Welcome back everyone!! As you can tell we once again took a long hiatus as life got busy and other tasks took priority over this blog. It's really a shame though because both Sara and I enjoy writing about our projects and adventures we just tend to stack more on our plate than we have time for, but I digress. On to the latest news and adventures!!
As you may have seen from the title of this entry we are once again making some big life changes. The last entry I made was about some of the projects we had started in our new home...well new in 2015. Needless to say we have been really busy making it the home we had envisioned. So much so that we hadn't even taken time to look back and see how far we had came until now.
As you know from our first entry about this house we bought it brand new in 2015, it was a nice little spec house just completed in a quiet neighborhood in my home town. It was very basic with a lot of cheap finishings but we didn't care it was our first brand new home and after our little Cisco house we knew it was the perfect canvas to paint our vision on. Starting with the living room we built the fire place, built in cabinets and book shelves and then installed a large bay window for natural light. We added more lighting in the way of six 3000k LED ceiling lights and then outfitted the book shelves and fireplace mantel with more LED lights.
From there we went to work on the patio, we framed up and screened it all in. At first we built a bar with quartz top and the grill behind it. It was nice for cooking meals on the grill especially when it was raining out but after having a few gatherings we realized it just took up too much room. So for phase 2 we got rid of the bar and the grill, bought a Traeger for outside and started building out a feature wall/bar that was more usable. Of course this being an outside area and exposed to some weather it needed to be made out of materials that would be resistant to weather. For the back wall we took off the siding and did a corrugated metal bottom trimmed in rough cut cedar then did cedar tongue and groove plank all the way to the ceiling. I built a bar from poplar, stained it then used outdoor poly to seal it all up. right above the bar is some cedar shelves with black pipe brackets and the ever important TV for those evenings of wine, movies and games. We also added a small 10x10 deck for evening fires in the fire pit and cooking on our beloved Traeger.
The next major project was probably my favorite one, the kitchen. I actually fought doing this one as I liked our kitchen the way it was. Originally it was dark and masculine so naturally I thought it was fine but Sara hated it. Since she is the one who cooks the most and it really didn't flow with the rest of the house I agreed to give it a make over. We started by building a refrigerator cabinet and adding crown moulding to all the upper cabinets. We then painted the dark cabinets white, which was a big job since I insisted on using my HVLP gun so it had a factory like finish. Once that was done we moved on to custom fitting butches block counter tops. I did a herring bone tile back splash with Carrera tiles that turned out amazing for my first time doing back splash. Then I built a custom island out of oak with a quartz top. This was a risky move since the kitchen isn't that big but it became an awesome usable space the we couldn't imagine not having now. The kitchen was finished up with more lighting...lots of lighting!! For all my projects I like using LED lights, 3000k in the house and 5000k in the garage. In the kitchen we added six, 3" LED ceiling fixtures, two hanging globes, one over sink can light and eight under cabinet light bars. Needless to say it is an amazing place to cook and photograph food.
As these projects got finished up we kept falling more and more in love with our home. So much so that we actually thought about selling our lake lot (that's right we haven't talked about that yet). We considered putting in an in ground pool and just settling in but like usual we decided to chase more rainbows!! Like I eluded to a second ago we bought a lot on our local lake with plans to one day build our real dream house. With the housing market the way it is we looked at what our home was now worth with the addition of all of our hard work and decided now was the time to sell. So after buttoning up some loose ends and giving the house a good cleaning we got these pictures taken you see here and she went on the market. As of now we have accepted an offer from a young couple who immediately fell in love with the house and are ready to embark on their next adventures in this home.
Thank you for sticking with us through these adventures, we hope that you are staying healthy and chasing your own rainbows.
Nathan
