A Grand Entrance

We haven’t been doing much house hunting lately (yep, we’re moving soon-ish, in case you missed it) because we’re still spending every free minute finishing up some big projects at our current house. But there has been a little bit making this post possible.  This next house I’m about to show you, we didn’t really even physically see at all.  It was on our list of houses-to-see but was already under contract when we found it so we were just keeping an eye on it in case that contract fell through.
I loved it based on what I saw on the inside in pictures – good-sized bedrooms, a big kitchen, a big entry way, a double car garage, and ugly as heck.  Every single room had wallpaper.  The fixtures and cabinets were all dated and the curb appeal was non-existent.  But, unless a home inspection proved otherwise, it looked like any updates that needed to be made were just cosmetic and therefore, DIYable and fairly inexpensive.

Its only downfall was the small backyard.  It was on a corner lot and the so the attached garage extended into one corner of the backyard leaving a small corner of grass (maybe a 15’ x 15’ space in) the back far corner.  I was almost willing to overlook that though just because I loved the house so much. 

Floor Score

Hey!  I’m just popping in to let you know we did NOT fall off the face of the Earth but our living room floor did…well, kinda.  You see, we had some water issues (you might remember me blabbing about the chimney leak and a water influx on the patio-now-screened-in-patio) that are now solved but that left some of the planks of our laminate wood floors in the living room warped.  Well, since we’re about to sell our house we reckoned yesterday was good time to replace those.  Unfortunately, the previous owner didn’t leave us any extra planks BUT something crazy happened, while waltzing through our local ReStore last year, we spotted a box of the exact same flooring and swiped it up quicker than quick.  Fast forward to yesterday morning, when we pulled that box out of the closet to finally repair the flooring and guess what?  The new planks are ever-so-slightly different than the existing.  They’re from the same company and look exactly the same to the naked eye but the tongue and groove were about a millimeter different.  WOMP, WOMP.  So, this was the scene in our living room yesterday evening:

(old floor on the left; new on the right)

One Year With Gianna

Also known as “The Year Parenthood Kicked Our Butts”.  Right after Gianna was born I thought, “Hey, this isn’t so bad, this having-four-kids thing.”  And now, looking back I realize I was naively basking in the sleepy newborn stage, soaking in life with the big kids getting more independent, only having one in diapers, and spending hours of “free time” nursing on the couch…  But now?  Now we have a one-year old and for this particular one-year old, that means being on your toes and on top of your game allllllthetime.  I don’t remember the twins or Sebastian being as busy as this girl is and, for the twins sake at least, that’s saying A LOT.  Girlfriend seems to have been born with a seek-and-destroy/eliminate/rough house/erradicate/obliterate motto and also a lemme-taste-test-every-tiny-thing-I-find-on-the-floor mentality.  Her favorite things?  The slightly open dishwasher, toilets, drawers, cupboards, toilet paper and any paper which she loves to pick to shreds (and then eat, of course)…nothing is safe.  In short, we get nothing done when she’s awake unless, and this is a big UNLESS, we turn on Moana.  She will sit and watch that movie and let the world crash down around her. 

Technically she’s now 13 months old but we’re going to go back a month and celebrate this girl who, for all her crazy business, brings all the smiles and laughs to the other five faces in this little fam bam over here.  Gosh, we love her something fierce.

Let’s skip down memory blevard, shall we?

First, you might feel like skimming the story of her birth or back even farther to when we found out she existed.

To Market, To Market

To buy a new house!  But first to list this one within the next couple of months!

Yep, we really, really, really want to move closer to where Anthony works for a good many reasons and so we’re taking the leap this summer and shooting for it.  Cue the tears though because we’ve brought home all four of our babies to this house. 

The Grass Is Greener

…in the backyard.  Whereas before, it was a mix of dirt and weeds that left me feeling blue and the kids, well, brown.  I know, kids and dirt.  They go together like peas in a pea pod and I’m a farm girl, I should know that.  Right.  But I also know that trying to keep the dirt from infiltrating the home by capturing said kids before they traipse inside all while juggling a sweet little angel but very needy babe is not my idea of a good time.

So that’s one reason we laid grass in our back yard last weekend – so that we could let the kids roam free, graze, skip, jump, and holler without hollering ourselves to “please stop digging in the dirt!”  The other reason is one I’ll dive into in another post but for now, some befores.

I took these pictures back in February, I think, when spring was around the corner but not quite here.