Oh My Word - We're Buying a Farm!

I've been away for a while (okay like two weeks or so), because we had a couple of let-downs on the home search road.  Oh well.  Forget those houses.  They just weren't "the right one" I guess.

But today I'm happy to report that we have an accepted offer (offer, counter offer, counter-counter offer, acceptance) on this little diamond in the rough.

All photos are from the Sibcy Cline agent listing.

It's been on the market since late February.  And we actually looked at it a long time ago, like right after it was listed.  At the time, I wasn't impressed.  And then we hunted.  And hunted.  And hunted.  And got out bid.  Last week, we began to realize that this house was actually a good bet.  It doesn't have vaulted ceilings or a really open floorplan like the house we tried to buy before (twice - ugh), but there is a lot of room for improvement.  Which is really what we're after.

Back of the house

So here are all the dirty details. 

It's in Hamilton Township (near Loveland / Mason area), but not in any city limits, so we can basically do whatever we want.  And I don't have to pay local taxes.  Yay.  The area is really quiet, and the houses are all spaced pretty far apart.  You have to have a minimum 2 acre lot to be able to build out there, so we don't have to worry about cul-de-sac subdivision-type houses popping up.  It's actually on the same road as the other house (see previous link to "Finding the Prince"), but has a much bigger lot.

It's on 2.83 acres, with a barn and fenced-in pasture.  The people behind us have horses in their pasture, so we can see them from inside the house.  I don't think we'll get a horse, though.  But I wouldn't mind taking the neighbors' for a ride (once I learn how, that is . . . ).

Barn

It has a really solidly-built barn, which has 2 garage spaces, a workshop, a hay loft, and the covered area (fenced in around back) for a cow.  Or sheep.  Or chickens.  I have a feeling it may get filled up with extra cars.  Or a VW Westfalia.

Garage

Here's the garage, which is on the right side of the house, if you look at it from the street.  There's no garage door opener, so that may be one of the first projects.  It would be nice to actually park my car in a garage this winter, especially since we'll have the barn for tool / shop / mechanic-y storage.  And the treadmill is going to go in the garage.  Once I actually get a treadmill, that is.

And here's a view of the front door / porch area.

Front Porch

It definitely needs some help.  I can't wait to take that terrible screen door off and replace the wood door with something nicer.  The porch is actually big enough to put a couple of chairs out there.  Maybe that's where these will end up.

Now for the interior photos . . .

Living Room

This is the view of the living room from the hallway.  The door next to the fireplace is a coat closet, and the other door is the front entry door.  The opening to the left is the dining room, and then through the doorway you can see the spot where the fridge should be in the kitchen.  We've got to get  a fridge when we move in.  Those spindle divider thingies are coming down like, Day 1.  The fireplace is woodburning (and it's actually usable - yay!), and that brass insert is coming out as well.  Along with the mirror.  And the weird wall sconce spotlight thing. 

Here's another view, looking the opposite direction.

Living Room (looking toward hallway)

What's with all the mirrors, anyway?  The room's already 23' long, let's make it look longer!  (I hope you can detect my sarcasm).



Dining Room

 

This is the dining room. The doorway where the lightswitch is on the right leads to the kitchen. The whole back wall is glass sliding patio doors. It's such a shame they have them covered with those terrible curtains. Their coming down immediately, along with the pioneer-style lantern light fixture. Any takers? I'll ship it to you! Free of charge! 

 



Dining Room, looking toward living room

The hardwood floors run throughout the house, except for in the kitchen, bathrooms, and mudroom.  They're a bit orange for my taste, but they're in really good condition.  I'm sure the boys will have them scratched up in no time, and we'll be sanding them down and staining them darker (though not right away, since there are some more pertinent projects that need our attention).

Like the kitchen.

Ugly, tiny kitchen

So here's the kitchen, looking back toward the dining room.  It's not huge - about 8' x 10' - but we're planning to take down the wall dividing the kitchen and dining room.  We'll open it up and make one big kitchen with bar seating.  I've already devised a plan from Ikea.

So with that wall gone, we gain 6" and can extend the countertops out to have an overhang for seating.  The backs of the cabinets and range are going to be covered with beadboard and trim to finish everything off without seams.  We'll have 2 glass cabinets on the opposite wall, and open shelves to the left of the window.  Not a lot of space, but hey, I priced everything out from Ikea and the grand total came to just over $6,000 - including the appliances, hardware and countertop.  Not too shabby.

And through the door next to the fridge is a hallway that leads to the second bathroom, the mudroom and backdoor, and the garage.

Mudroom

Here is the mudroom.  And of course, I've already got a plan for that, too.

Since the kitchen's not huge, and we need more storage for food and things like that, I wanted to add some big cabinets in here.  Also from Ikea.  I love Ikea.

So you may be thinking, "Karie, aren't there heating registers all over the place?  You can't put cabinets in front of there."  That is the best part about the deal we made with the sellers.  Our lovely Realtor got us an estimate for a local company to put in ductwork and a heat pump, so that we can have central heating and A/C.  The house currently has fuel oil, which heats a hot water boiler, which then makes heat come out of the baseboard registers.  And window A/C in the summer.  That was just not going to happen.  So when we make it to the closing table, the sellers will have a check written out to the HVAC company for the amount of the estimate, and then we will have them put everything in after we close, but before we move furniture in the house.  Amazing.

So now, on to the bathrooms.  They are both blue.  Everywhere.  I'm guessing nothing in this house has been updated since it was built in 1958.  Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, because the house has been so lovingly taken care of.  And that's reassuring.

But man, are they blue.

Main Bath (near bedrooms)

 

Second Bath (between mudroom and kitchen)

I've got the same plan for both of these.  And it involves a lot of white subway tile.  But as we know, I've got mad skills with the subway tile.  This is me doing the subway tile backsplash in the kitchen at the Jasper house.

Those running shorts look terrible.  Gotta get rid of those . . .

And here are the bedrooms.  Pretty boring.  Pretty basic.  But decent sizes and they all have fairly large closets.

Second Bedroom (My Office)

Guest Bedroom

Master Bedroom

Master Bedroom, Opposite Corner (looking back into hallway)

I look at all these photos and keep thinking, "Damn, girl.  You've got a lot of trim to paint."  I told myself after painting all of the woodwork at the Jasper house, that the next house was going to have all the wood already painted.  No such luck.

So there it is, folks.  Our soon-to-be new house.  The home inspection is scheduled for Monday (October 1) and we have a tentative closing date of October 26.  Hopefully we won't have to pay any rent for November, and we can have everything moved out by then! 

We have a lot of packing to do.  Fortunately, we knew we wouldn't be renting for very long, and a lot of our stuff is still in boxes from the move from the Jasper house.

Wish us luck!  We're really excited and can't wait to get our hands on this place!  I hope you'll follow along on our journey.  I'll be sure to post our progress along the way!

Ikat Fever

Last weekend, someone asked me what an ikat pattern was, and I didn't have a really good answer for her.  I could easily point one out, but words kinda failed me when I was trying to describe it.  I think I ended up saying, "It's kind of a tribal, kind of stylized geometric or floral design.  But, like wavy or kinda blurry."

I tried pulling up a photo of ikat fabric to show her what I was failing to describe accurately, but the Marketplace section of Ikea is a total dead zone for cell phone reception.

So I looked up "ikat" on Dictionary.com and this is what they came up with for me:

i·kat

   [ee-kaht]  Show IPA

noun

1.

a method of printing woven fabric by tie-dyeing the warpyarns (warp ikat),  the weft yarns (weft ikat),  or both(double ikat)  before weaving.

2.

a fabric made by this method.

Say what?

And if you don't have a ready knowledge of how fabric is made, (which most people don't) then this definition doesn't do you a darn bit of good.  And even if you do, it doesn't translate to the beautiful patterns that the technique creates.

Here, allow me.

Calico Corners, the venerable fabric super-supplier, has these.

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Ballard Designs, a site I love, has several ikat prints that are really nice.  If you noticed, I used this one in my Inspiration Board for the Dining Room.

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I really like that its a subtle print, so it will go with a lot of different accent colors.  The best part?  It's by Sunbrella, so you can clean it easily without worrying that you'll damage the fabric.  Great for a house with kids or dogs.

This one is a fun punch of color.  Great for a bedroom accent chair or pillows.  They also have it in grey.

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Here's one with more of a linear motif.

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And one more from Ballard Designs for good measure.  It's a lovely mix of blue, ivory, green, mustard, and rusty-copper.

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Ballard offers these fabrics by-the-yard (in case you want to make curtains or upholster your own piece), and also as seating fabric for their Special Order Pick-A-Fabric upholstered pieces.  I'm really loving this Simone Bench in the Malabar Coral ikat with the Driftwood finish on the legs.

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The pattern is also popping up in rugs.  Here are two from Ballard.

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This month, House Beautiful has selected a gorgeous grouping of ikat rugs (page 66 if you read the magazine).  You can view their slideshow here.

And if all that wasn't enough, here are some lovely pillows to drool over.

This one's from Crate and Barrel.

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Here's one from West Elm.

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Happy shopping!  I'm going to be on the lookout for more ikat patterns tomorrow at the Country Living fair in Columbus!

Going to the Fair

Country Living magazine holds a fair three times a year, where readers of the magazine can shop for antiques, meet the editors of the magazine, and get information on the latest products for the home.  This spring, one was held in Austin, Texas and next month, they're having on in Atlanta, Georgia.  This weekend, September 14 - 16, they're having on right up the road in Columbus, Ohio.

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Lucky for us, we never have plans, so when I asked the hubs if he wanted to go last night, he jokingly said, "I don't know if we'll have time.  The only thing I had planned was mowing the yard."

I'm really excited to get to attend, especially since it's less than a two-hour drive from our house.  I can't wait to see what I find to bring home!

Here's a link to the list of the vendors that will be there - there's over 150.  It's going to be huge!

They will also have on-site antiques appraisals by members of the Antiques Roadshow staff, a farmer's market, and cooking demos.

Here's a link to the schedule of events for the weekend.

Tickets are no longer available in advance online, but they are available at the door.  It's $16 per person for a one-day pass, and $20 per person for a weekend pass.  We're only going the one day - Saturday (I wouldn't put Patrick through that much shopping - poor guy).

I'll be sure to bring my camera with me to photograph some of the lovely items for sale, and I'll post photos of anything that I get to bring home with me.

. . . Let's Try This Again

Last night, we made another offer on the house we put the offer on back in July.  I previously posted about it in Finding the Prince.

We're trying to not get our hopes up again, since we went through all the work before to get the deal done on our end.  But our trusty Realtor has ensured us that both of the sellers have agreed to the terms in the contract and we should have both signatures needed by the end of the week.

Cross your fingers for us.

Home Design / Room Planning Software

Back in the good ol' days of design school, there were few options for room planning software, and they were prohibitively expensive.  For architects, Autodesk's AutoCAD is still the industry standard, but the software takes years to learn and relies exclusively on the user's knowledge of design standards and construction practices in order to come to a finished, workable floorplan.  Plus, achieving realistic 3D views takes hours of rendering time.

20/20 Technologies is used commonly by design students, office designers, residential interior designers and kitchen / bath designers in the retail setting.  It's a drag-and-drop system of adding cabinets, fixtures, appliances and the like into a floorplan, with 3D renderings generated with a couple of mouse clicks.  But the software has its limitations and glitches, and is available only to those in the design profession.

With the increasing popularity of do-it-yourselfers combined with the sluggish economy, companies have introduced their own versions of FREE software for the general public to use for their own homes.  People want to make sure that they can visualize what their new kitchen or couch will look like in their home before they fork over their hard-earned dough.  I've been exploring some of these new software options and wanted to share my opinion about them.

Homestyler.com is a web-based software site that is brought to the masses by the good folks at Autodesk (makers of AutoCAD).  

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In my opinion, this software site is my favorite for doing a whole home design, because of the photo-realistic rendering capabilities and the many options they have for interior finishes.

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Pretty impressive, huh?  There are a lot of really great renderings done by other designers in their Gallery in case you need some inspiration for that project of your own.

The wall builder tool is easy to use, and dropping in architectural details is simple.  You can resize and reposition items easily, as well as copy and paste multiple items in the same room.  

They have generic furniture items, all of which are resizeable so that they'll match the dimensions of your existing items.  They also have premium brands featuring each company's most popular items, allowing users to get the exact look of their Caesarstone counter or Circa Lighting ceiling fixture.

Two more sites that allow users to plan their furniture placement in each room in their home are Urbanbarn.com's Make Room Planner and Better Homes & Gardens' Arrange-A-Room.  I played around with both of these planners and find that the ease of use may be a little higher than Homestyler's, but the options are much more limited.  Urbanbarn.com's Make Room is less photorealistic and you either have to use the generic symbols or products from their own furniture line.  The BHG Arrange-A-Room doesn't have 90 degree snap points for walls or rotating of furniture, which is kind of annoying, because I'm really picky and like to have everything perfectly lined up when drawing out rooms.  Also, you have to drag and drop each individual item, rather than doing a quickie copy and paste function for multiple items.

For kitchen design, I really like Ikea's Home Planner 3D Tool.  

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Resizing walls is easy, and changing options on the cabinets is simple.  The good thing about this tool is that it allows you to go easily from 2D plan view to 3D.  It also has tips for placement that those who are not professional kitchen designers wouldn't know (like leaving at least 1" next to the wall for a filler piece so the door hardware doesn't slam into the wall).  However, it can be difficult when trying to reposition a cabinet because of their snap-to-wall function.  Also, they only offer cabinets and appliances for kitchens.

Another kitchen design tool is at Home Depot's website.  The Virtual Kitchen allows users to choose by style, kitchen layout or brand.  You can pick from a pre-designed kitchen layout they have available in their library or create their own.  Fun fact: I designed the kitchens featured in the Martha Stewart Contemporary Perry Street, Casual Display 1, and Traditional Mount Desert photography sets when I worked at MasterBrand Cabinets in Jasper, Indiana.  Good times.

Lowe's Virtual Room Designer lets you design a kitchen, bath or a laundry room, either by starting from scratch or by using one of their pre-designed rooms and modifying it to fit your needs and space limitations.  You can also design your dream deck!  You can bet I'll be using that before next spring gets here.

So I hope my research will help you out next time you need to re-arrange your furniture or plan a dream kitchen.  Each of these tools takes some patience and some practice, but they're helpful and can save you time and money.  I think the time spent learning how to use these is well worth it to make sure that your living room furniture is going to fit BEFORE you have it all delivered to your house!

 

DIY Paint-By-Number

Back in the good ol' days of college, during my junior year at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (go Dawgs!) I was the undergraduate assistant to the Advanced Painting professor, Najjar Abdul-Mussawir.  When the students decided they didn't want to keep their work, he would bring them back to the studio and I would prime over them and he would re-use them for his own work.

I expressed an interest in keeping one of the pieces - a large 46" x 46" oil painting of green peppers.  It wasn't particularly good, but it was big, and when you have literally no money to decorate your apartment and can get a big piece like that for free, you take it anyway.

That painting made it from my house in Carbondale, to our apartment in Murphysboro, to our apartment in Huntingburg, Indiana to our house in Jasper, to our apartment in Loveland, Ohio and is now at our current rental house here in Milford.  Knowing that we would be buying a house (and moving yet again!) in a couple of months, I couldn't stand the thought of moving those ugly peppers one more time.

The resurgence of vintage paint by numbers is everywhere.  I had been stalking some animal portraits on Etsy, and finding that none of them would have the big impact of a large painting for the price I wanted to pay, I decided to do one of my own.

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I'm a sucker for anything with an animal on it, and according to Flea Market Style magazine, animals are one of the top trends in collectible items for 2012.  Over on my Pinterest Color Inspiration board, I've had a photo of this Swiss Brown cow pinned for several weeks, because I love the colors in it (and just look at how beautiful she is!)

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So this is the photo I used to create my own paint-by-number inspired work of art.

This is how it turned out.

And here's how I did it:

1.  Print out the photo you want to use at full 8.5" x 11" size.

2.  Print a piece of grid paper to use as a guide.  I did mine with 1" grid squares.  Print the image below at 100% and they should come out to be 1" apart on a full size sheet of paper.  Standard grid paper that you buy is at 1/4" squares, so if you use purchased grid paper, mark every fourth line and you'll have 1".

3.  Lay the grid paper on top of your photo and tape together with tape that you can easily remove, like non-permanent satin gift wrap tape.

4.  Tape both pieces of paper onto a sunny window and trace over the image, ignoring the grid lines.  Follow the lines of the photo where two colors meet to give a rough shape to the image.  Remember, paint-by-numbers are just simple outlines of color boundaries that are painted in with one solid color.  Because your photo may have gradual changes in shades, rather than hard edges, you'll have to take a little bit of artistic liberty so that you have clear lines.  Don't forget to incorporate the highlights in the photo - that's what gives an image its dimension.  You will now have the outline of your photo with the grid going through it, dividing it up into squares.

5.  When you have your photo outlined on the graph paper, you can start to make a corresponding grid on your canvas.  To blow my image up from 8.5" x 11" to 46"x46", I multiplied my dimensions by 5.75, so each 1" square on my paper would correspond to 5 3/4" on my canvas.  Because I started with a rectangular photo and I was putting it onto a square canvas, I knew that I was only going to use 8" x 8" of the original photo, so part of the top and bottom was cut off.

6.  Take a tape measure and a carpentry square or a T square and measure out your new grid on the canvas.  Starting in the upper left corner, use a pencil to make a light mark every 5.75" from left to right along the top edge of the canvas. Repeat along the bottom edge of the canvas, using the square to make sure the lines are perpendicular to the edge.  Connect the marks to create the vertical grid lines.

7.  Repeat this step for the horizontal grid lines, starting at the top left corner of the canvas and marking down the edge, then moving to the right side of the canvas and start measuring from the top, marking every 5.75" down to the bottom corner.  Connect the marks to create the horizontal grid lines.

8.  Now you should have a grid that corresponds to your photo on the canvas.  Starting along the top of the piece of paper, label each horizontal space from left to right with a letter (A, B, C etc).  Label each vertical space along the left edge with a number, going down the canvas.  Do the same on the canvas.

9.  You will now have a way of quickly referencing a particular area of the photo and matching it to where it corresponds on your canvas.

10.  Use a pencil to fill in the squares on the canvas with the lines from the grid paper.  It doesn't have to be perfect, just use the grid as a guide.  The lines should flow from one square to the other, so don't worry about getting each individual square exactly as it is on the paper.

11.  Once the image is sketched in on the canvas, you need to select 6-10 colors that you're going to use to fill in the painting.  I used 8.  The goal of paint-by-numbers is a flat, folk-art look where the paint is consistent from one area to the other, so I used pre-mixed acrylic paints from Hobby Lobby, matching them in the store to my photo as best I could.  You will probably only need one of the little bottles per color, but I bought 2 of each since I had such a big canvas.

12.  Label the areas of the painting with a specific number for each of the colors you're using.  I labeled the tops of all my bottles with the corresponding number so I could look quickly and see which color I needed.

13.  Begin by filling in all the areas that are labeled 1, then 2, then so on.  Pay particular attention to the edges of the color area, and use a fine, tapered tip brush for accuracy.  You can fill the larger areas in with a 1/2 - 1" flat edge brush.

14.  Depending on the color, you may need to go back in and put a second (or a third for white) coat once it's all dry.  Acrylics dry quickly, so you will probably be able to start the second coat on color #1 by time you've worked your way through all the other colors.

I'm going to do another one, not quite as big though.  I'll be sure to photograph the progress as I'm doing it and post everything when it's done.  I think I'm going to do a sheep next time.