The perfect dining room

So while the girls have been napping during the days, and I've pretended to get my "chores" completed, I've been looking at pictures of different rooms on the Internet in hopes of getting inspiration for our home here (to show) and for our nonexistent new home. :) The first room we'll be attacking here at 311 will be the breakfast nook/kitchen. We're currently using the nook area for our dining room and the dining room for the play room. We'll probably continue to use the nook as the dining room until we get closer to show time just because the dining room is right off of the living room, and it helps me when watching the girls play. As a whole, I'd say our style is modern country... if that makes sense. I love certain aspects of country like things looking aged/used, nothing is too matchy matchy, things are just kind of thrown together but look great, and I love that it all looks warm and homey.

The last couple of days I've found the following photos, but only likes bits and pieces of each. So basically if we put all of these together... PERFECTO!

Basically our dining furniture now is a honey color, but we'll soon be finishing it in distressed black. I'm not going to take a hammer or anything to it, but I think some sanding in some of the "natural ware" areas will look awesome. We also have a pie safe that is buffet level. In this photo I loved the buffet table with the two shelves above for personal family photos. TO DIE FOR! It's a wall that would make a huge impact on the overall room, and we would seriously need to buy two shelves, and call it a day. I already have the black frames currently hanging in our living room.
I also liked this wall of pictures. It's neat how they are all different frames, but they share that center line. Maybe an idea I'll use in another room.

I love love love this next one, and we have that exact corner hutch in the same honey finish as the dining furniture. This just seems like a great corner to me... just maybe not in white.

This next photo is kind of blah, but I LOVE THE GREEN HUTCH!

The chandeliers in the next two photos are awesome! How nice would dinner be with candles lit?

This next one is super homey looking... I love that buffet table, but again... we already have a cute little pie safe.

This is actually something I've already done in our current house... framing 3d objects. In our dining room now I have an old feed sack framed, and it looks awesome. I need to find more of those frames this summer.

Now to sell some of these ideas to B. :)

The goal

So Bryan and I have been driving around for what seems like months... actually it has been months... trying to get a taste of what we want in our new home. This is a custom built home in a neighborhood very close to where we live now. It was actually built by the developers who sold us our land. While a home like this is laughably out of our price range, I heart the design.

We've agreed that we're looking for something in the Contemporary Craftsman style. We love the bright colors, the columns, the stone... the list is endless. We have probably close to 10-15 floor plans that we're looking at currently. None of which are Craftsman, but have a lot of the same features on the exterior that we're sure could be switched out for the style we're looking for.

Sure...

So, there hasn't been too much to report lately. We're waiting on some renovations until the weather is nicer and vacations/baby showers/birthday parties slow down a bit to get started. First on the list will be the breakfast nook/kitchen. I had my list set up and ready to go until this happened.

Our spare bathroom doesn't get much action unless it's football season or the girls are taking a bath. Even when the girls are in there, they AREN'T taking a shower. Well, my brother Aaron has been staying with us the last couple of weeks, so the shower gets used daily. One day last week, he finished showering... getting ready for work... I went in to the kitchen to get Reese some juice... nothing out of the ordinary. For some reason I glanced up to the ceiling and saw the yucky mess pictured above. I immediately yelled for Aaron to make sure he turned the water off. He already had. I then called Bryan and told him to race home because my ceiling was sure to collapse. :) After some thorough investigation, we discovered the leak.

We have one of those shower caddies hanging on our shower head with the girls' shampoos and whatnots in it. Basically the water coming out of the shower head was hitting the bottles causing the water to dribble down the front of the shower where the spouts are. The water was then leaking behind the faucet (which apparently was not all the way caulked) causing the leak, which then caused my ceiling to look tragic. Oy.

Luckily we caught it in time and are able to fix the damage without calling in a plumber! Hopefully a little securing and some paint will make it all super swell again. Here's to NO MORE silly problems! :)

Hurdle crossed!

We are landowners! It's so super exciting and relieving! There were issues with the land being divided but apparently not according to the town... that was putting a damper on the appraisal. They ordered the appraisal anyways, appraised it according to the plat on file... everything seemed to work out because our loan went through! We're now the proud owners of 2.4 acres. I'm already so proud of us. A big goal of mine was to own my own home that wasn't attached to someone else's. It's amazing to me that we've done that and are now moving on to build our very own home.

There are SO MANY things to get done around here. As soon as I think I have some sort of plan, I get overwhelmed and change my mind. First it was "let's declutter the kitchen, fix the floor, paint..." blah di blah di blah. After I box things up, the box goes into the garage for storage until Bryan can get into the attic to organize. As boxes seem to be piling up, I'm realizing that I need to box up the things that are already in there to be able to better organize bins while I'm decluttering the rest of the house. Because we used our garage as another room of our house and not an actual garage... there is tons of stuff in there. So basically what I'm saying is... I'm working in the garage FIRST. :) We're packing everything into the 18 gallon plastic bins as opposed to boxes... of course that's a lot of bins, but we are forever using bins for something, and it's much easier to store things. Today I managed to pack up 2.5 bins worth of Hokie gear from the garage while Emma Grace was napping and Bryan was entertaining Reese... and that's not even all of it.

Hopefully as the process continues, we'll have more pictures to post dealing with both projects throughout this house and a couple things we'd like to get accomplished on the land this summer. Did I mention WE OWN LAND?! :)