It's been a while....

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Hello everyone,
It has been a while and I don't even have much time today to stop and chat!!  I just wanted to update you all...after two years and three months we have finally had an offer to buy our house!!  This just happened last Friday and we hope to finalize and close on April 21st.

So I am in the midst of packing up the other half of the house since I had half done from getting the house on the market in the first place!!

We are really excited to see where the Lord would have us to be next, we are hoping to stay in this general area of SC and would like to find a house with 4 bedrooms if possible and a minimum of five acres.  As of next month if we have not found a place we will move into our travel trailer until we find just the right place.

In the meantime, I am coordinating the Ladies Mother Daughter Luncheon for our church coming up in early May.  This details for the most part are taken care of, we just have two major projects left to complete.

This next Sunday we have our Teen Afterglow at church.  This is a the last Sunday of the month and one family provides the evening refreshment for all our teens.  I had volunteered for this before I had been asked to do the Mother Daughter Luncheon and I had chosen March in case we were going to be gone throughout the Summer possibly camping.

So my husband is gone all this week until next Monday, I need to pack, I need to teach Kings Kids this Wednesday, Teach Sunday School, prepare for the Ladies Choir performance this Sunday, watch the nursery Sunday and then prepare all the food for Sunday evening........deep breath.....the Lord will get me through this busy week!!!

I need to do another post about reading the book Trim Healthy Mama and how much success I have had, however, that will have to wait until another day.

I pray all is well with the rest of you!!!

Happy New Year 2013!!!

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Well Hello Everyone and Happy New Year’s this first day of 2013.  It seems like so much has happened since last June and I am not sure it is worth going over all of it and just start from here.

Almost all of last summer we worked on getting our house repainted and touched up to sell it.  We had it on the market in January listed by for sale by owner.  In August we finally finished everything up and listed it with a Realtor in town that we thought was the best option.  We have had two showings since August and nothing else.

 

      Before               After

Yes, I know the fixture needs to go….lol…so 1990’s….I would have changed it ages ago, however, that is not my decision…currently!!

 

        Before                  After

The walls were beige with wallpaper, so we went with complete wallpaper removal….my husband and I have made a pact that we will never put up wallpaper again!!!…and then painted the kitchen white.  We also redid the linoleum in a really nice replacement…

The Master Bedroom:

This was the original look, with our four poster bed, as best as I could get it in the picture…then we knew we would should take the bed down to make the room look larger.  The previous owners always had their bed on the same wall and so we place our bed there so we could look out the huge window to the left….so then I tidied the room up and came up with this…

This was an amazing improvement and I brought in our other travel trunk to have matching nightstands…so then we decided it was time to paint.  Once that was done, I suggested we move the bed to in front of the window that it would make the room even more spacious….and  this was the final result…

We also replaced the carpet in our room as well as the two other rooms on the opposite side of the house.

Front Bedroom:

 

The color is hard to tell, however, we want from a sea mist green to a beautiful blue shade by Benjamin Moore called Pale Smoke.  This room also received the same brown carpet as our bedroom in the picture above.

Spare Bedroom:

So this room had never been painted from when they built the house.  The previous owners had a wallpaper border up of bird houses and when we moved in, we only covered over the wallpaper with other wallpaper…..I thought surely, this would be the easiest room to take the wallpaper down…HA…we ran into some issues along the way….

When I took off the wallpaper, it took all the paint with it and damaged the sheetrock!  Four walls of this mess and the space between the windows!  When it was all said and done….

This was the new color….Elephant Gray by Benjamin Moore!!

Then there was our garage….

Now the picture on the top right here…we had loaned out our travel trailer and that was a stack of our clothing bins and our tables…so that part was not normally in the garage….the left side …well that is another story…there were two benches of things we had stored on top of those and then all the bikes, etc.….And now…..

We can now fit TWO cars in the garage!!!  We painted the garage with a fantastic color called Stonington Gray from Benjamin Moore, and repainted the trim around the door.  Now you can was the walls from the dirty little hands and it looks fantastic.  The bikes we moved to our basement and we picked up two shelving units on sale at the ACE store.  We corralled all the little toys into the two bins under the work bench, tossed a whole bunch of junk and voila!!

We updated the front yard…..

This for the most part is what our front yard has looked like at least the house part, the cinderblock’s with the stained lower part from the red clay soil…the landscaping has been pretty much nil since we moved in back in ‘01 when this picture was taken…

So the first thing was to paint the lower part of the house a nice brown color and then we called in the landscapers and redid the whole front yard….

You can kind of see the lower part of the house here with the paint, this was taken right before the landscapers came, so you can see the lack of plants around the foundation and then right there near the street has always been neglected by the mail box.

Here I tried to get the same shot, so you see up close the nice new mulch and groundcover that was planted and then up closer to the house the plants were all done, and there is mulch all around the established trees in the front yard….

Here you can see up close the right corner of the house with the planting bed.

And then when we listed it with the Realtor, they said we should paint the shutters to match the roof…so here is the final result.

So we have black shutters now and a nicely landscaped yard!! We did the back yard as well….but curb appeal is what we are after the most….

So that pretty much sum’s up the house, etc.… here is a link to Realtor.com

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/113-Deerfield-Ln_Seneca_SC_29678_M56440-22839

We still have an agreement with the current Realtor to sell the house until February I believe and at that time we will re-evaluate the situation.

October was a busy month of camping, we went to Atlanta to see the last Petite LeMans for the season and spent three days down there and had a fantastic time.  We left and drove up to Pigeon Forge for my birthday to go camping and realized that camping in the Smokey Mountains in October might not be the best option for a quiet relaxing time……The Fall color change in the trees brings all the visitors from the North down and I suppose from the South up and it was really crowded…..  We left there after three days and headed towards home and stopped in Cherokee NC at another campground that was practically empty and had a great time.

We were home about a week and a half and then headed back out across town for a few days camping for our oldest son’s birthday weekend.  After all that camping I was ready to close up the camper for winter and look forward to camping for next year.

The end of the year had us dealing with the awful flu bug that seems to be making the rounds.  We were so blessed to only have to deal with high fevers, lack of energy and just being in a vegetative state.  No tummy sickness or colon problems…However, the flu took its toll and both my daughter and I ended up dehydrated.  I have never had such a terrible feeling of having everything inside me hurt when I breathed because it was so lacking in water.

So in a nutshell there you have it!!!  I am hoping to keep up more frequently, and I think I say that every time after there has been a drought in my writing, but I am going to make a concentrated effort!!

 

  

 

Happy New Year!!!!

Getting the House sold….

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Hello all,

I am working again today on getting the house ready for sale.  It really is an ongoing process, never ending.  We had a phone message on Monday morning when we had no phone service at our campground.  Someone had a question about the property for sale.  I called back and left a message and then called again later but the mailbox was full.  The same person called back today but my phone was out in the truck on silent mode from church last evening.  I left a message and then I just called back again a short time ago and left a message and asked them if they would leave a time that would work for them to come see the house if they were interested.

Since I know someone is calling, I have started going around doing the detail cleaning today.  Washing all the door frames from little grimy hands, washing windows, doing extra dusting, getting the upper window frames vacuumed off.  At least if I get all the nitty gritty stuff, then if they do call, I can do the big things like scrub the floors quickly and vacuum the house and be done.

We are to have a landscaper come in the next couple of weeks here and bring in a huge truck load of mulch.  We are having a French drain installed along the front of our house to divert water from wicking into our basement area.  We are going to paint the bottom of the house foundation to get rid of the red clay stains from our soil and to “elevate” our house above the landscaping.  We are going to paint the shutters on the front of the house.  We are also going to mulch a huge planting bed in the front yard around three trees, the whole side yard, approximately 100 feet in length, the whole back side of the house and install a few foundation plants around the front and rear of the house, and lastly mulch around the mailbox out by the street.  I think it will look wonderful when it is all said and done.

I am still dealing with the itchiness from the poison ivy I contracted when I cut the woods back two Saturdays ago. Today was my last day of medication and yesterday I felt like I was erupting all over again.

Inside the house, I just need to get my motivation back and finish up the dining room, it has one small section of wall left to wash and then fill in some holes and paint and it would look 100% better than just walls with the wallpaper removed.  I have all the paint colors picked out and will give you some links to see what direction we are going.

http://www.benjaminmoore.com/en-us/paint-color/wickhamgray      dining room

http://www.benjaminmoore.com/en-us/paint-color/palesmoke          boys room

http://www.benjaminmoore.com/en-us/paint-color/oc-130                Kitchen…it really is white, but it is a blue white which I think will help with the  counters…we are hoping to paint our cabinets white they are currently an oak very low end cabinet right now.

http://www.benjaminmoore.com/en-us/paint-color/ashleygray           Our room, possibly

http://www.benjaminmoore.com/en-us/paint-color/elephantgray        Haley’s room

http://www.benjaminmoore.com/en-us/paint-color/oc-61                  Guest bathroom

 

I picked our colors with the help of Maria Killam a designer I found online and bought her ebook and she does a fabulous job of explaining undertones and explaining where the current color trend is going, etc.  The brown/beige is out as the previous neutral and now the gray tones are in for about the next 10 years so I should be safe with what we have chosen.  Even if we don’t sell in the next year we will still be in the right colors for a few more years!!

 

I just need to go get the paint and get going again.  The Kitchen needs the wallpaper border taken down, my bedroom just needs paint, and both of the other two bedrooms have wallpaper borders as well to come down…it is lots of elbow work but if we get it done and soon, we might get this place sold and it would definitely look more “turn key” to prospective buyers!!  I just need a work crew for two days!!!

Here it is 2012….Oh Carmen…this one’s for you!!

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Hi all,

A New Year has arrived.  I pray the last year was full of blessing for everyone and that the year to come will be even more blessed.  I am so thankful for the merciful God we have that allows us these new beginnings; days, months, years.  It gives us a chance to reflect, to dig deeper, to grow more as we focus on the Lord.  A time to repent, to seek guidance, to set attainable goals, to re-evaluate, to separate more, etc.

In the big scheme of things though, I don’t have to worry about the month, the year, etc.  I only need to focus on this day….this is the day which the Lord hath made…Psalm 118:24 and Matthew 6:34…Take therefore no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought of the things of itself.  I need to live this day to the fullest for the Lord, to do my best to glorify His name in whatever area of capacity that I experience.  That may be teaching, housekeeping, mothering, being a chef or “best cooker” as my children refer to me :- ), finance manager, etc.

Last year, around the first couple of weeks of the year, my husband and I sat down and made a list of things to do to get our house ready to sell.  It was a great list in outline form with neat little “bullets” and sub-bullets….yada, yada, yada….and how much did we complete??? Well not nearly enough!!!  I don’t think we can even say that we completed one thing entirely.  We did make a good effort of cleaning out things, made some huge donations to Habitat for Humanity and Goodwill…but that was the extent.  Being pregnant and trying to get rid of things….I think those two ideas aren’t meant to go together!!

So the new year is here and what do we do……PUT THE HOUSE UP FOR SALE!!!!!!  Yikes!  Well here is the thought process….The Economy is just horrible right now and especially the housing market.  We have lots of “to-do” projects to complete. Our neighbor around the corner put his house up for sale with a realtor.  They didn’t have a choice, his job moved out of state.  We have talked about putting our house up for sale ourselves.  After mentioning it to a friend over lunch recently, my husband came home and said maybe we ought to put our house up for sale as it would help out the other neighbor and theirs being for sale might help us out!!

It just so happens that I follow Money Saving Mom and she had a guest post about a couple that had sold their house by their selves. Way back when I first read the article and all their supporting articles, I shared it with my husband and I bookmarked it!!  I just love technology like that that is really helpful, bookmarks!!!!  Anyhow, I mentioned the articles again, went to some websites that were suggested, came back to my husband with details and then a few Sunday’s ago, BAM we went ahead and did it!!

Part of the theory, put the house on the market with a sign in the yard and that will motivate us to get the “to-do’s” list taken care of in a hurry!!! We figure since the housing market is in a slump and somewhat oversaturated with foreclosures, we could put it up for sale ourselves and we would be blessed if someone would be interested in buying it for a half way decent price.  If the house doesn’t sale over the next year then we would only be out a relatively small amount and if the market picks up then we could hire a realtor.  After all, we figure, we are capable of having a sign made, we are able to make flyers, we are able to set up an open house, etc.

Well one of the bookmarks was about how to get your house listed on the MLS listing on Realtor.com…basically you really want that as a For Sale By Owner as it gets you the most traffic, more so than just a few corner and lot signs for sale….  We sat down, made a few choices and signed up…well that listing actually gave us a broker…we didn’t realize we would get a broker, we thought we were the listing agents, etc.  I guess you would call it a discount broker…we paid the flat fee and we don’t have to pay the thousands of dollars to a real-estate agent.  I kind of like that idea, more money in my pocket!!

Weelllllll, who would have thought that living in a small town where you know lots of people because of your business…..that there would be ANYONE, upset at you for using a discount broker, which we didn’t realize it was in the first place.  My husband calls me this evening from work that he received a TEXT, yes a text, not even an actual phone call, which I consider the cowardly way out, from a Realtor that Tim has known for several years and considers a good acquaintance and great professional relationship….

That realtor states…”I am really disappointed that you used a discount broker and didn’t give myself and so and so the business”  WOW, can I just say I am shocked!  Can I just say, how unprofessional that is!!!  Can I just say, there is NO WAY that realtor will be getting our business when we decide to buy a house!!!!  My husband knows at a minimum 8+ realtors in our town and we got to talking about how to respond, one thing that came up was how would we be able to pick the right realtor and not show favoritism.  Anyhow, I put a nicely worded response together, emailed it back to my husband so that he could cut and paste it into a text or email it to the realtor.

I hope the email works and we don’t have to hear further remarks about what he can do for us, blah blah, blah….Every family has the right to keep as much money in their own pocket as possible.  It wouldn’t be so bad if the realtor had said “Hey, I see you have your house for sale. I hope all goes well, and if there is anything I can do to help you out down the road if you need it, just let me know.”  You know, keep the door open for future business instead of slamming it on his foot just now!!

Here is the listing: http://mlsmyhome.com/285259 that is the for sale by owner site and I should have the Realtor.com listing by Thursday.  The listing is essentially the same on both sites, the only difference is that on Realtor.com it will have all the MLS details that you can print out on one page.

For the last two weeks I have been working on our Dining room.  It had this plaid wall paper, floor to ceiling when we bought the house; not anything I would have ever picked out but sufficient to leave it be.  Well now it has some rips and the flower border has come down so I have been removing wall paper.  The wall paper is down, I need to scrub the walls, then spackle all the holes, and then sand and then paint. One of the freebies on Money Saving Mom was a free can of paint last year from True Value Hardware.  At the time I picked out a soft gray color hoping to be able to use it on the dining room at some point.  Hopefully it is not too dark and will look just right when I get to that point of painting.  I would like to do gray walls with silver accessories with white trim.  I’d like to have a silver-framed mirror on the wall you can see as you walk in from our Foyer and a few small floating shelves with silver accessories on them opposite wall that you could see in the mirror.  I’ll take pictures and keep ya’ll updated.

All I need to do now is get rid of this sickness that I have so I am not quite so tired and can do a little bit more vigorous work!!

My mom asked me the other day what we were going to do if the house were to sell right away.  I said well, it would be a little stressful but we would just get it packed up and take our travel trailer and go set up shop at the campground.  Our ultimate goal in selling the house is so that we can buy some acreage, a minimum of 5 acres and build a house on it.  If we can find a piece of property that has an old house on it that is decent enough to live in while we build that would be great.  We did see one that has a house on it across town, and there are some businesses on the same street as well.  What would work is we live in it to build our house and then when the house is built my husband could turn the old house into the business office….if the structure was sound enough….but all of this is just thoughts and nothing can happen until we get our house sold.

I looked into renting, in case we sell the house.  I could not find anything to rent that was significantly cheaper than our house that was a house.  I could find a 4br. apartment the next town over for only $310 a month but there is no playground…. no yard….do you see what I am getting out with having 6 children?  I think we would all go stir crazy.  At least if we sell and we live in the travel trailer at a campground….there is lots of open space, there is a playground, possibly a pool for spring time, there is a laundry mat.  There is no neighbor right next you with adjoining walls and the children could ride their bikes, etc.  I would much rather do that than live in an apartment for the same amount of money.  Travel trailer here we come!!!!! I am just continuing to pray that the Lord’s will be done and if it is His will that a buyer come our way sooner than later all the better and if we end up having to live here longer then what a blessing to live with all the improvements that we have been putting off doing for so long!!!

I am sure there are lots of other small details that I should be mentioning about what is going on at our house but right now they are absent from my mind, so I will let ya’ll go and wish you a blessed evening and day tomorrow!!!

Home Improvements… lotsa pictures…

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Remember me saying my husband was in the nesting mode prior to our baby being born??  Well here are some pictures of our family room…the before’s and after’s. 

This was my family room as of 3.5 weeks ago.  When we moved here 11 years ago, we decided we would go bold with our color choice and did this finish technique to the walls where you paint on and then take the paint off with a rag or a plastic bag….we liked the warm tropical look and have a beach wallpaper border on two sides of the room…..However, when wanting to sell a house, one always knows to paint neutral colors….so it was time to change the color.  I actually have had the color for easily two years sitting in the garage.  I had painted our entry hallway the new color but we never followed through with the family room.

   

All the children found ways to  chip in and help out, from pulling up the carpet and rolling it up to removing the staples in the under padding.  Tim then went through and re-nailed the entire floor down to the joists to remove any squeaking….of course after he finished the whole thing, he went down to the basement and realized that the majority of the squeaking was coming from the pvc pipes that he had run over a year ago when he re-routed plumbing and the pipes were rubbing against the joists!!

And now…..the new color, and new carpet….we ended up spending a little change at Big Lots and purchased curtains.  This is the first time we have had curtains in the 11 years we have been here. We purchased the mirror at WM and then the new floor lamp and little end table came from BL’s as well.  It is nice to feel like you have a coordinated cozy place to sit and relax.  I still need to put my sewing table back in front of the window on the right side and we are hoping to make one more trip to BL’s to pick up two pieces of art work to go on either side of the mirror….either that, or I would like to get some floating shelves to go on either side of the mirror to put up some family pictures….we’ll see… The only spot I have right now is on top of the China Cupboard in the back corner….

   

 

These pictures below show the progression of changes this family room has seen…

This first set is from the previous owners…. kind of a chocolate milk on top with a dark, dark, hunter green on the bottom…almost black.

 

Then we went with the salmon/coral color….and actually the color I chose below for the walls in the new color was picked to go with the wall sculpture…I took it from the turtle at the top….but alas that got taken down to my disappointment and it was replaced with the TV below…. We no longer have the cat post or the cat…sniff…. and the couch is rotated 90 degrees so the back is to the front entryway.

 

 

So that’s my latest home improvement….next stop….the Kitchen linoleum…..and that looks to be coming sometime in the next couple of weeks as well!!