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One of my favorite things to think about when I'm starting to decorate a room is what details I can add to really make the room "mine". Today, I worked on the office nook. I would say this room is considered "finished", except for whatever I might find in tubs over the next few days. Hopefully I've got it organized enough now that I should be able to categorize any extra items and put them right away.  Some of the details that I really adore about the new farmhouse office nook include the herringbone plank clothespin board, the Rise & Shine sign, and of course, the typewriter Scentsy warmer. I love the Farmhouse caddy sitting by my camera and the wire basket from Dollar General holding all of my Bible study items. My childrens' picture on the "love" picture frame along with the funky desk lamp are both details that I enjoy.
Through the whole process of moving and planning and decorating, I'm trying to remember to take time for the details.
I wanted my office nook to be someplace that I can come each morning to spend time with Jesus. To be able to load and edit photographs for my clients in a peaceful environment. To be inspired in my workspace. To pay attention to the details as I mold the space to fit exactly what I am visualizing in my mind. I wanted to have a refreshing place to create. And I think this farmhouse office nook will be just that place.
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I've really tried to minimize belongings in our home over the last few years by using specific areas in the house for dual purposes. An example in the old house would have been our kitchen island. It had the dishwasher on one side and cabinets on two of the other sides. The top had a rustic-style organizer where bills, event invitations, and important papers landed. I had mason jars with pens and scissors in them. It was sort of the hub of the house. The problem is that it also became the "catch-all" a lot of the time. One of my goals for the farmhouse was to have locations in the house that would serve dual purposes, while making sure that these places didn't attract clutter. This is where I got the idea for a coffee bar charging station.  As our girls have gotten older, they have started to spend more and more time engaged in electronics...mostly their iPads. We have rules for these and to be quite frank, they often end up on the refrigerator for a week at a time because the iPad is a privilege and when little girls make poor choices, privileges are revoked. I know that as they continue to grow, we will be dealing with other types of technology...cell phones, computers, and who knows what else. I knew I needed a central charging hub and I knew that this little space in the kitchen could be the perfect location if I would work it out right. I ended up finding a really well-made console table at a friend's garage sale in mid-June. I knew it would be perfect SOMEwhere in the farmhouse, so I bought it. We had several options for using the console table in this little nook by the basement stairs in the kitchen...a mail drop-off location, more counter-space for use in cooking, or just a decorative table. I knew that any of those three options could turn into clutter-central. That's when my sister-in-law mentioned putting our Keurig there. That really got the wheels-a-turning. I decided that having a coffee bar on top of the charging station would be perfect. And I decided to be very intentional about what I put there. In the old house, I always tried to hide the K-Cups.
Now, there is an outlet right behind where the wire basket sits. Of course, there aren't enough plugs to service a charging station for the whole family...so I mounted a power strip on the wall behind the console table. Nothing fancy...I literally used thumbtacks to hang it (the farmhouse has plaster walls...have I mentioned that???). The girls picked out their own washi tape to identify their chargers and we fed them up through the drawer on the right. I plugged in my iPad and FitBit Blaze into the left drawer and we were done! A functional charging station inside and a beautiful coffee bar outside.
Three days ago, we took early occupancy of the farmhouse. It's official. We almost have a new address. The farmhouse almost belongs to us. We will officially close at the end of next week. Our seller allowed us to come on in and start painting and prepping for the big move. It's almost time to pack up the last little bit of our belongings from the home we've known for the last eleven years and move them to our new home.
I can't wait until the painter's tape is pulled off and we see the finished product!
Very, very soon, we will sleep for the very first time in Farmhouse 654. Yesterday, we spent day #2 at the farmhouse. On the "to do list" was to finish painting the master bedroom and to get the kitchen somewhat put together. One of my former colleagues is an amazing painter and volunteered to come down and help me knock out the bedroom walls. She. Was. Amazing. She filled holes, painted the edges with her favorite fancy Purdy paint brush, filled in the middle with the paint roller, and even painted the whole closet by the time she left late into the evening. And now it looks wonderful! After the bedroom was painted, Mr. Farmhouse left and took the two younger girls home and Harlee & I decided to tackle the kitchen. My dad had gone to Lee's Summit to pick up our new refrigerator yesterday afternoon and it was now safely installed in the new kitchen, thanks to Dad, Matthew, & my brother-in-law, Colby. We had only three tubs of kitchen stuff to go through and put away, so Harlee and I decided to go for it. We went through the tubs and only ended up keeping one tub of kitchen items. We put those items away and made a plan for where we would put the rest of the goodies we have left in our current kitchen. I have lots of pictures for the walls, decorative items for above the cabinets, and other countertop accents. I'm looking forward to putting all of those things out once we get the final appraisal report back (today sometime!!!) and set a final "for-sure 100% happening" closing date. I can't wait to share the details of the kitchen project with you! Until then...here's a preview!  The Pioneer Woman Utensil Crock was the very first thing I bought for the farmhouse & I got the clock today at WalMart for $14.97!
As I shared a while back, the thought of leaving our current home is bittersweet. We have so many memories in this home. It's strange to think of passing the keys over to someone else and moving on with our lives in a new home. We are excited and sad and overjoyed and even mourning a little bit. As we walked the property yesterday, Matthew and I visited about all the things we could do to the outside of the house. We were planning on new siding and windows right away, but due to the fact that we are wanting to add a second bathroom upstairs and still keeping on the straight and narrow with Dave Ramsey, we might have to put that off for a year or two. After we discussed the changes we needed to make on the outside of the house, we took his parents through the inside of the house. This was the first time we had walked through the house since the owners moved out. It was a blank canvas. Empty rooms. Empty cabinets. Empty closets. Empty. Mr. Farmhouse and my dear teaching partner worked to bring the very first load of our belongings in. We had been filling up an enclosed trailer with stuff ever since we thought we would be closing and moving on June 16th. While they delivered tubs and boxes, the girls and I worked to scrub the main rooms down.
The men left to go get another load and the kids and I started sorting the tubs into the rooms they will be going into. Mr. Farmhouse, along with a few of his friends, brought in the Craigslist farmhouse table I had been waiting for and brought a load of outside items. Our friends left and the five of us shared our first meal at the new table. Casey's Pizza. It was spectacular. Harlee prayed for our new journey in the house and for the pizza and for the appraisal results we are still waiting on. We stayed until 12:30 this morning, working and painting and enjoying each other. And when the girls get up, we're gonna go do it all again. After 11 years in one house, it's kind of difficult to think about filling a different house with everything you own. Difficult and exciting and fun. It's a blank canvas and we are already working to make it our masterpiece. During the process of searching for a home, finding a home, and planning to move into a different home, I have been thinking about several projects that I would like to do at the farmhouse. A few of these could be completed here at our current home, while we wait to get moved in! I started today with a project for the top of the stairwell. When you walk down the stairs, there is a big wall at the farmhouse that you will see. I thought about doing a gallery wall there, but decided instead to do one big canvas print. Canvas images are expensive, in case you didn't know...so I decided to create my own! I decided I wanted the girls to have a reminder of the house they have spent the last several years in as they walked down the stairs every morning. So one night, I had them put on some matchy-match clothes and run out to the corral to try and snap a photo...with my iPhone. I should really use my big, fancy camera more often when photographing my own children, but the phone is just so convenient. With Mr. Farmhouse's help, we got a photograph of the girls all three looking at me, with our cows in the background. I only had to do a little Photoshop work because in the original picture, Mattie's arm was at a really unnatural angle. I just grabbed her arm from another photo and put it on her body. Here is the image we ended up with from the hundreds we took that night.
And then...I put the gift-wrapping skills that I learned from Grandma Stephens when I was little to good use. I stapled the two sides up over the frame to start and then did the top and bottom, pulling it tight as I put in each staple. Admittedly, the iPhone picture was a tiny bit pixelated as a 36" x 48" print (which is to be expected, I suppose). However, a photo wall-hanging for $37.50, as opposed to the $150-200 that could easily be spent on large canvas wall art is okay with me!  We have now been on summer break for almost a month. The whole summer I've been working on the moving process. Pack a whole trailer full of items into tubs. Schedule inspections at the farmhouse. Paint the ceilings of the current house for the appraisal. Purge & organize. Measure spaces at the farmhouse. Order some furniture & order some appliances. Purge some more & organize some more. Make some decorative purchases for the farmhouse. Prepare for a SECOND appraisal on the current house (long story...). Then wait. And wait. And wait some more.
To be honest, I woke up this morning feeling differently about the whole situation.
I'm trying to be patient, but I'm tired of waiting. I don't want the kids to remember this summer as the summer we held our breaths for two months, waiting to get settled in at the farmhouse. Last night, the girls got home from the softball game and played catch in the backyard until it got dark. Then they ran around and caught lightning bugs. It was heavenly. No worries about when the second appraisal will happen... When the closing date will happen... When we will actually move to the farmhouse... Just three little girls catching lightning in a jar while their parents and Gramps tried to coax a baby kitten out from under the feed truck (also a long story...). So I decided that today, while the kids are off at science camp, I'm going to get this house put back together and ready for an appraisal. And then, we're going to stop waiting. We're going to breathe and enjoy and stop stewing over what could be coming around the corner. We're going to catch lightning bugs and have movie nights and soak up the last few weeks in the home we've known for almost eleven years. We're going to enjoy the waiting game. A few months ago, my sister, my sister-in-law, my mom, and I planned a road trip to Pawhuska, Oklahoma to visit the Pioneer Woman Mercantile. Originally, with our closing date being June 16th, we were planning to be moved into the farmhouse and ready for a relaxing weekend girls' trip. Since life didn't quite work out like that, we'll be relaxing on the girls' trip and also planning excitedly for the moving process and decorating the farmhouse. I'm hoping to pick up some vintage goodies on the trip, like a square cast-iron baking dish, a strawberry can for above my kitchen cabinets, or some cow plates for my sweet Mattie Moo. We're leaving in a few hours to head south for the weekend. I'll let you know what treasures we discover!  Sometimes you can't go back to sleep after tucking the three-year-old back into bed at 4:45 a.m. So you decide to do some online window shopping on Hobby Lobby's website. Sometimes you accidentally put some items in your cart. And enter your shipping information. And your payment information. Sometimes your online window shopping turns into actual online shopping. Oops. I had a plan. I was going to do a thing. I was going to BUILD MY OWN FARMHOUSE TABLE for the new house. Seriously. I had pinned all kinds of plans. I had measured and sketched and figured. I had called and priced lumber. I was ready. I was going to build a farmhouse table for like $175. Amazing. And then, I thought I would just check and make sure I couldn't find one for that price online. I checked all over the Internet and NOPE, turns out $175 is the best price for the masterpiece I had planned! And then...Craiglist. I hopped onto Craiglist last weekend just to do a little browsing of any farmhouse tables that might have been around the Greater KC area in the last few months. Just looking for some ideas...some inspiration. That's when I found it.
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