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)) 

Long summer nights...even longer blog posts.

I can only thank my lucky stars that we are only months away from being in the new house! Thankfully my neighbors quickly got rid of the extremely small cage of roosters and chickens they had stashed in their back yard... but this was only after a few 5:30 am roosterings to wake us up. I can now say I hate living downtown. It is just not for me.

I know I am complaining but with this heat and putting in some good hours at work I am officially exhausted. To my family and friends who are reading this: No, there is not a baby on the way. I am just tired... but I cant say that it hasn't crossed my mind that if I was preggers I would totally get out of moving haha :) Nope just a lack of baths and not being able to drop the A/C to just above freezing my sleep has been all out of whack!

Things are getting done on the homefront though! They finished our drywall! The house is so silent now! No outside noise, no road noise, nothing! Its wonderful. I think that I will start to bring a blow up mattress and just sleep in here.... sure there isn't any a/c but at least I wont have to worry about fire trucks and roosters :) 

Also helping to eliminate any noise would be our new fence! 

This is what our backyard used to look like.... (yes we took Remmington James out to the house, but I am hoping that he wont remember... but he did take his first poop there) 

This is as the back part was going up, at that point we were still missing the last section of the fence.

Just to give you an idea of big this fence really is I am 5'3 (awkward photo only because I felt like I was in a police line up when I looked up) This fence is huge! Its all being custom built since we wanted it to be 8 feet tall. Its a beautiful cyprus, board on board construction! OOOHHHHH!!!! Privacy! I cant wait!!!! We also cant see the houses or our own house from the post office anymore because of this glorious fence. I am so happy! Yes, making it taller cost us a few more pennies (ha) but its going to be worth it! 

Thanks Gabriel! 

They also sprayed all the texture on the walls! The whole house was blue inside from the protective plastic over the windows and doors... yes, I know the quality of my photo is bad but its on average 96 degrees at 6:00pm here in Florida and this house was SWELTERING! 

We started on round 2 of paint samples, sadly we will not be going with a blue color or any color that might resemble blue. Our neighbor who lives in a little shack house has blue paint, I will not match my neighbors. We also eliminated the top color since that is too close to one of our other neighbors. Grey is going to be our jam! I know, I love that color but you can offset grey with almost any color! Green plants will look nice with it and maybe some blue for the water feature near the front door! See! Its not going to be totally monotoned! 

We also received our first and second orders from Overstock.com! I am usually not a fan of buying things online when I havent been able to even see them.... but they have a great return policy! 

My first order was a couple of these guys! They are for the master bathroom! They are so sparkly and so... me! Ha on a serious note I did read the reviews before hand and knew I needed to put each and every strand of crystals on this fixture but I guess I just wasn't prepared for how long it would really take. For now I just did one. Only 7 more to go! woohoo! :/ I know I will probably regret buying these the day I finally have to clean them but for now I am in love! 

Our second purchase was this light! I was going to go with something with a little more funk to it for the foyer area but The Hubs really loved how this went along nicely with the front door! The assembly on this was a cake walk compared to the last set of lights! The coloring is beautiful and we are both really happy with the way this came! 

While we are on the subject of spending money... We bought our couches! Yay! We headed up to Ashley furniture and Ikea (about an hour away, get with the times furniture stores its just too far to drive!) 

We walked in and headed straight to our couch we showed everyone previously sat down and relaxed.... then we decided to just take another look around. Confession: I secretly hate furniture sales people! If they would just say hello and then back off it wouldn't be such a big deal! This woman that we worked with this time walked up behind us as we were walking somewhere else and said "Uh I'm trying to greet you!" Never in all my years of customer service have I ever given or gotten a greeting like that. At that point I decided to let The Hubs handle the talking. ((shaking my head)) after we got her out of our hair (if you walk really fast they will think you aren't there to spend money and will leave you alone) we found another set of couches we really liked! 

Yay! look at the nail head accents! Thankfully it passed all tests including the Tony test! (The Tony test is when my Brother-in-law comes over to the house can he lay down comfortably? Yes, my 6'11 brother can lay down in comfort! side note I'm not sure hes that tall but hes pretty damn tall) So The Hubs found the angry sales lady and told her we wanted the couches. She started the paperwork for us and then ran back over to show us the "features" by this time we had spent a good 20 min looking over everything on the couch, frame, cushions, zippers, you name it we looked it over so we knew the "features" maybe she did this because she was feeling bad that she had written us off so soon, who knows but we all just nodded while I tuned her out and looked on at other displays. We payed, took our paperwork, and left. We may or may not have picked up the pace of our walking on the way out haha just incase she wanted to show us more "features"! 

We then headed to Ikea, where we picked up our sink and base for one of the guest bathrooms. The clean lines and big drawers were a huge plus for this set since we dont have a linen closet in that bathroom. 

Here are the boys going into man mode to haul our stash to the register! The box that my husband is carrying is about 5 feet long we originally had this laying sideways on the cart but we started to get some funny looks from other customers who were about to have their ankles pulled out from under them as we passed. haha! They look silly only because 1. We didn't spend hours in Ikea and 2. We chugged Red Bulls before we even went inside! All in all it was a great day of shopping! I always have a blast with these two though and I am lucky enough to get to work with both of them everyday! 

Okay I'm sure I have made your eyes hurt by now from all the reading you have done so I will leave today posting :) More pictures to come later!