A Favorite

For over a year now, I've been eager to spend some time in Amish country. Observing their way of life interests me, but I also wanted to find someone to sell me a quilt. As I shopped online to see how much I may have to pay for one, it seemed clear the place to start was a baby quilt. :)

While planning a day trip to take with my parents, I found an Amish market we could visit. We loved it. Mom and I bought several things at a variety of booths, mostly food, and both wish we had more time to shop.

One of the booths had many quilted items, most of which were pot holder size or the size of a wall hanging. Right away, a design caught my eye and I asked if there was one in a larger size. The lady running the booth said she'd contact the quilt maker to find out. In a few short weeks, my order arrived: 

I LOVE it!

Truth be told, I'm looking forward to going back for more canned goods, more quilts, and even a hot air balloon ride!

Master Tour

Once at the top of the stairs, our room is immediately to the right.

This is what you see when you look through our bedroom doors: 

The picture has now been hung over the bed and the baby activity gym you see below is in another room, but you get the idea.

We love the space in this room and high, coffered ceilings. I'm not so crazy about all of the white. This is another room I want to paint. Paint just seems to warm up a room. 

As you see below, I have some work to do on the curtains. I've found exactly what I want and know how I want to arrange the curtains. They're just SO expensive and I need 8 panels. On the windows to the right, the rods are already installed. I got a little ahead of myself, but at least I have the hardware I'll use. Hopefully, we will be able to get this done soon.

The windows on the left don't have the rods up yet, but I have them. They no longer liter the bedroom; I finally put them away in my closet until I get the curtains. 

Pictured below is our dressing area. This is right outside of our closets by our bathroom. I LOVE this space. We already had the mirror, so I hung it in a way so that it serves well as our full-length mirror. It looks a lot better in person.

Along the wall you see where I hung a couple of robe hooks so I can set out our Sunday clothes once they're ironed. Recently, our church had Fan Day as an outreach to invite friends to church. We classed it up by wearing dressy clothes with fanwear touches. It was fun! I wish we'd had someone take our picture.

One addition I'd like to make to this room is a bench seat. By putting it along the wall on the right, we would have a seat close by to sit on as we put on our shoes. 

These are our closets. Mine on the left; Matt's on the right. We both have lots of clothes. Unfortunately, mine don't all fit in one closet! Note to self: Weed out the clothes you don't wear. 

Matt's closet is rather large. He is able to keep all of his clothes in one place. This picture doesn't do it justice. You can't see the built in shelves or the corners to the right and left. This is one of my favorite things about the house.

Since he gets ready to leave the house each morning for work or church, it made more sense for him to have all of his things in one place. It's also easier for me when I put things away. Since I buy his clothes, he also needs to see what he has! I love that there's room for our hamper in here too.

This is our bathroom:

Behind the door on the left is the shower, the vanity you see is mine, and to the right of the jacuzzi is the water closet. Matt's vanity is just beyond the door on the right. I love that the blinds lower from the top of the windows so we can enjoy natural light and preserve our privacy. 

We regularly use the shower rather than the jacuzzi, but we hope to take advantage of that too at some point. If you haven't heard, when you're trying for a baby, it's best not to soak in a bath...either of you. So, for now, I simply have the pleasure of cleaning it ;)

Below is Matt's vanity and you see the door to the water closet as well: 

The only thing I care to do in this room is paint it. In the long term, the very long term, I may consider putting in new counter tops. 

While looking for the color granite I want in the kitchen, I saw a picture of a couple of bathrooms with granite or faux granite counter tops. I like the look. Especially if I never get around to painting this room, it would be nice to add some depth, dimension, and darker color to accent the room.

That completes the tour of our new home. As I make changes, I'll post some updates.

Come See Us

Next on our tour of the house is the guest room. If you come see us, this is where you'll stay: 

 

If you saw my house in TN, you know my quest room hasn't changed much since I lived there. A few accessories have changed and the lamps are new since we've lived here, but otherwise, it's the same.

  

You can see in the next shot a little of how the room is oriented upstairs. When you look out, you see a door on the left. That room is the man-cave.

When guests visit, I want them to have a place to put their suitcase. After looking online for a while, I found this luggage rack and had to get it. The nook by the door is the perfect spot for it and it worked great for my parents when they visited. When no one is here, I stow it in the closet. It makes me feel good to find as many ways as I can to make family and friends feel comfortable while they're in our home.

On the other side of the guest room is the guest bathroom. Recently, we added a Waterpik shower head and shower wrack for shampoos and things.

 

As far as improvements to these rooms, there's not much I want to do. We bought a ceiling fan for the guest room so we need to put that up. I'd like to paint both rooms and there are some decorative shelves I already have that need to go up on the wall behind the toilet.

Truth be told, I'd love to have ceramic tile in this bathroom rather than linoleum, but that won't happen unless we decide to put in ceramic tile in a larger room like the kitchen. It's not needed, but it would look nice.

So be sure to come see us. We've got room...

Commercial Break

There is still more to show you on our tour of the house, but with a group of friends coming over this weekend, I'm shifting into planning mode. It looks like there will be about 10 adults and 7 children coming. Since I'll be going out with a friend tonight, making a meal for a family tomorrow, going to coffee with church ladies tomorrow night, and keeping the baby on Thursday, I've got to focus on getting things done early because I'm prone to getting overwhelmed when I plan to entertain at my house. :)



In the meantime, I'll tell you a few of my favorite stores:
Pottery Barn
Bed, Bath and Beyond
Hobby Lobby
Tuesday Morning
J.C. Penney for lamps
Kirklands
Walmart for bins and organizers
Target for bins, organizers, and some small pieces of furniture

Do you have any favorite stores to add for household items? 

The Next Stop

The next stop on our tour of the second floor is Matt's man-cave. I can't say it looks particularly impressive now, but it's his own space to use when he needs time alone. That's one thing we discussed before we married. We both need a fair amount of alone time. 

You can see here that we set up my smaller flat screen in this room, which is actually the perfect size for the space. He has his trusty reclining leather sofa with console. On the right, you can see a weight bench I bought him for his birthday this year and he has a set of adjustable free weights that lie outside of the picture. 

He has a retro mini frig with freezer next to the couch, a birthday present from his mom this year. Then, as you see, there are lots of unsightly boxes waiting to be dealt with as soon as I can get to them. The closet you see in the first picture contains some more boxes of Matt's CDs and DVDs. He has TONS of CDs. He also has his golf bag, guitar, and a few other things stored in the closet.

My plan for this room is mainly to get it organized. We need to buy something to display his CDs and DVDs. I need to sort through the rest of his boxes to see if any of it needs to be set out for easy access. He has a lot of binders and files from his days pursuing his Master's degree. Most of that, I'm sure we can store in the basement, but I haven't asked him yet.

Otherwise, we need to choose and purchase a light fixture to install overhead. I need to hang some pictures and I'd like to paint this room for more depth. It seems pretty simple as it is, but I've struggled to decide on a color. Other rooms need to be painted first, so I'm in no rush. 

Matt spends most of his alone time in this room having his quiet time, working on Bible Study Fellowship (BSF) homework, or lifting weights. From time to time, he also uses the home office to complete online training, go through his work emails, finish writing capital project proposals, etc. Even still, most of his time at home is spent with me :)

There are even times we'll both work quietly on things in the main room. Both working on BSF homework or him doing some work, while I email a friend or blog. That is to say, Matt loves having his own space in this house, but he doesn't disappear into it for hours at a time on a regular basis.

Not long ago, I read an article a friend linked in on Facebook. It was about this modern concept of having a man-cave. She was in complete disagreement with having one in the home. To her, it communicates that the man-cave is the one space in the house that is the husband's, but the rest belongs to the wife. She suggested it would relegate the husband to spending all of his time in that one room and the wife and kids would have run of the rest of the house. Well, to be clear, that's not how we use it.

I agree that a man-cave could provide a husband and father an easy (possibly too easy) local for escape from family or family matters. That's not a good thing for sure, but if a man wants to escape his family or family problems, he will.

My suspicion is that this modern convention of a man-cave was dreamed up by a woman who wanted her husband to escape at home rather than at the local bar. Give him his own space and then maybe he'll choose to come home. At least he'll be nearby if I need him. 

When I read in some premarital counseling books that men, due to the way God created them, are prone to feel less capable of handling family matters than they feel with work matters, I took note. One of the best weapons in the fight to keep our marriages strong is awareness.

Knowing that harmony in the family and peace in the home are extremely important to our men, we need to be very guarded with how we welcome them home, what they initially experience in those first few moments, how we communicate with our husbands and allow our children to communicate with him. We need to think about how we may feel after a hard and tiring day at work if we were to enter that family scene, whatever is typical of our family, and how we'd feel in response to it. We should do whatever we can to give our husbands an experience that draws him home, that leads him to want to be there.

The other morning, as I was hugging Matt goodbye before work, I told him I loved having him home, would miss him, and asked him to come back home to me. Not an unusual thing for me. He gave me a long hug and replied, "Of course, this is my refuge," and added in good humor, "but we'll have to name it something else because Dawn and Chris already have that one." :)

I relate that to you, not because I have this thing down, goodness, almost all of you have been married far longer than we have. It's because we are working on it now while it's just the two of us and I hope to keep this in mind when we have children. Children are game changers. It will become so much more difficult to keep my perspective sharp once there are little ones constantly distracting me.

In the meantime, Matt is choosing on a regular basis to spend time with me in the evening and he makes sacrifices to do it at times. We like a few of the same shows, very few, but mostly I go for family drama (of the Parenthood variety) and he goes for comedy. When he's in the room, he controls the remote (I told him that from the beginning). With time, he began to change the channel to a show he thought I'd enjoy. It worked well because he didn't hate it, but I liked it. Occasionally now, he'll even turn on something he doesn't like and he'll disappear into Facebook and then go take a shower. lol

Many couples in the same situation would end up in different rooms watching whatever they want to watch. That may end up happening with us over time, but I hope not. We've also discussed having no-t.v. nights. We're not particularly ambitious, so maybe one night a week we'll try that out. 

As it is, I'm glad Matt has a designated place for his quiet time, to lift weights, and even to get a little time alone when he needs it. During this season, his only times alone are in the car and in the shower otherwise. Once there are little ones, I fear he won't even have that...

A Silly Little Thing

During winter, Matt has certain things he leaves on the second floor at the end of the day or in the morning that he uses downstairs when he arrives home at night. When I notice them during the day, I try to remember to relocate them from upstairs to downstairs so he doesn't have to go up in search of them when he gets home.

One of the items is his iPad, but that's a year-round item that he moves from place to place. Now that it's turned cold, his house shoes is another of those things.

Recently while I was upstairs, noticing his house shoes by the bed, I remembered that he'd begun leaving his house shoes, on rare occasion, in the entry hall by the bench. Not wanting to run downstairs just to move that one thing and not wanting to forget, I took advantage of this feature in our home: 

 Standing in front of our bedroom door upstairs, you see our 2nd floor hallway. The railing straight ahead overlooks our foyer. 

This is the view looking over the rail.

I dropped Matt's house shoes over the rail to the first floor and hit the red rug in front of the bench :) Today was the second time I dropped them to their spot and I couldn't help but smile.

I LOVE being able to drop soft things from the second to the first floor :) It's a silly little thing, but sometimes it's the little things that make me smile.