Walls.

Good Morning! Please dont hate me for lack of blogging we have had so much going on around here! There have been some great changes since I last wrote... one of which would be our wall! Yes, I know you have seen all the walls in the house but this fancy one is for our outside! 

After an intense day of trenching down through years of roots, they poured the cement deep down in the ground and hauled in all the block needed. 

It honestly was put together very quickly! 

Ah, here she is.

I want it to be known that this is My Husband's Wall. I like it now that its here but it was not something on the top of my "dream house" list. Ha! 

We also got to celebrate our garage door being installed! 

Cuuute!

I could bore you with a ton of pictures going up and down but I wont :) this time at least! I've never heard such a quiet garage door before in my life! This thing is amazing! On the button to open it it tells you the time and temp! These things are so fancy these days haha! 

Its time for us to get ready for our driveway! 

We picked out some really lovely pavers called Deep Sea they have hints of blue and grays but are a beautiful charcoal color! We are still going back and forth on if we should do some stone accents around the front door or to keep it like it is now. Thoughts? 

Our beautiful base boards, crown moulding, and door trim are all installed through out the house! 

The inside has all been painted as well! How exciting! 

Everyday that we go and visit the house I have to take a look at my beautiful bathroom, I just cant help but be super excited about it each and every time! The crown in here is stunning as well! 

We are getting ready for the tile to go in now, we had a meeting with our tile guy yesterday and we were even there when our tile was delivered! I'll update a little bit later tonight with those photos and some of the driveway! 

Oh yea... this baby... going in my master bath! 

I wish I could have these all over the house but sadly this is not a home that has a maid to clean every shiny thing.  :( 

I also have to still pick out some more light fixtures for the rest of the house and watching The Great Gatsby before doing this is not a good idea. Side note: I will be collecting charms and pieces of old or broken chandeliers so I can make a whole dress out of them. I've got quite a few already but probably only enough to cover my lady bits. 

I also picked out and priced a dining room table ((from Pottery Barn)) well... lets just say that I am now allowed to get a table from the local Architectural Salvage because they are more than HALF their price!  

Dear Pottery Barn, I love you but I am as the kids say these days 'Ballin' on a Budget' and I'm going to need you to bring your prices down a few thousand. 

This is how my conversation with The Hubs went about how I want our house to look:

Me: So I want a mixture of new and old!

Him: Right.

Me: So we can pick a few things up from the Salvage and work them into our decor.

Him: Yea, so you want to buy new things that just look old?

Me: No, I want new things and old things. Mixed. 

Him:<makes a scrunchie face> New shit that looks old. Got it. 

*facepalm*

You should have this conversation with your husband or wife before you walk into an Ethan Allen store because thats just overpriced new old looking stuff and thats the prices they will think of when you tell them this. Haha.

I'll try to post more later with some updated pictures of our driveway and any tile work thats done! 

Tile Time!

So we got the call earlier this week that we needed to finalize all of our tile choices in the house... Uh welcome to Panic Town USA population: 1!

So as I was focusing on light fixtures, vanities, and outside paint colors I completely forgot that we needed to finalize our tile choices

First stop is the flooring in the main house:

This is a Color Body porcelain tile. We would have loved to have real wood floors but that's just not possible when you own 3 huge huskies! So tile it is! This is one of the best ones out on the market right now, it features 3-D printing technology along with some of the most realistic grain waves we have felt from any brand! It's a nice looking tile for sure and will defiantly be able to withstand the moments when our go-fast dogs decide to go crazy in the house. :) This is not where I was panicing that would be saved for the bathrooms.... 

This is an actual photo of the main floor tile and the grout, the line should be super thin so that it has more of a real wood floor look! I am so excited!

Master bathroom:

 With the building codes being well... not what I wanted ha I decided to go in more of a "Zen" spa feeling in the bathroom... For the floors we will be switching to more of a darker look we originally thought of doing slate in there but with the prices being a leeetle out of our budget we started to look at other options.

These 3 big tiles here were some of our choices, we ended up going with the one in the middle. This tile we found at Lowes for a great price! It has the slightest shimmer to it almost as if someone sprinkled glitter on the floors (Yes, I am VERY excited about this!) The lightest one of the group is our shower wall tile. This one we found at Alpha Tile & Stone near our work, this one was really cool because it has some lighter specks in it! For the shower floor we decided to go with a river rock:

I have seen a few photos of showers with this in it and there was just something that I kept coming back to. I know that it probably wont always feel the best on my feet but honestly we have a bench in there so it doesn't really matter :) In the photo above you can also see the flooring for the 2 guest bathrooms. Its a chalk white tile and its stunning as well! That green speck of sample tile that has been in these photos is actually one of the shower tiles! 

We have had a bit of a struggle with this one! We needed a total of 99 sqft of tile in the back guest bathroom when I originally picked out this tile I intended on doing the entire shower, but when they called to find out what was in stock they didn't have enough. This tile comes from Italy and as it turns out the factory where it is made shuts down for a month in the summer.... well it just so happens to be the month we needed to order our tile! Aye! So we headed back to Alpha and started picking other possible choices:

First I thought, why not just do it in this white.... but no thanks that bathroom would end up being this bland white room, not to mention that I would hate to have to clean this all the time. 

Then maybe blue, but if I want to do a "Mermaid" theme in that room I dont want the shower to be so... blue. I am honestly using the word "mermaid" lightly. I would like it to be implied but not in your face. If I wanted to do that I would have thrown the budget out the door and done a tile a little more like this:

Yes. I stood there and drooled for a little bit when I saw this tile. How stunning is this!? Back to reality for now and back to looking at other options... 

For a split second I thought about this guy... but then it would be like showering in a cave. That seems uncomfortable. 

I may or may not have curled up into a small ball at work for a few min while I freaked out. All my plans swam right out the window with this dern company taking some time off! 

I mean come on guys! In the end I was able to crawl back out of my pocket of sadness and pull myself back together... 

THIS is the final option for the shower! These lovely bubble stones will be located on the floor and after calling the company back we were told that they had 85 sqft of the tile which would be enough to do the shower! CRISIS ADVERTED! haha! This beautiful sea foam green tile has a ton of texture to it and unlike your normal glass tile that just has the color in on the back of it with the glass set on top this is also a through body tile, so no matter how much scrubbing I do to it it will never lose the beautiful color. On top of all of that it has been made with recycled materials! Yay! If you cant find a vendor in your area you can find this product on most eco friendly building materials sites! (well not this color... we bought all of that haha) I cant wait to see how this all looks together! 

For the other guest bathroom we decided to go with a standard subway tile 

Nothing too crazy... except to break up the white we found this lovely glass accent tile to run a band around. 

This has some lovely blacks, browns, silvers, and all sorts of other beautiful pearl-esk accents to it. It reminds me of a butterfly's wings, its very delicate looking. 

All in all we have ordered roughly 3 1/2 tons of tile. Yep. TONS! Ha. Guess our tile guy gets to have a real work out! 

This is one of the loads of tile that we actually picked up today! I was so excited they forked it over to the car! 

Here we go! You can feel the weight in the back with all this tile and I know that this just a fraction of the tile that will be in the house but its massive already! 

Since we are on the subject of bathrooms, this also happened:

The front of my tub is coming together. Yep I shed a little tear over this detail! 

Well I'll end this post for now and we are headed over to see the house today and I'll update more later... but a sneak...

Paint!

Hello all! I'll keep this one relatively short and sweet for now with a nice smattering of photos! 

Here are all 6 of our final paint colors! From all the input we had we pretty much still did our own thing :) haha sorry everyone! Doesn't our stucco look fantastic though? When I started painting the first round of 3 I kept looking at them and thinking of the 3 Little Bears... only they were all wrong. The second set of 3 was more to my liking! The row on the right contains our paint color... can you guess which one?! 

Here is the house primed and ready for paint! I was able to take my top 2 back out and paint it on top of the primer, this gave me a better idea for the final result of the color since it wasn't absorbed as much as it was on just the fresh stucco. 

We visited one morning before work and we were able to thank one of the guys painting the house! The color that we ended up going with was from a new collection from Valspar! 

A Sherwin Williams rep even came out to the house to see the color! 

So here is the beautiful paint color! Yes, its still in the early stages since the windows have no trim... but its so beautiful! The Hubs was worrying so much about me not liking it since we decided to pull the trigger so to speak. I cant love it enough! It just has this glow to it... haha okay I'll stop... but you have to admit its really a nice color! 

Insert silly Hubs picture! Found this cutie while I was taking my normal photos! Love him!! (That's just primer on the walls by the way) 

I watched him from the porch just roaming around the yard looking up into the trees... 

Surprise! He was actually looking for these vines hanging down so he could pull them! (This man has thoughts of a tree house as well)

Once he pulled most of what he could down....

Jumping really high was clearly the next option to help rid us of these vines.

But sadly, that was not his last...

So up I went. We learned this skill of being able to reach anything via Circus act because we didn't own an actual ladder for the longest time! Do you know how hard it is to change the battery of a dying smoke detector with no ladder!?? That random beeping alone is enough to make you go crazy! 

BEEP.

Needless to say I now know where the hammock is going to go. 

This was just breathtaking to look up into! 

BEEP.

Yay!!! Our front wall is going in! I had no idea what kind of roots we had under there but wow that was some back breaking stuff there! 

Today when we came out to the house the first part of the cement was poured! Scary! :) 

Oh this is going on across the street.

Uh huh, our house was too tall so he decided to build his fence up... well guess what neighbor I'm going to buy a paint gun and paint it white. This annoys me. 

On a happy note... we brought all 3 dogs for the first time! We just couldn't wait! We ran around in the yard for a little bit and then took a walk into the neighborhood! It was so peaceful and quiet! 

Okay time for me to get some sleep! I am super overworked and in need of a trip to St. Thomas... ((cough love you babe cough))