Beauty inside, making its way out

Here we are in the thick of summer and I’m loving every minute of it!

This was post hike at Smith Rock. Check out that sky!

As I sit here today, I am 10 days away from all my kids and grand-kiddos being here for a week and I couldn’t be more excited! Seriously, such a dream to get to spend this extended time together during the wonderful Central Oregon summer.

One of the things I love most about this place, is how it smells. When the sun gets hot and heats up the pine, there is not much else like it. It takes me back to when we were deep in the years of raising our kids and we would arrive here for vacation. We’d come to the end of the Santiam Pass and make our way into Sisters, and stop for gas and of course ice cream, and that first inhale of the clean, pine air was heavenly. The warm air would blanket us with this delightful smell and I was instantly in my happy place.

[Fun fact: our Tate was just here and came out on the deck and took a big deep breath and said, “Mom, I love this smell! It’s one of my core childhood memories and makes me feel so happy.”]

I still can’t believe I get to live here!!

Anyway, our house projects are coming to an end (those on the inside anyway—more to come on the outside next spring:). We do still need to get the fireplace enclosure finished and paint all the interior doors, but in light of what our list looked like a couple of months ago, that feels like nothing. Haha

So, I thought it might be fun to give you a few before and afters of what we’ve accomplished so far. I love looking back at the pics and being reminded of how far we’ve come!

Are you ready to come along???

As I have said before, we downsized, BIG TIME! And because our home is in a resort community, it was sold to us furnished (with lovely things from the 1970’s). Please enjoy the plaid furniture in this first pic taken from the entry way.

Before pics were taken from the listing so sorry about the quality being kinda blurry…

But, here’s what it’s like today.

As you can see in this picture, the fireplace area is not completed yet. We’re still toying with the ideas on making it what we’d like it to be. (I’ll be sure to fill you in on it when it’s done!) But it’s so much brighter and happy to me!

Here are all the things we did to this space…

-Painted the entire place—-walls and ceiling. It took us a couple of years to decide whether we would go for it and paint the wood ceiling (sidetone, people have very strong opinions about you painting wood!), but we did a trial in one of the back bedrooms and loved it! So we decided to bite the bullet and go for it and we are both so happy we did. As you can see, we left the wood beams and are so glad we did. Love the contrast and warmth the wood brings to the space.

-Enclosed the wood burning stove and added built in bookshelves. This not only added storage but also created a space for our giant tv in the center of the wall, rather than off to the side of the stove. Under the right bookshelf there is a space for us to store wood in the winter months.

(Mike loves the tv——I could live without it for sure, but its his house too so #compromise. Not gonna lie though, Top Gun is pretty amazing on that thing!)

-We also laid white oak hardwood floors which we both love! We chose the lightest stain we could, and also wanted a warm tone, rather than cool. Those were quite the adventure to lay since we ordered utility grade, we had to pick through the pile to find the most useable pieces and as we got near the end, we thought for sure we were going to run out! Praise the Lord, we didn’t or we would have had to wait another month for the next bundle to arrive.

If you were able to see to the right of the last photo, you’d notice that there is a nook that we also perked up. Here’s a pic from afar…As you can see, with our furniture it lands behind the sofa and created a bit of a dead space. So we felt like it needed some sprucing up and functionality.

That tiny space over in the corner is what I’m referring to:)

Here it is a little closer from another angle today! Not a huge space, but definitely more functional.

I moved the hooks that we had put on the other wall over to this corner to cut down on clutter in the walk through space towards the kitchen. We not only added a mirror (to check yourself on the way out the door:), as well as a cute little bench to sit on and put your shoes on and a basket to store gloves and hats in the winter, but also a shelf with a couple of frames for some dimension and warmth on the white wood wall. (Pics for the frames haven’t arrived yet—and for those who took my poll on Instagram, I went with black and white:)

I would say the biggest transformation of all though has by far got to be the kitchen! This space was small, dark and very closed in, with hanging wood cabinets dividing the space. Our vision was to open this baby up and we nailed it! We moved the stove over to the wall and put the sink in the island.

And here it is today! Our new lighting is only temporarily wired in. We will do a more permanent install next spring when we replace the roof and can get to the ceiling. (one of the drawbacks of a wood ceiling rather than sheetrock, you can’t repair as easily)

So, not only did we rip those cabinets down, but we also took the peninsula out and created an island. This took it from being a galley kitchen, that only allowed for 1 or 2 people in there at a time, to a much more open, fluid space. As a part of this new design, we pushed the island over 4 inches, which was probably the best decision we made out of the whole thing. I cannot believe how much those 4 inches created so much more flow for the entire space.

I also decided to go with the blended cream cabinets instead of basic white and I’m SO GLAD I DID!!! It took it from being stark white to a much warmer overall feel. I’m also happy that we chose the dark cabinets for the island. I don’t know about you, but lower cabinets always seem to take more of a beating and the dark hides some of that wear. They look black in the pic but in the daylight they actually look more like a dark navy, which I’m happy about.

Here it is from the dining room before.

And here it is today! Isn’t that wild?!!! It’s amazing what light will do to a space. I feel like it not only brightened it up, but made it feel so much bigger.

Mike has wanted to try concrete countertops our entire marriage and we finally bit the bullet and went for it here. My only requirement was that they be white:). He spent his entire career working with concrete so he felt fully prepared for this project, (especially after watching multiple YouTube videos of others who had done it before:)

What we didn’t know is that the concrete mixture for countertops is much different than traditional concrete. It is far more fibrous. Couple that with the altitude here in Sunriver as well as an 80 degree day and let me just say, it was rough!!!

Our challenging experience included everything from the consistency being thick and drying far too quickly, to the drill motor burning up and buckets blowing out!

If you know anything about concrete, it’s pretty time sensitive, so once you start you have to do whatever it takes to make sure you can keep moving (especially with a large island top). This basically led to me making multiple runs to the local Ace Hardware begging them to help me find what I needed as Mike continued the process at home. Fortunately for us, they are just around the corner so it didn’t take long to get there and get home with what we needed.

***Pro tip: if you want to challenge your marriage, do concrete countertops together. If that’s not your jam, go to Home Depot and order the quartz and call it good. HAHA

As it turns out though, we both love them, even more than we expected to!

You can see a little closer in this pic how they turned out…

They are imperfectly perfect, just like us! They’ve got some wrinkles and a few divots here and there, just like us—-I’ll spare you a pic of the divots and wrinkles on my thighs. I do love the color tho and I love the fact that we did them together!

The truth is this little bungalow is just that——little. And, it sits in the middle of the Deschutes National Forest, so perfectly clean lines are not what this space needs. This home has been such a great place for us to rest and relax and enjoy not only the environment, but a space for others to come and experience that as well. And I don’t know about you, but rest and relaxation isn’t dependent on perfection for me, but rather a place of connection and love for one another. So my imperfectly perfect countertops are just right.

And, I’m finding the older I get, I’m realizing that less is more. My desires have shifted and changed to make room for more connection and a lessening of creating something that feels like a showpiece.

Please don’t get me wrong, I love pretty things and I love to design and create something from nothing. But I’m finding that this longing comes from the image of my God in me—He has made me co-creator with Himself, and for me, creating spaces of intimacy and connection has less to do with flawlessness than it does with a place for relationship and making memories.

So, there it is! —-the last couple of months of our major home projects. I hope you enjoyed seeing the before and after pictures and hearing of all our blunders along the way! We’ll see, maybe next time, I’ll go and dig up some before and after pics of the bathroom remodels we did and share those too!

God bless ya!