Basement and more

This spring I started a landscaping project. My mission was to give color to the inner circle of our circle drive.

Last fall on our 26th Anniversary I purchased this wee little maple tree. Maples are a favorite of Dan and I, I cannot wait to see it's colors here in a few short weeks. We had actually transplanted a young cedar tree not far from where we planted the maple, but he did not survive. we found out later that it is really difficult to transplant cedars. I had named the little cedar Ralph. RIP Ralph. You created a nice bonfire.

Dan is a hunter of many things, and spring time yields morels here in Iowa. These are a few that he picked on a break from working on the house.

CARPET!! in the basement meant we could go back to the storage unit and grab our couch, and give Jen and Grant back their O gravity outdoor recliner chairs.
Our neighbor Jeff, excuse me, former  neighbor Jeff, but still good friend, and Grant could not pass up the chance to sofa surf back to Jen and Grants from the storage facially.

Last shot of Dan's Man Cave room

My laundry room is taking shape- When I painted this room this green, Dan told me it was hideous and did not go with the house. He then told me that when guest came, the door to the mud room and laundry would remain closed. One of those decorating fights he lost.  As we started to add the white cabinets, his opinion softened. The white cabinets really look sharp against that green. Yep! Could have told you that. Actually did tell you that.
When Jake saw this green he started singing John Deere Green. I think he still does from time to time.

The Stone Shop installed our granite counter tops. I cannot say enough about the work they do. Their staff are knowledgeable and friendly, and they really did a great job.

Kitchen is starting to take some shape

Doors added to cabinets in the laundry room

We have the most awesome views of wildlife from our basement family room. In the picture below you will notice our cat looking out the window. This is his typical view, and his typical chair.

Most people who have seen our doors in person comment on the doors. They are beautiful, and something we both agreed on when we saw them. But when we started looking for trim, the only trim in pine is clear pine, without the knots. This was disappointing, but remember I am married to a wood worker, so yes, Dan has milled all of our trim by hand, stained it, finished it and installed it. There is such amazing detail to this wood.

The base

My mom brought me some whiskey bottle from Arakansa

Jake found this whiskey bottle some where on our place.

The mirror that was Dan's inspiration. This mirror, given to me by my mom was what I used to sit in front of when I was a teenager. This is where I learned how to curl my hair, and how to put on make up. 

The antique spitoon. Dan and I saw this advertised at an auction just a few miles from us. It was a huge auction and there were many bidders, but this copper piece was meant for me!! 

 more pictures of my whiskey bottles. 

 The front of our saloon bar. Love the knots. 

 up the stairs board and batten

Inside family joke

Time to catch you up

I apologize, I have had a number of people ask me to update the blog, and I have told most of you, I am so busy and both work and home I barely have time to pee. But as I went through my old blogs, I did not realize how long it had actually been and ALL that has taken place since my last post. 

First of all, things are coming along nicely, and I am going to spend some time updating you on all the progress room by room and floor by floor

Basement

The basement is going to be a place to gather for fun. We eventually want a pool table down here, we plan to mount our largest TV down here, and basically want to create a game room for our family, and a nice place to watch a movie, or the deer, or the turkey, or the random bobcat that wanders through the back yard. Dan had at one time talked about putting the stone we are using on the outside  also on the inside. Well, cost prevented that. We were nearly 6 thousand dollars for the outer wall and the fireplace, so plan b. He decided to make a wainscoting of board and battens from pine boards. So each individual board was cut, and then he routered the battens. Once everything was up, we stained the entire wainscot.  Since this was a game room we had been talking about a bar. A place to have a few dishes and fridge and microwave. I am an avid user of Pinterest. I know some of you HATE it, but for me, it stirs my creative juices, and I love it. We planned most of Jennifer's wedding with Pinterest. Anyway, when we Jen and Grant started talking about purchasing our home, and we started looking at land, I created a new book on Pinterest called " Maybe I can dream". This book was filled with ideas about what my forever home might include. I also stumbled upon the website Hozz. This website allows you to look at millions of home and decorating ideas and save them into ideabooks

So back to the bar, it was on these websites that I fell in love with the idea of making a western saloon in my basement. I kind of mentioned it in passing a couple of times and Dan really did not seem to GRASP my vision, till I started showing him some pictures one night. I also started reminding him of several of the items/memories we have that I would love to display. One night he came home, he grabbed a mirror from the bathroom that I have had nearly all my life, and said. "So you want a saloon? I'll give you a saloon. He proceeded to tell me how he was going to do it, drew it up and we went to Menards for lumber. It took a weekend to build and stain but I love how it turned out. 

This is all the trim for the basement that has been set out to stain. Dan milled it all then we stained it, and finished it. We had to set up stations to finish it all over the house.

 

My saloon bar nearly finished.  Notice the spittoon in the right corner. I will talk about this in my next post. I promise, it won't be so long in between.

If the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy.

So Dan and I have been very busy since my last post. Mostly in our basement. We do have kitchen cabinets up, our counter top ordered, and a sink ordered.
Most of you ladies, have the reality of husbands/significant's that probably could care less about decor or aesthetics of a home.  My reality is, that my husband and I both care. Care very much, and well believe it or not, I sometimes have to fight for my voice or creative "flair" to be heard in my home. This has sometimes slowed our decision making down in the process of building this home. Fortunately, Dan actually had good creative ideas, and for the most part we have had to find those common things that we agree upon and move in that direction. Most of the time everything just falls into place. One of the things Dan and I have always agreed upon is a farm sink for the kitchen. We both have always loved the look of the farm sink. So, with the promise of a new kitchen, I mean you can't build a new house without a kitchen, we started with the farm sink we had agreed upon. So, we met with the kitchen designer, and settled on cabinets. The cabinets came in, and our builder started urging us to pick our counter top. Dan loves granite, but I would have been fine with a high resolution/ higher grade laminate or a solid surface counter top. Granite felt a bit mucky, muck to me, and although I love the look, I was not really sure if I could justify the cost. Our builder gave us the name of the guy he gets all his laminate through, and we set up a visit. We also got the recommendation of a stone and granite place. So, one day Dan and I took off in search of counter-tops. We first visited with the guy who does mostly high resolution laminate, and then to the granite place. Both asked be to send them prints of our kitchen, so they could get an idea of the size of job. Not long after I sent my design plans to the guy who did the laminate he called me back, and gave me the news that it is not a great idea to put a farm sink into laminate, cause in rare cases they sometimes de-laminate. GRRR, This will not be the first time I think or say, "I wish I would have known this about installing a farm sink."
So, our choices, solid surface, granite, or quartz. With the solid surface not a lot cheaper than the granite, we returned to The Stone Shop in Ankeny and picked our granite and slabs. We set up a time to have them measured and potentially installed. Remember-they had our plans already. So the day came that we were getting our kitchen measured. I waited with anticipation, the gentleman arrived, nice guy by the way, he came into the kitchen and looked around and pointed to the cabinet that would hold my sink. "That looks like you have a farm sink going in?" Yes, I said no knowing what was coming. "Do you have the sink?" Me, curiously, No, not yet, we are looking and trying to find what we want, but since you have to order a sink, we are a bit lost yet." Guy-Farm sinks are the only sinks we do not install, and they must be installed prior to us measuring, so we can get a correct measurement." GRRR- "I wish I would have known this about installing a farm sink. He was very surprised that the people missed the sink, but mistakes happen. If we can find the sink and get it installed in the next 10-15 days, there is still a chance that we can still have it installed by our current install date of April 1. You know, April Fools day.
After getting a couple recommendations of places to get farm sinks, I took off in search of my sink. I finally ended up at Plumb Supply in Des Moines, and found the sink of my dreams, oh yah, the farm sink we are looking for is black. Guess what the most expensive farm sink is? Black, because they only make the black farm sinks from cast iron, not composite yet. And a white farm sink would be an eye sore in my kitchen after picking the cabinets, appliances, and counter-tops. So, I gulped and said, "Order it". But first, we have to double check with your plumber and make sure we can make this purchase. I will send the specs to you plumber and wait to hear back from him, and then we can order it. So, I waited, and waited. bugged my builder, who bugged the plumber, and we waited and waited some more. Remember that window we had, well we missed it. I mentioned the plumber- I might have to have a separate posting, just to talk about.......him. Yah, pretty much everything he touched, crap. So they finally got it ordered and then we waited to have it come in. April 1st day came and went, April fools to me. Then, the sink was finally ready to be delivered. It was beautiful!!
That night, Dan came home and did some measurements.....Too small, the sink was too small for the cabinet opening. I had told the guy the sink front opening was 36 inches. So after a night of frustration, we found out that the sink, was the largest sink that was made by Kohler, and that the cabinet was made to big. Which, in looking back, and if we could go back, we wish the place who worked with us on our kitchen would have told us about all the ends and outs of installing farm sinks in like October, November when we met. We would have then known, we need to look at kitchen sinks to get an idea of size before order the cabinets, but it was one of those things we were some what rushed into. So, my handy husband and son in law took to installing the sink. I am so fortunate to have an amazingly talented and handy husband. More on that in the next post. Cherry on top, my daughter married one, much like him, smart girl.

So, here is the picture of my installed sink.

Dan and I recently took a walk down our road next to our timber. I wanted some air and exercise, Dan was hunting turkey sign. These pictures are of one of the coal creek located on and at the edge of our property. One of my favorite places to walk.  

Home sweet Barn! 

It's been a while since I posted, and I am sorry. We have been so busy, I have barely had enough time to catch my breath. My last post was a little over a month ago. I was whining because we were seeing little progress on our home. Then as I ended, so many things were falling into place. I was finally able to clean the weekend of Dec. 12-14th. Every wall and ceiling had to be swept down and then the floors. I had to start in the loft bedroom and work my way down to the basement. 

On Wednesday, December 17 Jennifer came down and we started the process of priming the walls for paint. In preparation for Dan to tile the bathroom. We needed to prepare the basement for us to live in just in case the weather turned bad. The basement bathroom is "Dan's" bathroom. I'm not sure if you can see the shower in this clearly but it is the size of tub, only it is a step in shower with a large seat. Dan was so excited when he saw this for the first time, he promised his first shower in this thing he would sing and empty the water heater. So Dan completed his tile work, as I continued to prime and paint walls. And paint and paint and paint. Then a couple days before Christmas we were told we would need to get the bathroom ready for plumbing. So on Christmas eve I spent my holiday at Menards. Where we spent hours, as if we had not looked at ever square inch prior to this. It's different when it's for good.

I also came home to garage doors being installed. And our builder got our porch and deck railing on.

Dan, Duane and Grant were able to get the rest of the fireplace and chimney completed. And then our doors were delivered, and hung.

Deck railing

Finished bathroom

We were not exactly happy to see that the Friday after Christmas our plumber had not yet showed up. We were expecting a fairly bad cold spell, Dan and I were both getting sick, and we were tired of taking our camper showers/baths. We were mainly tired of the constant filling of the tank and be careful that lines did not freeze as we were filling. But what do you do. We talked to the builder and told him that we need this to happen quickly, and that it was only a matter of time before we could no longer stay in the camper due to temperature, and that we'd actually been quite lucky so far.

About a week or so after we got our bathroom we heard that our luck with the camper had run out. We were going to get some severe cold that the camper furnace and little heater would not be able to keep up with. So one tiring weekend we moved nearly everything from the camper inside our very unfinished house, and set up camp there. We were in our camper EXACTLY 7 months to the date.

 Our interior doors are beautiful. We did not want a dark stain, but we wanted to add a bit of depth to the wood. Dan has worked diligently nearly every night staining the wood doors and windows in the basement, so that we could get our trim and our carpet.

Finished door

Our cat Stache, well Stache does not handle change well. Each time we move him we have to provide him a confined space where he can find everything he needs, but just let him hide. We usually make him a bed of fuzzy blankets he loves to make him comfortable. It has not taken him long to make himself at home. For whatever reason he thoroughly enjoys the loft and looking down on us.  

Dan's mancave room, which actually goes by another name, but because I respect him and his desire to not have his life added to the public, I am not sure how many more pictures I will get to add here. I am in the middle of painting the cabinets right now, hoping to finish priming tonight. 

In the mean time, here is my make shift kitchen for now. Isn't it lovely!! Think of me while you are cooking your dinner tonight. But it is warm, and I don't have to use a hose to fill a tank to do dishes. I just have to take a dishpan to the basement bathroom sink. 

           More to come- Busy, busy, busy!!