April Bits

 The pieces of our April puzzle. 

{A few days early, but nothing beats the tulips on Michigan Avenue!}

{Moulin Rouge. My mom and I have had tickets for this show for over two years. Covid kept changing our plans, but we finally saw it. And now I’m in love. It was AMAZING!}

{Mason made the family pancakes with a recipe that no-doubt came from Tik Tok. Raspberries and an insane amount of powdered sugar garnish for the win!}

{Cam spent the day hanging with her old built-in best friend and former next door neighbor. Picking up right where they left off!}

{A lounge-in-the-laundry-basket kind of Sunday.}

{Ruh-Roh. Sometimes Molly doesn’t love it when we leave her home alone. She lets us know that by eating  our shoes.}

{Nice-ish weather means that all family members attend the baseball game. Dogs included.}

{Camryn’s school sponsored a Color Run for anyone who wanted to participate, and because free is about the right price for this activity, she did it. And then said she didn’t need to do that again!}

{Snow Cone day at school. And by the looks of the clothes, there may have also been actual snow.}

{This guy went back to work. Kind of.}

The Basement Hallway

With the way our house is laid out, we technically have two basements: one that’s kind of above ground and one that’s definitely below grade, which makes things confusing. But the “basement basement” —which really does nothing to make things less confusing— is for storage and laundry and is nowhere anyone should want to be. 

But the regular basement, that’s coming along quite nicely. In the hallway alongside Jacob’s bedroom, and across from the basement basement door there once was a closet presumably to be used for board games and other gotta-have-it-but-never-use-it crap.  We didn’t need a spot for that stuff, we needed a place for shoes, jackets, and backpacks, so we ripped out the closet and transformed it into a mudroom-type area with bench seating, cubbies for shoes, and hooks for coats. There isn’t a proper mudroom in this house, so making a resting place for all of the daily clutter was key. And this works out just perfectly! 

Way to go, Jacob!

Jacob finished up with his track season on Tuesday, and to say that he did an amazing job is quite the understatement! This is a new sport to him, and he has never been known as a runner, but, WOW, he can run! He qualified for 5 events in our school district’s conference meet: long jump, triple jump, 100 hurdles, 4x200 relay, and 4x400 relay. Only two students per gender per grade per event are invited to the conference meet, so to even make it that far is quite an accomplishment. Athletes could only compete in four races, so Jacob dumped hurdles to focus on the others. He didn’t medal in the jumps, but that he even can get his feet to hop, skip, and jump in the right order amazes me so he deserves a medal for that! His relay teams were missing their fastest runner and placed 4th in the 4x200, but took the gold in the 4x400. Jacob killed his personal best on that run and to snag first place in the last race of the meet had that boy beaming! And of the seven middle schools in our school district, the boys at Jacob’s school came in third place with overall points. A great finish to a very cold—then hot—season. Couldn’t be more proud of Jacob’s efforts and pushing himself out of his comfort zone to try something new without his regular crew of friends. 

Oh, he was also named Athlete of the Month at his middle school this month. Woot! Woot!  {Getting ready to hand off the baton in the 4x200}

{Zipping by in the first leg of the 4x400 under the lights. Lots of hours after it all began.}

{The 7th grade boys who medaled in the conference meet.}

Jacob’s Room

With the exception of Jacob, everyone has a bedroom on the upstairs floor of our home. But I think it is a teenager’s right of passage to snag a basement bedroom as the first step to independence, so this bedroom was perfect for him! Basement bedrooms can be ugly. Soffit and odd wall ledges are necessary to cover up the guts of the house, and this room was exactly that: ugly. I wanted to create a space for Jacob that felt cozy—but not like a basement—and could grow up with him for the last handful of years he will be home with us. 

The before: Ugh. It was a nondescript room with icky old carpet.

The after: Ahhh. New paint. New carpet. A built-in bookcase. And decor that speaks directly to our sporty guy. I hope he loves this room as much as I do! 

While we couldn’t get rid of the soffit, we were able to transform it into more of a cozy sleeping nook filled with sports paraphernalia. And a dog. 

The built-in that Caleb designed and constructed hides some of the wall ledge that we were battling, and it gives Jacob the perfect way to display some of his favorite things. It’s really amazing. 

I think this room is one mini-fridge away from being the perfect studio apartment. Sorry not sorry that there is no room for a fridge. 

Bathroom 3

The basement bathroom is coined as “Jacob’s Bathroom” because it is directly outside of his bedroom in the basement. But it’s amazing and everyone should use it! 

It started out as a decent-sized room with an unnecessarily small shower. So we gutted that space and put in a wall-to-wall shower. This bathroom was the first room that we tore into, but we quickly halted progress as we trudged through the rest of our bathroom renovations first. I’m glad we did, because we had a few hiccups along the way that were much easier to fix with open walls! 

{The before. Blah. It was obvious that the previous owners painted over some thickly painted stripes on the walls, which left some raised patterns that needed to be figured out. And that shower. Makes our master shower look big!}

And… the after!

{A full wall shower with glass doors and a patterned tile was just what this bathroom needed! We textured the walls to cover up whatever had been painted over to give it a fresh feel.}

{A charcoal colored hexagonal tile floor and black accents give this room a masculine feel for our teenage guy, but the accessories on the shelves remind him that he needs to share!}

This bathroom is on point, and I love how it turned out. Well worth the wait! 

Bathroom 2

Because of our home’s layout, we don’t have a bathroom on our main floor, so this upstairs hall bathroom is what we expected to be our go-to bathroom when guests come over. Before we got our hands on it, the bathroom had two doors: one to exit to the hallway, and the other to our bedroom. But now that we have our own bathroom, we had no need for a doorway to this bathroom from our room, so we closed it up which gave us a bit more wall space in both of the rooms. And, fun fact: what we thought was a white bathtub is actually a blue bathtub that the previous owners painted white. We found that out as we were re-tiling the floor. We would eventually like to redo the bathtub surround, which is a project for another day but a white shower curtain covers up the oldness quite nicely for now. 

{The before. A standard single-sink bathroom. This picture was taken from the then-doorway to our bedroom.}

And the after:

{Caleb plumbed out a second sink so that both Mason and Camryn could be in the bathroom together without attacking one another. We know our kids and their needs. Where the linen cabinet is was where the door used to be. And we settled on this vanity, which is ok. We currently live in a world where you buy what is available, and it’s not necessarily what you want. New flooring, new mirrors, new light fixtures, and we have a functioning bathroom, folks. Except that we are pretty sure the the shower might be leaking through the ceiling in Jacob’s bathroom, so we fixed it by not letting anyone use that shower.}

And not to be forgotten: the toilet that lived in our hallway for several days during the reno. These are the things memories are made of!

Fixing up fine.

Because it seems to be impossible for Caleb and me to not put our mark on the homes we live in, we dove in head first to renovating our new—but old—family home that we bought in October. 

It’s a cute 1500-ish square foot tri-level house that was built in the 1970s. It’s right down the street from the boys’ school, and Cam has gotten district permission to stay at her current school through fifth grade, which is less than a five minute drive away. The neighborhood is full of huge trees that canopy over the streets in the summer and provide tons of shade and climbing opportunities for the kiddos in our backyard. After leaving a house that was triple this size, I can say that I have zero regrets living in a “tiny” house. It takes no time at all to clean, and the kids each have their own bedroom with plenty of floor space to stretch out. We are still close to our previous neighborhood, and the boys have no problem biking to see their crew of friends. We have settled in nicely, and this house is a great place for us in this moment. 

It would have been perfectly fine for us to live in this house without making changes, but that’s not us so we quickly got to work in every room. Making it ours has been a full-time job, nothing we didn’t know going in to it. And, I will say it again—after saying it before in different homes—that was fun, but I don’t think I need to do that again. If you know us, you know this is a chronic lie. Being the force behind the renovation is exhausting, and time consuming, and not really all that fun after the excitement wears off. And I’m sure our kids will remember their youth as a string of times that their parents were busy laying tiles, or knocking out walls, or building something to put somewhere. But to be able to take credit for the design and execution of everything in your home is probably what drives us to do it. Or maybe we are just too cheap to hire things out. Either way, we are on the tail end of the interior work—just in time for the weather to warm up so we can go outside to tackle outside things. 

We had several projects rolled out simultaneously, but the first project we completed was our master bathroom. There is no before picture of this room, because it was an 8x5’ walk-in closet. But because we also had another closet in the room, we decided an en suite bathroom would be a necessary upgrade. Here is our new bathroom…

Having only 40 square feet to work with is complicated, especially when you are looking to make a full bathroom. We knew we could only have a single vanity, so we optimized storage by finding a vanity with as many drawers as we could. After living with it for several months, I have no complaints. Maybe that will change when Caleb goes back to work full time and we are fighting for sink space. There is an octagonal-shaped window in the room, which is great for letting light in but not so great for shower design. The placement of the window was such that a larger shower would cut the window in half, so we had no choice but to go with a much smaller shower stall. It is what I would guess to be the size of a phone booth, and isn’t optimal for leg shaving.  But it opens from the corner, which saves a ton of space and the design works with our taste, so good enough! We kept the hardwood floors, because we love hardwood floors and the floor to ceiling tiles make the room feel much taller. 

To snag some more storage, we went with a medicine cabinet mirror. Not my favorite, but unless you know it’s a medicine cabinet, you don’t know it’s a medicine cabinet. Shelves provide some much needed additional space for toiletries—and clearly fake plants. 

We had one snag with this project: not all of the floor has house below it, so the cold winter temperatures caused our shower pipes to freeze. We are lucky that happened before we had closed up the ceiling below it, and now we have a permanent heating duct running directly to those pipes to keep things toasty in the winter. To save 5k in labor, (yes, that much. We had two estimates) Caleb and his dad plumbed everything themselves. We intentionally left the pipes exposed for longer than necessary to be certain nothing leaked. Plumbing is not a trade Caleb has much confidence in. But so far so good!