Dining Room Finish

 If you look back at the earlier posts from 2012; you'll see just how much damage we had to do to the dining room. More work was done on that room than any other prior to moving in.

And that work was being done right up to the moment we moved in. In fact, the paint was still wet when we started filling it full of stuff. 

The walls were painted with a primer just an hour before showing up with our stuff. And that's pretty much how it stayed for the last 9 years. Until now. 

We've decided on a "design language" we're going to use throughout the downstairs. Some of this draws on the existing woodwork design. Other elements (like the ceiling faux tin) are ideas we've tried elsewhere in the house already. But this room is the first to get it all at once. 


Brigitte contemplating layout.

Putting up the faux tin doesn't take too long. But caulking in all the seams is a bit of a chore. Brigitte handled most of the painting. We decided to stick with white, but this time actual paint instead of just Kills primer. 

Brigitte was the wood cleaning rock star on this project. Years of past painting mistakes had to be scrubbed of almost every piece of trim. 

As Brigitte was out of town, I had to install the new ceiling trim on my own. It was a little tricky to do working by myself. But it turned out well. 

After 9 years, this room finally looks the way we envisioned it the first time we viewed the house. 

The next step is going to be to apply this same style of finish to the living room. Then the foyer. But first, we're going to take a short rest. 

Where we've been. What we've been doing. And why we're back.

Back in 2014 we took a break from the blog. 

Some big things happened in 2014. For one thing, we got married!

Getting married on a beautiful spring day in May!

And as you might expect, we DIYed nearly everything, from wedding invitation design to guest gifts (homegrown tomato plants). We even made our own wedding cake and invited all our guests to bring a dish to pass for a big potluck instead of catering. It was a super fun day...but a lot to prepare for! Not to mention that shortly before the wedding, Justin had a medical emergency that landed him in the hospital. And then a few months after our wedding, Justin had spinal fusion surgery. This entailed a long recovery process, during which we had to put all remaining projects on the back burner. It took a little over a year and a half for Justin's back to finally get to the point where he could be as active as he wanted to be--and resume projects. 

And we had projects galore!

Fixing the concrete in the small section of the garage, and building a mini-shop...

Before: what a mess!

Pouring new concrete.

Ah, much better!

Dividing up the basement to build a woodshop...

Before: what a mess! (am I sensing a theme?)

Coating the walls

Prepping the floor

Getting a layer of primer on everything

Ta-da! It's a woodshop!

Woodshop organization.

And then finishing one room into an office...

Before the walls were finished.

Drywall and doors added...

Justin's work-from-home setup before finishing the room

Justin's work-from-home setup AFTER finishing the room

Not to mention fixing the hideous basement steps...

And you can't even see the ugly half-ripped out ceiling here...

Improved basement steps

And some other eyesores...

This had been shelving, but outside, it's open underneath and gets drafty. We filled it in with insulation, and it sat like this for years. 

Finally, the window seat gets the finish it deserves!

OK...a lot of other eyesores...

Goodbye, ugly plastic shower surround...

Ah, much better! Justin will probably need to do a whole post about what a pain this was, though. 

But this isn't all that we've been doing. 

We've had some fun, too--we've done some traveling, kayaking, and camping. 

At Garden of the Gods in southern Illinois. We traveled to see the big solar eclipse of 2017!

At the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. in 2017.

At Caracol, amazing Mayan ruins in Belize in Feb. 2020 (we JUST made it back home before pandemic lockdowns started)

Kayaking on the Wisconsin River.

And we both got SCUBA certified in 2019! 

SCUBA training at a local pool.

Brigitte diving with a turtle in Belize!

And last but definitely not least, we got a dog (a very sweet chocolate lab named Winkie). 

Isn't she cute?

But this summer, since it's become apparent that we're not really going anywhere any time soon (Delta variant and all that), we've decided to make a big push to finish a lot of the projects left hanging over the years. That is really our reason for revisiting this blog again. So much of what we started 9 years ago is starting to FINALLY reach its conclusion. While this journey is far from over, we'd like to document the final leg. 

So, hold on to your hats! Things are about to get crazy again. 

First Fruits (and Leaves and Roots): the Garden in June

First strawberry of the season!

As I was weeding, I spotted it: the first ripe strawberry of the season. I picked it, then had a brief internal argument with myself about whether I should just eat it on the spot or share it with Justin and Junie. 

Generosity won out. I ran inside to show what I had found, then sliced it in thirds so we could all enjoy that first delicious taste of summer. 

And now, the strawberries are ripening at a fast pace, much to everyone's delight. They're big, juicy, and beautiful! It amazes me that a bed that started out the season looking like this:

The strawberry bed in May

Has blossomed into this:

The strawberry bed in June

And if that amount of growth amazes you, take a look at my greens bed before I planted anything:

The greens bed in early spring

And compare it to this green, leafy goodness:

The greens bed in June

We've been enjoying plenty of fresh salads as I thin the lettuce. We've also pulled up a rainbow of beautiful radishes. And just last night I made a stir fry with bok choi and garlic scapes. So much to be excited about in the garden this time of year!

 

bok choi and garlic scapes!

Staying warm when it's colder than the South Pole

Yikes!

When the forecasted HIGH for the day is -11 and your thermometer reads -20 at 8 AM, you know it's gonna be a cold day. How cold? Colder than the South Pole, it turns out (a balmy -11). Cold winters are nothing new to the Midwest, but this is quite the extreme! To prepare for this arctic blast, we worked on buttoning up the house this weekend as best we could. 

When in doubt, put on more hats. 

I finished shrinkwrapping all our windows (a project I started in November) and stuffed insulation under our drafty dining room window seat. 

Nice shelving space, but it's uninsulated and juts out into open air, so it's pretty drafty!

Justin sealed up the frames of our outside doors and installed door sweeps; this made a big difference almost immediately! I knew those doors were drafty, but didn't realize how much. 

We then made major headway on insulating the attic (Look how far we've come!). Last spring, we installed insulation baffles and fiberglass batts. We had picked up foil-faced foam a while back and we wanted to wait to finish replacing the attic floor before we finished the walls. But we knew these would make a big difference in keeping the house warm, so Justin worked hard to get them all hung before the cold settled in.

Starting to install foil-faced foam 

Foam installation nearly complete. Welcome to our spaceship! 

With the foam in place, our unheated attic was comfortably warm yesterday. As was the rest of our house. I was even able to turn the thermostat down and have it stay toasty--so our efforts were a success!

Another garden bed bites the dust (so our backporch doesn't)

The previous owners built a small, raised garden bed right alongside our three-season porch. There are two problems with this. First, the soil line is above the poured concrete slab, right alongside the untreated wood of the porch, without any barrier, which has caused the wood to rot. Second, the porch is not structurally sound, and even without the rot issues, it would still be a bit of a precarious structure. 

Justin removed and leveled the garden bed, and then added pressure-treated lumber to reinforce the porch for the time being. We plan to redo the porch at some point, but we would like it to stay standing until we decide to take it down! 

I transplanted some of the herbs (chives, oregano) and perennials (echinacea)

We gave all these landscape bricks to a neighbor.

Justin pries off some of the old wood planks to see what's underneath.

And underneath, a rag-tag pile of scraps holding the porch up!

This small pile of wood was all that was holding up a section of the porch!

Progress!

I forgot to mention that we also rerouted our dryer vent a while back. It had been venting directly underneath the porch, which not only meant there was a ridiculous amount of lint under our porch, but also that the windows would become covered with condensation any time we used the dryer. In winter, of course, this condensation would freeze. Not so good. But now the dryer actually vents outside the house like it's supposed to!

The new, improved dryer vent (it's the little things in life...)