tedious enough the first time, we had to do it again before we painted to get sanding dust cleaned off.

Below is some of my handiwork:

Unintentional photo of my mother-in-law helping me wash out closets and test paint on the wall.  Thanks Ms. Katie!  We are both very lucky that both sets of parents came down Saturday to help us.  From picking up lunch to painting ceilings to delivering boxes that had been sitting in their homes for two years, it was a huge help!  Side Note:  the entry way into our vanity/closet area used to have a swinging western style door that Husband took down.  I really wish I had a good before picture because the thing was ugly

Large guest room before we started prepping:

After prepping:

Small guest room a.k.a. the staging room

Finally it came time to paint.  I pretty easily decided to paint the Master bedroom, bath and large guest room the same color, but the small guest room, vanity/closet and hallway/entryway were a different story.  My mom basically had to step in and calm me down.  I was so afraid I was going to hate everything and then we would have wasted a ton of money on my painting whims.

Below is a sample of my color schizophrenia pre-mother intervention (I'll tell you which one I picked later):

 We spent, LITERALLY, every second of this weekend at the house working from sun up until sun down trying to get as much painting done before Monday.  Husband spent hours painting trim and ceiling.  Monday dawned and the carpet guy met us at the house.  First words out of his mouth were that the trim had been painted for nothing because the shoe molding around the bottom had to come out to put the new carpet in.  I thought husband was going to be sick and I wasn't very happy either.  Oh well, you live and you learn.  We will be sanding and repainting trim this weekend.

However, it was totally worth it because we both love the new carpet!  It makes the house feel so much more modern and updated.  We are also really glad that we paid someone to install it and did not even consider trying to do it ourselves.  They had it done in a little under one day!

TA DA!!!

Added bonus, the stairs underneath the original carpet looked great and are a very pretty oak/pine combination.  So we are going to get them sanded and stained eventually (Husband and are pretty sure we would mess stain up so I think we are going to hire somebody-we may change our mind).  For now, we have had all the nails pulled out and are going to just kinda live with them.

Before:

After:

And finally, the room we made the most progress on this weekend, the Master:

Ignore the bedding-I am getting something new in October and I plan on moving this comforter into the small guest room.  We painted this room Hazel from the Urban Organic palette in the Sherwin Williams HGTV line of paints.  I love it!  The plan is to paint the master bath and large guest room this same color.  We are also going to put blinds up and eventually replace the lamps, hang curtains, etc.  I also have some prints that I found on Etsy that I am ordering.  They are a bright, sunny yellow in white frames!  

I'll put more picture of different angles of this room up once I have the room finished.

For now, I am going to be spending some time continuing to unpack:

Fighting a nest of wasps, potentially shooting some squirrels that are clawing at our siding and working on my washing machines spin cycle.  Oh, and playing with one of these shades of green this weekend in my closet/vanity room!

As husband said to me the first full night we lived in our house-we have moved into an endless to-do list!  I'll try to keep the blog updated, but it may be a little irregular until we get Internet at the house full time!  Hope you like what we have done so far!