Oh May, You Kept Us Busy

Crickets…..do you hear them?? The blog has been so quiet!  Time to dust the cobwebs off and give you some updates!

First off, we celebrated Austin’s graduation last week.

I can’t believe we have one kid leaving the nest for college in a couple of months. Graduation day felt so surreal.  Full of emotions but what surprised me the most is that I didn’t sob like a baby all day. I held it together pretty darn good…considering the lump in my throat with the urge of tears ready to flow at any given moment. And they did flow off and on.

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The greatest emotion I felt though is a heart full of gratitude. So blessed to momma these three boys!  Aren’t they a pack of cuties??

We now fully understand what our parents told us, time flies so fast and kids grow up all too quickly. I’ve found myself crying randomly over the past couple of weeks. We watched home videos for two days while we were snowed in.  Yep, you read that right…snow in May.  Blizzard like snow…ugh!  Our family who came from out of town got to stay with us an extra day since they had closed the interstate due to the snow. Crazy spring weather we have!  Kind of felt like Christmas with the snow falling and curled up watching home videos.

Thankfully, the weather was actually nice the day of graduation for some good outdoor photos. On a side note, I received so many compliments on these pink shoes that day. The next morning, to my horror, Kodak was caught with a hot pink heel in his mouth…..wah!!!! Thank goodness they are on major sale right now for the Nordstrom Half Yearly Sale because I’m going to need to buy a new pair. They come in yellow too. I may need those as well.  Clearly, I have a shoe problem and can’t resist cute shoes, especially hot pink shoes.

Dress | Necklace | Shoes

We held a big grad party in our basement and thankfully the snow melted just in time for all the guests to spill out onto our back patio.  We’ve hosted so many memorable events and parties in our family room and bar area over the years. I love this part of our home and am going to miss it and all the memories held here when we move.  You can see more of this space here (including pre-remodel photos) and here (last year’s summer home tour).  All room sources can be found here.

All that’s left of the grad party festivities are two balloons and the big banner of Austin. I think we’ll leave it up until he leaves for college. You can see a peek into our bar area there that we built a few years ago. It’s been the perfect spot to spread out food and host parties. You can see more of our bar area here (including sources), here and here.

I get asked quite a bit if we’ll be moving our furniture from this home to The Forest Modern.  Some will go, a lot will be up for sale.  I’ll keep you posted when time gets closer in case you’re local and are interested in buying any of the pieces. I have been so good about not buying anything new for this home since I know my style will be transitioning in the new home.  In foreseeing all the guests coming through our front door last week, I did break down and buy this new rug since Kodak ruined the old one.

Mustard yellow happens to be one of my favorite colors to accent with in my home. It just goes so nicely with all the grey and neutral tones I have going on.  I paid full price for this rug last week and now it happens to be on major sale this week! Oh the irony of my life.  I’m a fan of indoor/outdoor rugs because they are so easy to clean. Kodak and I had a nice long chat about being good to this rug.  We’ll see if he listened.

Now, last but not least…The Forest Modern. Friends, we have a second floor with walls!!

The boys’ bedrooms are taking shape. They have great views of the forest from their windows. Actually every window in the house has great views of all those trees. Love it!

Every time Tim sees new walls go in and rooms transpire, he finally can see what this house is going to look like. Unlike me, he hasn’t been able to get a feel of the flow of this home by looking at the plans on paper. So far he’s been really happy with my vision and watching this home that I designed from chicken scratch on graph paper finally unfold.  I added this bonus room above the garage at the final stages of drafting and the little balcony just may be one of the things I’m most excited about. I made sure to warn him and Ethan not to get too close to the edge! Yikes! I hate heights (in case I haven’t mentioned that enough ;))

By the end of this week, the upstairs level will be completely framed! Next week the trusses arrive and we are going to start seeing a roof! EEK!!

I find myself wanting to go for an evening drive out to the property as much as our schedule allows. Last night, I sat on a piece of plywood in the front of the house with a blackbox of wine. I like to keep it classy. Haha! Don’t worry, I had one small glass, and then a fly landed in my wine and then, well, there went that happy moment.

I ditched the red boots even. I think the framers didn’t recognize me.

Not a bad view!

There’s no rest for the weary when building a home. I’m currently working on ten rooms at once but the biggest space that I’m dealing with at the moment is our basement.

My original plan was to have a big linear fireplace between the two doors on that far wall.  But now I’m itching to be a little more creative and possibly move the fireplace into the room where it would divide two large spaces.  One area would be our bar area and the other side would be a family room. (ps. all that water was from that snow storm that hit and found it’s way into the basement!)

I love this concept of this massive and gorgeous open fireplace by Studio McGee.  This whole house is insanely good!

What’s your thoughts?  Keep the fireplace on the wall or move to the center of the space to divide it up? I’m really struggling with this decision so please give me your thoughts!

One thing for sure (I think…) is that there will be an industrial modern vibe with a touch of glam in our basement. I’m heading in the direction of some accent brick walls, exposed metal beams and definitely metal panels with rivets around the fireplace.

Well I certainly managed to pack a lot of info and updates into one post, didn’t I.  Next week we leave for our big Seattle/Canada trip so I’m pretty sure the crickets will be in full force on the blog for a week or two.  Stay tuned though because when we get back, we will have some big updates and quite possibly a roof on The Forest Modern.

Thanks for following along!