They're here!!!

We've been patiently waiting for new furniture and new shutters.  The furniture, which I swore they said would be here in time for Thanksgiving, will not be ready until Dec. 20th.  Some of it is in but we still need to finish painting.  It is waiting for the rest of the pieces to be ready for a full delivery.

The shutters, however, were finished ahead of schedule.  They are so awesome! I totally love the work that Devenco did for us. They are beautiful.  Time to save up for the dining room because now I want them in that room as well!  Happy Thanksgiving to us for sure!!!

BEFORE

AFTER!

Now if I could just make the time to finish painting the walls!  Slowly but surely, this project is staring to take shape.

More excitement!

As you can see from the pictures of our home, we have a lot of windows - TALL windows.  Currently on the downstairs windows that can be seen from the front of the house, we have 96" panel curtains on them.  We get a lot of direct sunlight and although the curtains are not my favorite, they have served a purpose.  They help keep the rooms cool from the blaring sun and it keeps the furniture from fading also.  Thankfully, the previous home owner brought them back after closing and we were able to save ourselves a ton of money by putting them back up throughout the house.  Curtain panels are not cheap, especially the 96" ones!

However, I have never been in love with curtains.  I think they are pretty but I see them as dust magnets.  Thankfully my husband has a vacuum attachment that is safe for curtains and he tries to get rid of the weekly dust but if I had my way, we would have shutters on every window.  I grew up in a home that had shutters and I absolutely love them.  Not the big plantation shutters but the old style, colonial shutters that are double stacked and can open on the top and bottom as well as the individual shutters themselves.  You can let us much light in as you want, when you want with them.  You can also peep out one shutter without moving the entire panel in case you need to see who is knocking on your door on a lazy weekend morning.

Since we are sinking a ton of resources into our new furniture, we made the decision to go ahead and spend just a bit more to get what I have always wanted for the house - real.wood.colonial.shutters. YESSSSSSS!!!

If you aren't really sure what I mean when I say colonial shutters vs. plantation shutters, here is a picture from the company we are using:

I swear I just get giddy looking at this picture!  These too will take about six weeks to receive as they are custom made.  It will be well worth the wait, I can already tell!

Changes a coming....

So we've been in the house for three years, give or take, and life is wonderful.  We totally love it here and cannot imagine ever leaving.  That being said, we've designated it as our forever home.  I don't think we ever doubted that we would not stay but it feels good to announce it with passion. With this title comes the desire to make changes that will last a lifetime. Even though the house has been renovated, there are plenty of projects to keep us busy for years and years and years to come.

The hardest part is trying to decide what to do first and how to prioritize our project list. Where do you start? Do you attempt to work in the yard? Or do you try to redo the inside? At this point, we've started doing a little bit of both.

Over the past few weeks, we've been doing the never ending purge of the inside of the house.  We took two trips to the dump, which in our County is a bargain - only $7 a load up to 400 pounds.  We hauled off all of our living room furniture - the sofa, loveseat and arm chair.  When pieces were out in the sunlight I was embarrassed to think I had let people sit on those darn things.   I purchased them for my first apartment after college in 1997 and we've been using them ever since.  Three moves, one baby, two puppies and five kitties total have lived on them. Now that they are gone, we moved two chairs and a rug I purchased last year into the room.  Originally, the plan was to start using them in Jan. 2013.  When I rescued a German Short-haired Pointer pup, that plan changed.  If we had not decided to move her to a plantation, we probably would have kept the old furniture.  With Dixie gone, the plan was back on track to get some new furniture for both a formal living room and a viewing room.

Of course, lots of plans have gone through our heads but neither I nor my husband are interior decorators.  We enlisted the help of Jerri at Ethan Allen and are thankful for her guidance.  She came over to our house and listened to our dreams for the house.  She measured windows, walls and doors.  She took pictures and sketched in her note pad. Then, she brought us to her office to see the project board for our two rooms that we've decided to work on first.  We could not be more pleased.  As you can see below, she staged the rooms for us with the furniture we liked.  She pulled colors for us to consider.  Within a few hours, we ordered custom sofas and chairs for our house!  Within two months, it will all be delivered.  Cannot.wait.to.see.it!

Baby birds abound

Every morning, we wake to the music of the baby birds around us begging mama and daddy for breakfast.  I finally caught a few pictures of the nests and babes.

This first picture gives me the greatest joy.  I love watching birds and the wren is my absolute favorite.  They are so tiny yet so busy with life.  My grandfather made me these bird boxes ages ago and I brought them with me from our former house.  The only thing that enjoyed it there was a squirrel that made a larger hole.  However, now it has a nesting wren!  This photo was taken before Mother's Day and later I saw four tiny eggs in the box.  I think there is only one baby in the box now but since it is so close to the ground where predators might linger, I have tried my best to stay away.

This next set of photographs comes from the corner of our front porch.  I think most of the noise we are hearing in the morning is coming from this nest.  I think the Purple Finch (aka House Finch) family had at least five babies.  You can vaguely make out baby birds in the first picture and in the second photo, you can see one of the babies almost ready to leave the nest with lots of other tail feathers poking up from the nest.  Sadly, I think they left the next yesterday because it has been very quiet.  Time to clean up the mess then, I guess!

Spring has sprung!

The trees and flowers are all abloom and the pollen has been raining for weeks!  There have been plenty of front porch evenings enjoying the milder yet still warmer days of spring. 

I am so excited that Memorial Day is just around the corner.  I know that means summer is knocking on the door but more importantly for the owner of an older home, it means it is time for patriotic bunting to go up!  YAY!

The ladies in my neighborhood and I have been discussing patriotic bunting and how long it should stay up.  Thankfully, we all agree it is a beautiful thing to keep up from Memorial Day up until Labor Day.  It covers all the holidays and who doesn't love being patriotic?

I was going to put ours up this weekend but the rain has been horrific and I have a little nest of baby House Finches in the corner of my porch pillars.  I don't want to disturb them too much.  They are newly hatched and mama and daddy are very protective.  We'll see how the week goes with growth. We also have a nest of Wrens in our bird house on our picket fence that are too cute for words. You can definitely tell it is spring when the sun begins to rise in the mornings due to all the chirping going on!

The husband and I have been kicking around new renovation projects to tackle.  We've both been so busy with life in general that routine upkeep of the house is all we have been able to handle.  I think the main project we'd like to have done is a new drive way.  The current drive way is simply dirt and with the amount of rain we've had in Georgia over the past year, it is totally washing away.  I've started a Pintrest board focused on styles of driveways that we like for an older home.  We need to get quotes and all that wonderful stuff so we have some idea of what we are getting ourselves into!

Happy 2013, y'all!

It is amazing to me how fast a year goes by now that I am older. Remember the anticipation of 2000?  Thirteen years later, here we are moving right along.

As I look back over 2012, my assement is that we had a great year with many blessings.  Probably the biggest was to finally sell our former home that we had been renting out since we moved to the dream house.  Since that chapter has closed, it finally seems appropriate to put more touches on our forever home.

Maybe I had a subconcious fear that we would lose the dream house.  I'm not really sure but once the former home sold I felt a new boost of energy to work on making the home in Marietta even more "ours" both inside and out.

I apologize for the poor pictures but I took them with my camera phone.  Despite the quality, you can see the progress.  More to come on this topic in 2013! May yours be abundantly blessed!

This is the faux wall that seperates our kitchen from our kitchen dining area.  I love Glory Haus and have found a fondness for their beautiful crosses.  Hopefully they'll create more that I can add to either side as the years go by.

Thanks to the invention of the commander strip, it is easy to put pictures on a plaster wall.  We plan to get more pictures framed and have our family story told as you travel up the stairs.