Chicken Coop

Back in April we went to the Tractor Supply store's monthly swap in hopes of finding chickens. We weren't sure if we wanted chicks or hens that were laying already. Part of the problem with buying chicks would be taking the risk of getting a rooster. We can have hens, but no roosters. Part of the benefit of raising chicks (besides being super cute) is that they get used to you, which is great when you want them to get used to being around a toddler. We got lucky and found chicks that we already knew were hens. We knew we wanted a chicken that would lay bigger eggs, but we wanted to find silkies too. Tractor Supply had leghorn chicks, and silkies. Lucky us! We fell in love instantly.

Seriously. I can't handle how cute they are.

Fast forward a few weeks, and our precious baby chicks started jumping out of their box! I'd go in to feed them only to find them all missing. It was time to get them in a coop, but we couldn't decide whether or not to build a coop or buy one. I had my heart set on something nice to look at. It might have not been practical, but I didn't want to look at an ugly hen house when I looked out in our backyard especially now, since we spend so much time out there. We got the idea to try to find a kids playhouse to convert to a coop. We scoured Craigslist, but found nothing but plastic houses, or people who were selling crazy big, crazy expensive, custom-built mini mansions. I love my chicks, but I'm not going to spend 10k on a chicken coop… Sorry gals!

Sam's Club had a playhouse for around $200. It was precious, sturdy, and could be converted into a coop easily. The house was a snap to put together, and with a little ingenuity and a couple of hours our chicks had a new place to lay their heads! We put wire mesh over the windows, locks on the doors and built a couple of roosts. The girls were in heaven! 

A few days later I painted the house white, and the door a nice dark grey.

When they got a little bigger we let them out. Bad idea. Something has pummeled over our fence and they 'fly' over the low parts and into our neighbor's yard. We're hoping to re-fence the yard sometime soon, any maybe then we can let them out. 

Eventually we cut open the back windows and put in a nesting box. We're going to divide the big box into a couple of smaller boxes for them to lay, but we got the bulk of it done. Chance did a great job building this, I thought. We shingled the roof just to hopefully extend the life of the coop. I won't be getting a new day job shingling roofs anytime soon, though. 

We've built a 5'x16' run for them to roam in. We have a sneaky raccoon and a fox that keeps trying to get in, but so far so good!

I just couldn't be happier with how it all turned out. They're lower maintenance than I thought they would be. We put all of our grass clippings in the run and let them go after the bugs. We use them to compost kitchen scraps, and those girls will go nuts over oatmeal or watermelon! 

This is Ethel, one of our Silkies

Until next time!

-Megan

Master Bedroom

Naturally I forgot to take a 'Before' Picture, so this is our 'before, but after we primed and ripped up the carpet' picture. 

Before all of this though, the room was a really beautiful blueish teal color. I really debated on not painting this room at all because I liked the color so much, but I had already fallen head-over-heals in love with the comforter from Pottery Barn and I couldn't compromise--- it had to be painted. I settled on 'Pediment' from Sherwin Williams for the master bedroom and really think it's fantastic. It actually might be my favorite color so far! 

For a while after I painted it was our catch-all room and it looked like this:

Terrifying, right?! It was to me! 

Once we got everything thrown away and out of the door it was much better and we started to lay the flooring down.

While we were laying the floors we were waiting for one run to work out perfectly. This was Chance's reaction when it finally did… It was very similar to Ron Paul's 'It's happening' .gif.

Swoon! It was beautiful! We got the new base molding and quarter round down. Eventually we'll be putting crown molding throughout the whole house, but this is where we needed to start.

I was and still am overly excited about my usb outlet! 

I wanted a nice jute rug for our bedroom but didn't want to pay for the size I needed. I always check the house stuff at Target and I was so glad that I did this day because this rug was super discounted. I think it was $28 or something around that figure. I'm positive I didn't pay more than $35!

Chance went TDY and gave me permission to do some retail therapy at Pottery Barn for leaving me in the middle of this move (missing Mac's birth, going to OTS during our move from Japan, leaving for two weeks in the middle of a the only move we have ever had to do ourselves… You'd start believing he planned these things!) I was dying to get this bedding! While I was at the mall my mom called and said she wanted to buy it for us as a house-warming gift. Do I have the best mom or do I have the best mom?! Bonus: It was on sale! Double Bonus: I still got a military discount!

We have a cupola out in our front yard and a couple of the windows broke off. So I washed them and bleached them in the shower and hung them. These lamps are from IKEA, and had a black shade on them. I replaced the black shade for these white ones from Target and we're finally getting some use out of them again. We haven't hung these things since we were in Japan.

Chance and made us some side tables and did a great job on them. When we got them upstairs, though, we both really hated the way they looked so we went back to the drawing board. On our way to Lowe's we spotted an estate sale and went to check it out. When we got there they said everything was on sale, so we snagged these two side tables. Originally priced $65.00 each, we haggled them down to $50 for the pair! 

And there's the master bedroom folks! Sorry for the grainy cellphone picture, I still need to get better with my DSLR that my dad gifted me!

-Megan

White Guest Room

Oh, how I love this room!

Before we bought the house I found this beautiful comforter that I was dying to buy but didn't really have a place for it. I was looking to buy a new comforter for the our bedroom at the time, but thought it might be a little too frilly for a master bedroom, so I passed on it. The next time I saw the comforter, we had already bought the house and the set was on clearance so I couldn't pass it up!

The guest bedroom was kind of a peachy color before we painted it and had carpet.

After we primed the walls, we painted it in Sherwin Williams 'Steamed Milk.' I'm a huge fan of the color. It's a nice creamy white, and for a white I think it's really warm. We've also painted all of the doors and trim in the house white. We (and by 'we' I mean 'Chance) replaced most of the doorknobs from gold to an oiled bronze, and switched the outlets and light fixtures from ivory to white. I'm surprised at how big of a difference the little things make! I don't know it's because we painted the doors, but they really started to stick and changing the doorknobs fixed that problem. Like all of the flooring upstairs, we put down the laminate wood in here too. 

I had a ton of things sitting in boxes throughout the house that I didn't know where or even if we were going to use them. One of those things was my 'EAT' letters that I used in our kitchen at Goodfellow.

Chance suggested that we make the letters say 'ATE' and hang it over the toilet but I thought that was a little gross, so I made it into 'TEA' and hung it in our guest room entrance. 

In the guest room there is a small board over the wall where I think our sellers said there are some pipe switches (Chance could tell me what it was for.) There wasn't a lot of room between the foot of the bed and the wall, but I wanted something that would mask the board, that was easily removable for access and also didn't take up space in the walkway. Someone had suggested hanging shutters and that was the idea I went with, so my friend Anna and I went to the Habitat for Humanity ReStore and she spied the perfect shutters at $5/ set! 

I un-hinged them, and painted them with Americana Decor Chalky Paint in 'Primitive.' I found some tiny clothes pins and hung old family black and white pictures.

I really wanted to get an antique dress form but the price-tag was too high for me so I made my own with the help of Anna and some duct tape. 

(Full Tutorial *Here*)

I'm so happy with how it turned out, and the whole thing cost me less than $20! That's a steal! 

So here it is!

I'm not completely happy with my pillows on the bed and hope to get some different ones soon. I'd also like to paint the side tables, but for now this will do! 

Welcome to our guest bedroom!

Original 'EAT' letters for the kitchen, and some pin boards from the Yen Store.

The sellers left this little ladder and I've been in love with the rickety thing since I found it in the garage. I've almost fallen off of it too many times for me to actually use it, so for now I'm using it as a book shelf!

I'll eventually get a little basket to set everything on, but I haven't found the perfect one yet, and I can be kind of a snob about baskets…

YaiYai and Papu

Grandma and Grandpa

I love our guest room. There is still quite a bit I'd like to do in here, but I'm not doing anything more until I find exactly what I want. Like most rooms, I'm most excited about how I will decorate it for Christmas, and so far I am most excited about decorating this room! My obsession with Christmas might be unhealthy… I'm a little ashamed to admit that I've been listening to Christmas music since February.

Happy Monday!

-Megan

Vintage Boy's Room

The first room that we started with upstairs was Mac's room. We knew that getting the floors in was going to be a chore, and staying the night would be key to getting them done so that Chance could come home from work and we could start working from there. Mac was being a total champ while we camped out in the living room for a few nights, but staying up so late and sleeping in a sleeping bag on the floor was not the most comfortable place to stay night after night. We ripped out the carpet throughout the entire upstairs, and I got to priming and painting. It took me forever to decided on the colors I wanted in the house, particularly Mac's room because I wanted it to be lodgy, without clashing with the rest of the house… almost a little Christmasy….

This Pottery Barn picture from Pinterest really captures what I wanted to go for… This, plus an all-American-boy feel.

I used my Sherwin-Williams app on my phone to try and figure out what color this wall was, but because of the different lighting in the picture it made it hard to land on a color that wasn't too dark or too blue. Serious problems, I know! 

Once I got to Sherwin-Williams and found the swatches, I realized that the color I had decided on was way too dark, but came across Homburg Gray and fell in love.

Sherwin-Williams Color Snap is a great app by the way! Pediment is for our Master bedroom, Steamed Milk for the guest room and office, and Roman Column for the hall and stairwell. 

After we finished priming and painting his room, we started laying the floors. We got the flooring from Sam's Club, (believe it or not) and we love it. We wrote Bible verses on the subfloor so that wherever we stand, we're standing on the Bible! We got the idea from our church when they opened their new campus, and decided that we would do the same whenever we bought a house of our own. 

Here are the first few rows completed. 

I don't think the walls look nearly this green in person, but I do love love love the way this room turned out. It's exactly how I imagined it would be!

Some of the shelving

I really like how this collage came out! 

Some of 'Dad's' old toys

Annnnd my favorite part. Mac's 'reading corner.' Chance and I bought this chair from Ikea for my little brother before we were married. My parent's never hung it, so we've been carrying this thing around, unopened, for about 8 years. I would like to find more of these little trees and place them in a few more spots in the room, but no rush!

Kitchen/ Dining Room

Since closing on Wednesday we've been working on the downstairs. I had no idea how much work this one area was going to be. We started with the ceiling. I found this wonderful light blue that popped against the white and the clay color I picked out. I had found a few inspiring pictures that drove what my plans were and I was excited to see them in our new kitchen and dining room. I don't think we knew what we were getting into, but 2 and a half days worth of hard work left us with two finished rooms. I'm so happy with how it all turned out!

Before: The sellers had a nice thing going on. The cabinets are solid and in great condition minus a few knots in the wood. The green was nice and earthy.

After: We painted the ceiling in Behr's 'Lime Light', which, despite sounding like a green is actually a nice blue. We spray painted most of the existing hardware in an oiled bronze color, and then last minute decided to paint the range hood too. We knocked out the small section above the sink and changed out the fluorescent lights in exchange for a pendant with an Edison bulb. We also changed out the other fluorescent light for a flush mount fixture. We replaced the old outlets and toggle switches which were beige, for white ones since we were going lighter with the whole house. We painted the cabinets white and this was much more difficult that I thought it would be! The rest of the walls are painted a creamy clay color that I just love against the bright white cabinets and trim.  

We bought three of these pulls for the drawers. Other than these, we just used existing hardware. 

Before: This picture doesn't do the before room justice. When I took the before picture we had already taken down the fan, so the whole room looks much more dreary than it actually was. The sellers had this set up so nicely and it was so homey. 

After: We replaced the fan with an old chandelier, painted the ceiling in the same color as the kitchen and continued the cream color throughout. The crown molding, chair railing, baseboards and windows are all in a semi-gloss white. I'm so happy with how everything turned out! 

We are going to get a rug for this room, but haven't found one that we love yet. 

I love these little egg pictures and plan on getting four more. 

Originally, I wanted this wall to have the egg pictures but since I didn't buy all of the frames that I wanted to buy since they were so expensive, we decided to keep our plate wall up for now. I'm happy with it, so maybe I'll keep it this way. 

Things are shaping up how I imagined they would be. We've been working on the living room and today I have been tasked with tackling the upstairs. There is still quite a bit of painting we'll have to do to get everything to match our stuff, but we love the house and we're so thankful and excited that we can call it ours!