Staining the Fence

Wanna know a great way to lose an extra few pounds and your mind at the same time??  No?  No one else wants to go crazy too?  Well, it's a rhetorical question, so I'm gonna tell ya anyways!

Decide the afternoon before one of your best friends is coming in town with her 9 week old baby to restain your entire 400 linear foot fence.  All while the house is a disaster.  I at least started on it while Kalia was napping, and she thankfully took a two hour nap before waking up!  Chris was on baby duty while I finished up.

We're re-sodding the back yard (post soon!), which is one of those projects where in order to do that correctly, you have to get other things done.  If anyone has ever stained a fence, you know that the stain kills anything and everything around it.  So I wanted to stain before we re-sodded.  So at 3:30 on a Sunday afternoon, I started.

Here's what the fence looked like previously :

We installed it when we first moved in...literally that first week.  I don't know why we thought that would be a good task to take on ourselves, but it's one of the few things I wouldn't do again.  Building an entire fence with two people while you're moving is quite a bit of work!   I did one coat of stain on it a few weeks after we built it, and never got around to doing the second coat.  I actually started staining using a paint brush, and only made it about 12 ft before Chris came home with a spray gun and let me know that was absolutely ridiculous.

The sprayer is so so much quicker and nicer, but it's a pain to clean.  We've got a system that works for us -I stain the fence, Chris cleans the sprayer.  My legs were sore sore sore from staining this.  In order to keep your stain from streaking, you have to do nice and even coats, which means you need to go up and down the fence panel with your sprayer.  I think I did about 1000 squats.

But hey, my sisters wedding was yesterday, and I've been trying to get back into pre-Kalia shape for it!  I get my workouts where I can these days!

The work was definitely worth it...here's what the fence looks like now :

Chris snapped up a few action shots of me moving my stain.  As always, Kodi was helping!

Chris : "smile!!"  Me : "Seriously?!?!"

And here's a good one to show you a side by side comparison of before and after with what a huge difference the new stain makes!

I promise it'll look so much better when the sod is actually laid instead of that huge dirt patch that's in the back.  Stay tuned for a post on that!  We do have one area of grass that's decent in the back, so here's what our nicely stained fence will look like once we get finished installing the sod :

We're actually on a big kick to get a lot of the exterior projects to the house while it's not too terribly hot out.  Anyone that lives in Florida knows that doing a ton of exterior house projects in the middle of the summer can be brutal!

Anyone else getting exterior projects done while the weather is still nice, and not too hot?  I have a feeling the hot summer months are going to slip up on us before we know it!

Happy Monday everyone!

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Follow up Friday : Kalia's Bookshelves

I'm not sure if I'm going to keep up with this idea of follow up Friday, but I get a lot of questions and emails on the same posts, so I'm going to attempt to answer them all at once here.

A lot of you guys became readers because of all of our hard work with Kalia's nursery, and especially her bookshelves.  They are honestly one of my favorite things in her nursery, and I absolutely love everything that we did in there, so that says a lot!

Without further ado, answers to some of your most burning questions...errr...this is a family blog, promise!

• How far apart did you space the bookshelves?
• They are 13.5 inches from the bottom of one shelf to the bottom of the next.  I took the largest book we had (12 inches) and added 1.5 inches for some head room.  I didn't want there to be a lot of extra space.  I like the look of the bookshelves completely filled.
• What length are the book shelves?
• 5 feet long.
• What about climbing?  That would never work in my house, I have too active of children!
• Kalia's climbing, and has been for a little while.  She's just now starting to understand the word "no".  We can pull with all of our might on those bookshelves, and they don't budge.  We screwed them into the studs in the wall.  Each shelf has two screws.  After we screwed them in, I covered the hole with caulk, lightly sanded it, added another coat of white on top of the installed bookshelf, and another top coat of poly.  We consider those shelves built-ins.  If we ever leave the house, they stay with it.
• What size screws did you use?
• I'm actually not 100% positive on this answer, but I can give you a minimum that you should use.  You need to use screws that are long enough to get through the shelf (3/4"), the drywall (1/2"), and into the stud (1/2"), so I would go with at least a 2 1/2 inch screw.  I think we used 3" ones.
• How far from the wall are the start of the bookshelves?
• ~ 2 inches.  Most walls are not straight though, so make sure you use a laser level and mark points along the way.  That way they all line up with each other, even if they vary slightly from the distance off the wall.  We started the bottom one 2 inches off from the wall, and did the laser level from there.

As for how Kalia likes them, she loves them as well.  She pulls off the books that she wants to look at, flips through them, then says "all done" and we clap our hands when we put them back on the shelf.  She's just starting to learn how to put things back.  Even when she leaves books on the floor, it takes a maximum of three minutes to put them back on the shelf.  As any mother knows, most babies leave a wake of destruction wherever they go, so whether it's in her room or in her playroom (post on that soon!), it's all the same to me!

Do you see the blue cushions poking out from the corner above?  Here's a closer look :

I added floor cushions that used to live in my living room for a little nook for Kalia.  I snapped a few pictures of her 'reading' on different days.  Such a big girl already!  Happy baby = happy Momma!

Because Kalia hasn't learned how to "respect paper" yet, we have all of her hard, edible books on the bottom two shelves.  She can only reach those, so those are her safe books that are pretty indestructible.  The shelves above that are for books that we read to her either early in the morning, before nap times, or before bedtime.  She honestly doesn't have much patience for long books other than her wind down time.

Are there any other questions on her bookshelves that I left out?  Feel free to ask, and I'll update the list above with answers!

Happy Friday everyone, hope you guys have a great weekend!

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Painting the House Part 3 : The Front

I would love to have titled this Painting the House Part 3 : The End, but we still haven't finished painting.  We just haven't finished the final side that is pretty close to our neighbors house.  You can barely see it when you turn the corner, and painting with a new baby is quite challenging.

When we first moved into this house (April of '09), I wasn't blogging.  I don't have a great before picture of where we started, but I did find the listing agents picture from when we bought the house.  This picture is actually a lot nicer than what we really moved into.  After we went under contract, they stopped watering the yard or pulling the weeds, so everything that was supposed to be green was dead, and everything that was supposed to be dead (weeds) were over grown.  
We installed a 400 linear foot fence around our yard that very first week we moved in, and very shortly after that did some landscaping to the front, to wind up with this :

The new landscaping made our front yard feel so much bigger and less cluttered.  The paint color wasn't bad, but it kind of felt like a dull concrete color, and I knew we could brighten it up.  It also wasn't the best paint job - you could tell they only did one coat instead of two.  And the previous color that they covered up was pink.  Just like the pool deck before we redid it.  I think one of the previous owners thought she lived in a Barbie house.  ("I'm a Barbie girl, in a Barbie world" just got stuck in my head!)

Anywho, painting this big of a house with Kalia was a bit of a challenge, but we still managed to get it done.  It just took a little bit longer than most things.  We also had a friend come over and help (thanks Chris!), which was amazing.  Chris did most of the big stuff, and I did most of the trimming during Kalia's naptimes.  If she woke up while we were painting, she happily laid under those palm trees and kicked around.

Thank goodness we tackled painting the front before she got mobile...no way would she do that now!

And after so much work, here's what the front of our house looks like today :

Ignore the spray paint and the not so healthy grass.  Of course when I went to go take pictures of this, the cable company had to do work right across the front of our home.  I wasn't waiting to take pictures again!

From the landscaping, to the new doors, house numbers, lighting, and finally the paint, we're both really proud of how much work we've done, and how much better it looks!

Oh, and did you notice the blue ceiling in the entryway?  We really love the blue ceiling that we painted out on the pool deck when we started this whole house painting project forever ago, and decided to carry it through to the front.  And yes, the pendant is missing.  We finally found one that we both really like and won't break the bank this week, so I just need to order it.  Don't worry though, I'll be sure to update you guys when it comes in and we install it!

Minus the pendant, the one remaining thing out here that drives me bonkers is that fountain.  It is getting redone, hopefully sooner rather than later!

For those of you curious about the details, we used Behr's Exterior Paint in Satin.  The house color is Sandstone Cove, the trim is just their basic Ultra White, the garage doors are Harvest Brown, and the ceiling is Tide Pools.  Home Depot runs promotions on a regular basis of $20 off the big 5 gallon buckets, so we snagged up enough paint to do the entire house on one of those sales.

So what do you think of our new bright exterior?  So much work, but so worth it!

Hope everyone is having a great week so far - Happy Wednesday!

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