Sun Room Complete!

The sun room is done!! We were really good weekend warriors and finished this whole room.  A reminder where we started...

The day we bought the house

How it has looked for the past 9 months..

We bought a ton of carpet tiles to lay down over the terracotta floor.  We decided this would be a good option since this is an indoor/outdoor room.  It's the only good way out to the deck and the yard, so it will get a lot of traffic.  This way, we can replace tiles as needed rather than having to replace installed carpet.  We also liked that the tiles won't damage the original floor in case we ever want to go back to that.

Ready to start!

We marked out the center of the room, laid 4 tiles in the middle, then worked our way out.  We ended up with A LOT of tedious cuts along the edges since the room is not exactly square.  Luckily, I am married to an architect and a perfectionist who pulled out his T square and carpenter's square to make perfect cuts (yes, literally).

And, drum-roll....

View from the kitchen looking in

I'm still not really sure what to do with the hideous A/C unit.  We do use it in the room, but something needs to be done with it.  That's for another day though! The squares photographed kind of funny.. you really can't see much of a variation in the squares. Here's a close-up of the pattern:

BUT, the big test? Did Moses like it? We'll let him decide :)

Sun Room Continued

We decided we would paint the sun room the same color as the kitchen to give the whole thing a better flow.  We really like the color, and I actually didn't really mind the floor, but Brent really wanted a room in the house that had carpet.  We had an estimate done for installation for just that room, but it was way too much.  I got online and found some carpet tiles on improvements.com that I really love! This will be our project next weekend!

Moses really loves it too! He will go sit on this one little square since it really is the only carpet in the house- I promise you'll have some more soon bud!

We also had about 20 paint cans still in the sun room that we had to get rid of.  We really wanted a good way to keep the paint, so I decided to put all the leftovers in mason jars.  I think they look so pretty! And they take up about 1/100th the space.

Be sure to check back soon!! (I mean it this time..)

 

It's Been Way Too Long!

I can't believe how long it has been since I last posted! I have a list ten items long that I need to write updates about! This could take a little while to catch up, but I will get started with a few quick ones...  

Remember that lovely "storage shed" that the previous owners left? Here it is:

Really?! Does this really count as a storage shed? What can I put in there.. trash?? The doors were missing and it would maybe fit one bicycle.  We were sick of living with our sun room in this state:

so embarrassing...

So we decided it was time to invest in a new shed.  We found some local guys online that would come build the shed on-site in less than a day.  They did such a wonderful job and it cost less than getting one from Home Depot or Lowe's.  Check out their handiwork!!

Beautiful!

Wonderful built-in shelving!

Needs a little landscaping!

Brent has already been working on the backyard as you can see a little bit in this picture. We will obviously be planting some shrubs around the foundation of the shed, but we l-o-v-e it!  A little shop-vac action, and the sun room is almost ready for human use! We are almost done painting (here I am with my painting helper close by).

Ready for Brent to cut in!

Now that there is actually room in this room, we had a place to FINALLY sand the stained wood doors from the den.  We have had them sitting in this room since MARCH. Awful. So we took them out on the deck and tried to give the stain stripper a go.

It took us all of about 30 minutes to give up on this project! We had three doors to do, and between the stripping, sanding, priming, and painting, it was clearly going to take us about 17 weekends to complete this project.  SO, we called some trusty painters to do them for us.  $150 and 4 and a half hours later, and the doors were done and beautiful.  These things cost an easy $300 each new.

We also had to paint the inside of this closet.. Here is before (ew)

 And after:

This one is a little blurry cause I just stuck my hair in the paint for the fifth time...

 Amazing what a can of paint can do! So I think I will end this first marathon post here. There's a lot more where this came from though, so stay tuned! :)

Built-Ins

Remember when we took ALL that wallpaper down after we bought the house back in March?? Well we have painted all the walls with a neutral color. YAY! We really like the built-ins upstairs, but it was all just so blah.  Here is a before picture (with the previous owner's stuff still in the shelves):

In all of its yellow glory!...

And after! (I had to shut the door because of the mess in the other side..)

 

Here is a full view

 

Brent put a fresh coat of white paint all over the wood and I painted the back the blue color.  We really like the way it makes the hand-made built-ins look a little bit newer (and cleaner)!

Super Easy Upgrade

Easy!! Yay!! Our house was built in 1966 and has a lot of 1960's quirks.  Our kitchen cabinets are hand-made, built-on-site cabinets, and they are definitely not perfect, but we are not planning on ripping them out any time soon.  We have heard the whole wall would probably come with them cause they're not simply nailed. SOO we have done a few things to try to make them livable.  The cornice over the kitchen sink was so incredibly dated, something HAD to be done.  Here it is before:

 

So country and old.  I decided that, since our cabinets have a lot of paneling anyway, maybe we could just cover it up with some plywood.  We went to Home Depot and bought some for about $4.

After some paint and a few nails, this is what the window looks like:

I'm so glad you can't see the top of the curtain anymore, and I think it looks so much less dated! What do you think??

Brent is a Beast

Since Brent's official diagnosis a few weeks ago, we have been in a bit of a whirlwind.  We had to deal with all the emotions of his diagnosis and had to figure out, mainly financially, how to take the next steps.  Hearing that Brent has MS is a lot like being told he had the tumor and that it was inoperable.  We don't know how he is going to feel day to day, and we don't know what the future will hold, but we can only do our best! For anyone with a chronic illness, finances can be difficult.  We are SO thankful that we have health insurance, even though it may not be ideal.  Did you know that, for someone without insurance, medication for MS costs over $4,000 a MONTH.  Our pharmacy benefit on our insurance will only cover up to $2,000 a YEAR.  Luckily, there are special programs to help you with cost and help you get the medication you need.  After a couple weeks of delay, Brent finally got his Copaxone shots this week.  The nurse from Shared Solutions came during my lunch break on Thursday, and she taught us how to do the injections.  Brent will have to give himself a shot every day from now on.  He needed 7 sites on his body to rotate between.  I know it comes as a shock, but Brent is a little on the thin side, so this was a tough task! There is an auto-inject he can use in some areas, but I will have to give him a manual shot a few times a week--lucky I did all that injection training in optometry school!
Brent did SUCH an amazing job learning how to do everything and I am just amazed at his positive attitude and optimism.  For those who don't know a lot about MS, the medication Brent is starting will hopefully reduce the number of new brain/spine lesions on MRI, and the number of relapses.  Only time will tell if he will respond well to it.  Please keep Brent in your thoughts and prayers as he starts this medicine.  Pray that he has minimal side effects, and that he can tolerate the daily shots.   I promise the next update will be about the house, as we have still managed to get a few things done here and there!

Brent: Updated

I will never forget how I felt when we had top neurosurgeons at Wake Forest and Duke look at Brent and say, "You have a tumor inside your spinal cord and it needs to come out sooner rather than later."  They told us that the surgery is so risky that he would have to learn how to walk again afterward (with a walker for a while) and that he would have chronic pain and numbness for the rest of his life.   We asked them both if they were sure this could not be MS or another neurological disease, and they both point-blank said "I am positive this is a tumor, there is no question."  We had basically scheduled Brent's surgery for October.  I had told work that I was going to have to take a week off (he would be in the hospital for 4 days) and that I would have to play my schedule by ear a little bit.  But, before we let these Johns Hopkins trained surgeons cut into Brent, we were going to make pretty darn sure these guys were right and that this scary surgery was really the only option.  
The feeling of amazement was only topped by the moment when I looked at the repeat MRI, 4 months after the first.  The latest MRI (he had it on Thursday) showed that the lesion was in fact an extremely inflamed MS lesion.  It is no longer inflamed and no longer shows up on a with-contrast MRI.  Dr. Skeen, a neurologist at Duke (who we set up an appointment with on our own) explained to us that he, too, would have thought that the lesion was a tumor.  HOW SCARY IS THAT.  It has been hard to shake the feeling that Brent would have had an extremely risky and completely unnecessary surgery.  If we had not insisted that we have a few more tests done, we would have taken the word of these talented surgeons and we would have put Brent's well being at risk for nothing. 
Brent is obviously not in the clear, and he will now start a life-long process of figuring out how to deal with MS.  The one thing that was a bit comforting about the surgery was that, when it was over, Brent was going to be how he was going to be.  No wondering or waiting.  MS will be a lot different.  Hopefully he will be one of the lucky ones! We are so thankful that we pushed so hard, and we would appreciate continued prayers as Brent and I start to deal with a new reality.