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Flex Space with Some Color

noreply@blogger.com (Cassandra @ The Life of CK and Nate) — Fri, 11 Nov 2016 12:00:00 +0000

One of the most frustrating spaces in our house has been the 'flex space' right as you enter the front door. It kind of feels like a entry space, but it's supposed to be another living space for the house.

There are a lot of houses with this floor plan in the area, and I've been in A LOT of them. The consensus? Nobody really knows what to do with this space. A lot of people either make it an office or a sitting room, both of which I'm told don't get used much.

So after months of using this space as a holding spot for all of our renovation things, we finally decided to try to make this space functional for us. We often need a lot of work space for CKandNateCreate to assemble and organized all our pulls and knobs. So, we got two large tables from Ikea and put them on either side of the room so we would both have ample space to work on things.

Since the house is still very beige heavy, I decided to play around with some brighter art in this space. I found the bigger pieces on Etsy and the blue and green pieces are paper that Nate brought back from Switzerland for me years ago. The rest are just colorful family photos.

One of my favorite little extra additions is this ball clock from Regency Shop. It adds the perfect extra pop of color. We are often up late working nights and so a clock nearby is essential, and this one is fierce. It looks really delicate, but it is actually really heavy and well made. I love how the modern design plays so well off the chandelier. Which, by the way, can you believe I found on Amazon??

We also don't have a built in coat closet in this house, so we have this Ikea unit in the corner to hold our coats and shoe surplus. It isn't the most ideal of situations, but it works for our purposes.

So far, this setup has been working really well. It definitely isn't what I envisioned initially for this room, but this is definitely the most functional use of the space for what we need now. Having it finished also brightens my day since I'm not immediately walking into a disaster area.

If you like the clock from Regency Shop, you should also check out some of their other products. They carry all different styles from this mid century Ibiza Chair, to the traditional Chesterfield Sofa, to the super modern Egg Chair. Everything is on a huge sale right now too. So you can definitely find the style you are looking for.

I was gifted the clock to provide a honest review. All opinions are mine.

Playroom Reveal

noreply@blogger.com (Cassandra @ The Life of CK and Nate) — Mon, 12 Sep 2016 11:00:00 +0000

Can you believe we've been in Phoenix for well over a year now? Probably not since I haven't posted in FOREVER. Life has been crazy busy and fun things like taking pictures of our projects have not made the list recently. Hopefully that will change... Regardless, we still are working on the house, and we will eventually share all the work we've done. It definitely won't be in real time though. If you want more real time pics, or more pics of the kids, you can follow along on Instagram. I do manage to get shorter little snippets on there on a regular basis.

We do have some completely finished rooms now (yay!). I most recently finished off the final touches of the playroom.

This is the loft space that is at the top of the stairs. Initially, this space was huge. In my opinion, it was awkwardly big, with odd placements of lights and windows.

From the beginning, we knew we were going to take the back half of the room and make it into Maisie's room. For the playroom's side of things, this involved a lot of planning for the wall since we wanted to have built-ins for all the toys for the kids. Once we had a plan, Nate built the wall fairly quickly which immediately changed the feel of the space.

If you're wondering about the carpet, we did build the wall over the carpet. I think we checked with the inspectors at least twice to make sure this was legit... which it was. The reason we did this was because we wanted to leave the carpet in Maisie's rooms so that all the bedrooms would have the same carpet, but we were planning on taking out the carpet in the playroom. There was this really awful tile that was mostly loose in the hall and so the plan was to replace all the flooring in the playroom through the hall. By building the wall over the carpet, we didn't have to figure out how to cut the carpet ahead of time. We could just cut it away on the playroom side.

We went with a bamboo floor from Floor and Decor for the open space upstairs. My dad and Nate installed the whole thing in a weekend.

And then came the cabinets. We went with the Besta System from Ikea. We managed to get them on sale by chance so they were a little more affordable for us. We've had really good experiences with Ikea's cabinets, but this was the first time using the Besta system. We really thought the quality was really superior to some of the cheaper bookshelves, so the price difference was definitely worth it.

After a lot of putting things together, we had all the doors and drawers installed. You'll notice that you can see wood all around the unit. This is for installing trim so that the unit would be completely integrated into the wall.

We put the furniture back in, and it stayed like this for quite some time. If you've been around this blog for awhile, you know we like to get things functional, and then tend to make very slow progress on the finishing touches. At least we're consistent... right?

Fast forward a few months, and I've finally gotten around to installing trim, caulking, touching up paint, hanging curtains, decorating, and deciding that the layout wasn't great.

We actually ended up going back to how we originally had the furniture arranged. Now that the space is smaller, it feels right, and it allows for the kids to have a space totally theirs behind the couch and to have more of a den feel in front of the couch.

Side note: We got a killer deal on the bronze pulls. Lowe's had these bins of pulls and knobs without screws for 50 cents apiece! We spent a few bucks on new screws and so we were able to do this whole unit for less than $15. We can't even come close to making pulls for that little (which is saying a lot since we literally have a business making pulls)

I love hanging out up here. It's way cozier than our downstairs living room and I love that Will plays in here all the time. He knows which drawers has his toys in them and so he can play pretty independently.

So that's the playroom! Are you a fan of cozier living spaces or do you love the huge open floor plans?

Sources:

Cabinets, play rug, kids table and chairs, bookshelf under TV, Large wall art: Ikea.com

Blue and White Rug: Rugsusa.com

Couch: Macy's Furniture Store

Window treatments:Wayfair.com

Floor poufs: Target

Maisie's Room - All Done Up!

noreply@blogger.com (Cassandra @ The Life of CK and Nate) — Tue, 05 Jul 2016 11:00:00 +0000

There are some times when I finish a room and there are things I'm so-so on. Then there are times when, even after awhile, I can't get over how much I love the space. That's how I feel about Maisie's nursery. It took a lot to (literally) build the room, which you can read about here, and once we finished our new master enough to move out of her room, I could finally get around to finishing it for her.

I picked up a Jenny Lind crib and changing table for a steal off of Craigslist. We did have to retrofit the crib so that it doesn't have a moveable side, which was fairly easy... just required some L brackets and drilling. We then sprayed both of them a soft mint green, which I love against the dark walls.

The art in Maisie's room is a smattering of handmade items, pieces that were given to us, and items I've picked up over the years that pulled the accent colors of the room. I used the moulding that I installed to frame each piece.

The dresser is a piece we picked up in a consignment shop in Florida and the rug is a transplant from Will's playroom in the FL house. The curtains are from Ikea.

The big splurge in this room was the glider. I didn't have one with Will and it was on the top of my list of things I wanted this go around. It was totally worth every penny and it's by far my favorite seat in the house (which it kinda has to be since I sat in a crazy number of them to find this one). We got it at BuyBuyBaby and it's the "Blake" glider from Little Castle. It's not too squishy and it has angled arms so it's pretty awesome when feeding Maisie. I even sometimes hang out in here after Maisie goes down or have her play on the floor while I work in this chair just to spend a little more time in it.

So this is where we chill with Maisie now. I know dark walls aren't super nursery-esq, but I wanted an untraditional nursery for her and it actually works really well since this girl needs a DARK room to sleep. It's also girly without being super pink. My favorite part is still the trim work that I spent way too many hours on. What's your favorite part?

Wall Paint: Valspar Seattle Haze in Satin
Crib Paint: Valspar Pillow Mint in Satin

Awkward Laundry Room to Full Bath

noreply@blogger.com (Cassandra @ The Life of CK and Nate) — Mon, 20 Jun 2016 18:12:00 +0000

We officially closed out our permit last week. All inspections have been done and we have minimal finishing work left to do. Last week also marked 1 year in the house... crazy!!

We generally have a few things left to do in a lot of rooms, but one space that is completely done is the new kids bath that we put in in this weird storage space in the front section of the laundry room ( the washer and dryer are behind the half wall). This area was completely useless to us and it was the perfect amount of space for a full bath. Adding a full bathroom to the house is not only good for resale, but it freed us up to create a second master bedroom with attached bath on the second floor (the original master is on the first floor... away from kids... which is not awesome with a newborn)

Since this is the kids bathroom, I wanted something easy to keep clean but also a little fun. It took awhile but now it looks like this!

Nate started by ripping out the shelving and opening things up so that he could run all the new plumbing and electrical.

He also framed out the rest of the half wall to close off the laundry room and put in a new door so that we could access the laundry room from the top of the stairs (which is so much better since it keeps the noise away from the bedrooms). We also framed out a wall so that we could add storage at the base of the tub.

We've gutted and redone bathrooms before, but this was the first time we created a bathroom where there previously was none. This meant the first time installing a tub and plumbing everything from scratch. We've learned that tubs aren't the most fun thing in the world to install and that it's useful to have some one with small hands around. The annoyance of the tub was slightly offset by the fact that we got it on a major clearance.

We bought an Ikea cabinet (It's one of the pantry cabinets from the kitchen department) and inserted it in the space we left at the end of the tub.

We did Hardy board and installed a membrane on top for around the tub. We didn't love this in terms of ease of install, but it's supposed to keep the tub area nice and dry.

We've been using Floor and Decor extensively in this reno and picked up the floor tile for under $3 a sqft. We love the clean and classic look and we paired it with the subway tile in the shower.

Dark grout is a bit more fun and a little easier to keep clean with the little guys. HOWEVER, it is a pain in the butt to clean up. If we were to use it again, we would be really keep an eye on the grout lines to make sure we clean up any extra grout because cleaning it up is really annoying once it's dry and since it's dark, it shows any imperfection.

We added some finishing touches and we had a working bathroom! We spent ~5k on the whole bathroom including all the framing, plumbing, wiring and HVAC. In our area, adding a bathroom increases the value of a house by 6k so we're up $1,000 just on appraisal alone (which only counts it's existence, not the finishes)

Sources:

Paint- Valspar Signature : Sea Salt Blue in Eggshell

Ikea - Stool, Storage unit

Lowes - Vanity (similar), Faucet, Toilet, Light, Tub, Towel Bar, Hooks, Fan

Target - Mirror, Buckets (dollar area)

Wayfair - Shower Curtain Rod, Curtain Hooks, Shower Curtain

Floor and Decor - Floor Tile, Shower Tile, Wall Grout, Floor Grout

Maisie's First Month

noreply@blogger.com (Cassandra @ The Life of CK and Nate) — Wed, 04 May 2016 21:29:00 +0000

Maisie just turned 4 months old so it is way past time to document some little tidbits on her. I initially thought I was falling into the rut of not taking pictures of the second baby like the first, but then I tried to put 4 months of pics into one post... even taking just the ones I loved are not going to fit into one post so we'll go month by month.

Maisie (Margo Elizabeth) was born on December 28th, 2015 at 7:06 pm. She was 8 lbs 1 oz and was 20.5 inches long. My water broke with her right around her due date and she made her debut about 12 hrs later. This labor was so much better than with Will. I did get an epidural again, but I waited until the last minute to get one. I still got every possible side effect from the epidural (and still have back pain) so I don't know if it's really worth it in the end, but holding off definitely worked better this time around. Maisie was born very quickly (two pushes), which was a pretty big shock compared to last time around. It took a few minutes for it to sink in that she was here, but we were completely in love!

We spent two days in the hospital and the majority of the time was spent trying to figure Maisie out. She was cuddly and sweet and a total mama's girl. But... she basically spit up everything that was fed to her. We got into a routine of her screaming (and boy can she scream!) because she was hungry, feeding her, and then her spitting everything back up. It was frustrating and exhausting and something we were not even close to accustomed to (and a little scary). Initially, the spitting up was attributed to her being born so quickly that she still had fluid in her stomach so we were hopeful that it would be a temporary issue.

Will got to visit a couple of times a day and seeing the two of them together was the sweetest thing you could imagine. He took to her right away and tried to help with her paci and gave her kisses.

Going home

For the first month, Nate and I were set up in Maisie's room (due to all the construction on our new master) so Maisie and I spent a lot of time in there. She really only liked to sleep for more than a few minutes on me or right next to me (touching) so I did a lot of work for my residency (or watching Nurse Jackie) with her on me. The rest of the time was spent getting used to being a family of 4, trying to get some sleep, and finish the house so we could get into our own room!

Over the month we found out that the spitting up wasn't going away and learned the art of avoiding complete wardrobe changes. Maisie taught us that she is very verbal (coos, grunts, screams) and very alert. She also taught us that not all babies sleep everywhere and some need all the S's to sleep. She has a crazy sensitive startle reflex and is very dependent so there were a lot of baby snuggles and baby wearing (Ergo saved our lives).

Maisie rounded out the month at 9 lbs 6 oz (52%), 22.5 in long (96%), and 36 cm head circumference (30%). She has dark hair (which has mostly fallen out) and blue eyes (for now).

One Month

CK&NateCreate - A Live Event!

noreply@blogger.com (Nate) — Fri, 15 Apr 2016 16:54:00 +0000

Greetings!

As we continue to try and share the many exciting things we've been up to the last few months, there's something we've been gearing up for this weekend we want to share:

We're going to be one of those Local Artisans - sharing our wide selection of drawer pulls and knobs from CKandNateCreate! This is going to be our first time selling our products "off-line" and so we are both excited and nervous. We've been prepping for about 3.5 months and have made a total of 1000... yes that's 1000 ends. This includes displays, some pre-made items to sell and a whole bunch of free ends so that we can fill custom orders on the spot.

You'll see we chose to use some reclaimed barn wood we picked up at a local spot here in Phoenix called Porter Barn Wood. They have an amazing selection of wood and they do some amazing things with it (check out there website... it's drool worthy). You know you're at a hip place for salvaged building materials when you see this in the parking lot!

We are also introducing some new products including our shelf hangers. We made these for our house and have had a few of our friends/neighbors ask us to make a few for them so we're going to give them a go and see if the sell!

Are you in the area? Come on by! It should be a really great time!!

Trip to FL

noreply@blogger.com (Cassandra @ The Life of CK and Nate) — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 23:08:00 +0000

Well hello there. We've had quite the blogging break around here, which was necessary with all the stuff happening in our life. Things are settling a bit now so we're back to share what's been happening.

Obviously, the biggest change in life has been adjusting to being a family of four. Miss Maisie is pretty different from Will (not a huge surprise) and I finally feel like we're starting to understand her.

We'll have more on her in a later post because today we're talking about how crazy we are. I was on maternity leave for 6 weeks and Nate just happened to have a conference in Orlando for the last week of my leave. Instead of me staying home with the two kids, we all piled on a plane and headed to FL for the week (for the count that's with one 5 week old and one 2.5 year old). We split the kids up on the plane (a half a plane apart), which worked so well I don't think we'll be sitting as a family on an airplane for the foreseeable future.

The first few days were spent visiting friends and our favorite restaurants. We also went to the science museum in Orlando for the first time which was so amazing we went a second time as well. We met up with our friends and Will had so much fun running around with someone his age.

I think Nate and I may have had more fun in the physics room than any other person in the place. I've never been in a science museum with such an extensive physics area and it was amazingly well done.

Will preferred the motorcycles

It was weird staying in a hotel in the town we lived for so many years. It was also a nice challenge to manage nap and sleep schedules of everyone in one tiny room.

The rest of our trip was spent at a resort at Disney (where Nate's conference was). This is when crazy set in a bit. Nate was in meetings all day so I had both kids, one hotel room, limited play area and 1 newborn who fully refused to ride in the car without screaming. We made it through but not something I would exactly recommend to anyone.

We discovered the "susher" app which did help with the screaming in the car a bit (and at one point put everyone to sleep (including Nate) except me ... because I was driving)

We mitigated the lack of play area by taking some trips to visit more friends and my old department. I even braved taking both kids to Universal for one of the days. (I quickly figured out how to carry both of them at the same time which has become a very handy skill to have)

The highlight of the trip was probably going to Disney. Nate got night passes through his conference so we headed there after Nate was done on one of the days. It rained and Will is TERRIFIED of the fireworks so we did a lot of indoor/covered things like Mickey's PhilharMagic, the carousel and tea cups and seeing Elsa and Anna.

If it's not clear from the photos, this is Will so excited he can't handle it. He LOVES Anna and he was talking about hugging her for a solid week after this.

(the only photo of all 4 of us from this trip)

We finished the night with dinner at T-Rex Cafe. Will was apprehensive at first, but overall liked eating with the dinos and the food was so good after a full day of walking.

(Hoteling like a champ)

While we've been MIA, we have also almost completed the house so we'll be dropping in to show you updates periodically.

New Year, New Life

noreply@blogger.com (Cassandra @ The Life of CK and Nate) — Fri, 08 Jan 2016 23:26:00 +0000

Happy New Year!... a week late. We are bringing in the new year with a pretty drastic change in routine. On December 28 we welcomed our new baby girl into the world! This shifted me into maternity leave just in time for the new year to roll in. Nate is also taking a couple of days off each week and Will started going to "school" for a true full day for the three days a week that he goes. We are slowly transitioning to this new life of a family of four (and still trying to finish up the reno's on this house!).

We are going to be pretty low key with the blog for a bit, but we will continue to post pictures to Instagram and Facebook if you want more frequent baby pics. In the meantime, here are a few pics of Margo Elizabeth's (Maisie) first week of life. She's a pretty awesome baby and we are soaking up the snuggles with her.

Arches National Park & Tips for Road Tripping with a Toddler

noreply@blogger.com (Cassandra @ The Life of CK and Nate) — Thu, 17 Dec 2015 12:00:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago we had the opportunity to go and stay in Aspen, CO for a week. Since I was well into my third trimester, we decided to make the trip by car. With no stops this is a 11 hr trip, but since we had one newly potty-trained toddler and one very pregnant person in the car, we decided to break the drive up over two days, taking advantage of the extra travel time to appreciate a part of the country we had never visited before.

Will and I had never been to Utah or Colorado so we can officially add those to our states visited list. We also happened to drive right by Arches National Park and we couldn't pass up the opportunity to spend a few hours exploring. This was a perfect park for us since you drive through a lot of it but has a lot of places where you can stop and walk/hike around.

We stopped a few times to just take some pictures but actually walked around at Balanced Rock and Delicate Arch. Balanced Rock was super impressive since we could get up nice and close but I couldn't do the 6 mile round trip hike to get up close to Delicate Arch. We instead did the 1 mile round trip hike that was surprisingly steep and didn't get us very close, so we got to admire it from a distance.

Will had a blast exploring and climbing on the rocks (and doing the "so big" arms over head pose). It also was surprisingly chilly which felt great when climbing. Everything was so impressive, pictures really don't do it justice. We really could have spent more time exploring if I was able to walk better so we may take another dedicated trip at some point. They even have camping areas in the park which would be pretty amazing when it is a little warmer!

If you are planning on taking a long road trip with a newly potty trained toddler, here is what we learned:

Bring a potty with you: It will always be in the middle of nowhere when the announcement is made that they have to go to the bathroom NOW and stopping on the side of the road is the only option. The potty made it feasible if not still weird.

Ration juice or any other drink your toddler really likes: Save the drinks they really like for bribes (you will need them) since they will drink it way to fast and you will stop every 15 min for awhile.

Regardless of why you stop, take advantage of the bathroom: We established a "you must try" rule any time we stopped and whenever we were leaving after a few times of having to stop within minutes of getting back on the road.

Keep them in Pull-ups: Will is in underwear except for naps and nights, but we kept him in pull-ups during the entire car ride just in case we couldn't stop fast enough. He always asked to go and we would act like he was in underwear ("keep your pants dry until we stop!") but if push came to shove, the pull-ups kept us from having to clean his car seat mid trip.

Bring distractions: We loaded my kindle up with shows and movies so that time between stops could be extended just a bit by Will not constantly focusing on going to the bathroom. Even with that, we had to stop about every hour to hour and a half while he was awake and only made it 2 hrs once so also Bring Your Patience!

Nursery Progress

noreply@blogger.com (Cassandra @ The Life of CK and Nate) — Tue, 08 Dec 2015 05:53:00 +0000

Hello there. Well over a month has managed to slip past! We've had a lot going on so there are a lot of updates needed!

I keep playing this game with myself of wanting to have some good photos to show you, but never being home when the sun's up so to make sure I get some progress pics I take iPhone pictures in the dark... and so that's what you're going to get a lot of. Hopefully for final pics I'll get some good pics that show the true colors of these spaces but until then, enjoy the large variation in colors!

To back up a bit... we bought this house for many reasons but one big one was the huge playroom space on the second floor. This model of house comes in a 4 bedroom and 5 bedroom version and the difference is the space at the back of this room can either be playroom or a 5th bedroom.

With baby girl coming and the rest of our house situations, we decided to turn our 4 bedroom version into the 5 bedroom and have the new bedroom be the baby's room. We pulled a permit to put in this new room, as well as a lot of other rearranging on this floor that I'll get to later, and got to work.

In the permitting process we had to draw up blue prints of the new layout so we already knew where the new walls were going. This meant that as soon as we got the go ahead, Nate started building the new main wall and thew wall to close in the closet. It's always impressive how fast framing out new walls can go.... Nate had them up within a couple of days of getting the permit.

Nate did all the wiring and then we put in insulation before putting up the drywall. Since this is the wall between the baby's room and the playroom, we wanted a pretty good sound barrier. It worked really well. If you are in the room with the door closed, you can't hear anything outside the room.

Once the drywall was up. we mudded all the seams. This is probably one of my least favorite tasks and since this house has textured walls, all the seams got mud and then the whole wall got a texture treatment with more mud.... not much fun but we didn't want the new walls to stick out as new.

Luckily the AZ lack of humidity means everything dries super fast and I was able to paint shortly after finishing the mudding. The new walls got primed and painted while the old walls just got paint. I wanted a more sophisticated feel to the nursery, so I went with darker walls. The last picture in this post is closest to the true color, which is Seattle Haze by Valspar. It's a greyish purple color and is the perfect neutral for the magenta and mint nursery I have planned.

Normally we would end there but this time around I wanted to add a little more interest to the room so I decided to spend an entire weekend putting moulding up on the walls.

We're going to call this a labor of love since it was WAY more time consuming than anticipated, but I love how it came out. I put up chair rail up in the middle of the wall and then built the boxes from smaller trim. I generally used the rule of thirds to determine how big to make my boxes and where to place them.

To make the moulding an accent and not the main focus, I painted everything the wall color. This way, once I add the other colors in this room for the nursery, the walls can stand out without being too busy.

This is now my favorite room in the house, which is great since we are using it as our room right now! We've had to do a lot of room swapping to get all our renovations done, so we moved into the nursery and set up part of the room with the crib and glider and such. That way, if the baby decides to make an appearance before we are finished with our room, we can all be on the same floor as the kids and the baby can be in the nursery from the beginning.

So that's where we're at with the nursery. I would show you the current state, but it's pretty much a hot mess of furniture and clothes and my huge maternity pillow... not a pretty sight. It's much nicer to look at the the moulding.

We'll do a final nursery reveal when we're out of the room, which will hopefully be in the next few weeks!

Will- Two and a Half

noreply@blogger.com (Cassandra @ The Life of CK and Nate) — Thu, 22 Oct 2015 11:00:00 +0000

We've hit some major milestones with Will and so I felt it was time to document these new achievements!

Right now I'm:

A big helper
In a big boy bed
Daytime potty trained
Wearing size 11(!) shoes
Talking a lot more and saying mostly full sentences
Riding a tricycle and trying to keep up with the big kids in the neighborhood
Swimming while holding a noodle
Loving gymnastics, singing, dancing, riding in the car with the windows down, taking pictures and helping mama and dada with house projects
Going to Montessori school 3 days a week and LOVING it.
Counting to 19 and reciting about half the alphabet without help

Favorites:

Food: Yogurt... we go through copious amounts of yogurt and I think of Burn Notice every time I buy it

Books: All aboard the Dino train, Olivia, Go dogs go and Giraffes can't dance
TV/Movies: Thomas, Curious George and Frozen (he went through a phase where he would put Olaf to bed every night and tuck him in and sing Twinkle Twinkle to him)
Music: Bruno Mars, Uptown Funk, although he also knows some Taylor Swift and other pop songs that he will randomly bust out lyrics to (and ask "I want loud" in the car when he wants the song turned up). He also loves and will sing: Twinkle Twinkle, You are my sunshine, Wheels on the bus, ABC's and Do Re Mi
Comfort Items: Lovie, Teddy, Bear and paci during naps and overnight. He also recently likes having a blanket
Sayings: "I want to snuggles", "Um.... Ok!", "Where IS ____?", "Band-aid?", "Take puppies for a walk?", "Will-will help?", "What (mama/dada) doing?", "Come here (Madline/Zozos)!" (with hand gestures)

The AZ House Plan - Outside

noreply@blogger.com (Cassandra @ The Life of CK and Nate) — Mon, 19 Oct 2015 11:00:00 +0000

Last week we showed you our plans for the second floor of the new house. The other area that is going to get a major overhaul is the backyard. IMO, the reason we got a pretty good deal on this house was because of this:

There is nothing, in this yard except rock. We have a pretty nice view beyond the yard, but the yard itself is basically unusable at this point. Zoe can barely walk on the rocks and it's just hot with no reprieve when we're out there.

We've been going back and forth for months on what we actually wanted to do with this space. The biggest thing we were unsure of was: pool or no pool. We really wanted some sort of way to cool off but didn't love the headache that comes with maintenance and worry that a pool brings. Then we found out that with the high incident of drowning in Phoenix, backyard splash pads had been growing in popularity over the last couple of years. They are much smaller than what you would see at a park or mall but offer the water feature without the worry. A nice bonus is that a splash pad is 1/3-1/2 the cost of a pool. We got a quote last week and had some guys come out and talk design/location/etc in the backyard and I spent the last few days playing around with designs for the rest of the yard.

The goal is to have a bbq area, lounge area, fire pit and splash pad. Another major goal is to get some greenery in the yard for both shade and aesthetics. First thing that needs to go in is the splash pad and we should get going on that in the next few weeks!

The AZ House Plan - Upstairs

noreply@blogger.com (Cassandra @ The Life of CK and Nate) — Thu, 15 Oct 2015 11:00:00 +0000

I've mentioned a few times now that we are on a pretty tight timeline for the AZ house reno, but I haven't really shown you yet what we are actually planning on doing. Well, today is the day!

We have a pretty major reno going on the second floor of the house, minorish projects on the first floor, and a complete overhaul of the backyard planned. Today I'm going to show you the plans for the second floor.

I've fallen in love with Google Sketchup (I use the free download) and it has helped me tremendously with the project plans in this house. I tend to be pretty good at visualization, but Nate needs pictures and since we have so many changes going on simultaneously, having the 2D and 3D renderings has be amazing with making sure we are on the same page (and we can show inspectors, builders, contractors, etc). So, this first floor plan is the original upstairs layout as we purchased it (you can ignore the numbers... )

This next one shows you the areas that we are overhauling in the next couple of months. Purple is what we are deeming phase 1, blue is phase 2 and green is phase 3. The brown area is the area that is getting new hardwood flooring so that is kinda phase 2.5. We are currently working on phase 1 and 2 together and then will go on to phase 3 when the first two phases are done.

These are the original realtor pics of the spaces above.

Green: Current hall bathroom

Blue: Super long and skinny laundry room

Brown: Hall

Purple: Current playroom

So you want to see what we're going to do??

The purple are is going to get split into the baby's new room and a smaller playroom. This includes framing out the new room and closet, running new electrical, insulating the wall and then closing everything up and finishing things off. We are putting a bump in the new wall so that we can put built-in cabinets for the playroom. The combo of the insulation and cabinets will hopefully make the baby's room pretty quiet. The playroom is going to get hardwood flooring, but we are going to keep the carpet in the baby's room.

We are adding a door from the playroom (at the top of the stairs) that leads the the blue section. This will allow us to close up the half wall in the current laundry room and split it into a laundry room and new hall bathroom. This will be the bathroom for three of the bedrooms upstairs.

This leads us to the green section or the current hall bathroom. We are going to take the upper right bedroom, remove the linen closet and take that space to enlarge the bedroom into a master and give a side entrance to a master bathroom. We are going to leave the current bath door and build a wall to make a new (bigger) linen closet.

Whew... tired yet?

So where are we right now?

We are currently in the demo/rough-in stage. We got our green light and building permit a couple of weeks ago and Nate has been kicking butt since building walls, taking out tile, running electrical, HVAC and plumbing.

We have the new door into the laundry room installed:

The baby's room is all framed out and new electrical is run:

and Nate's been working long nights running the new electrical and plumbing in the new laundry/bathroom space. He also has the new walls up separating the laundry and bathroom (no pics).

The goal is to have the framing, electrical and plumbing inspected before this weekend so that we can start closing up walls and I can start tiling the laundry room and bathroom!

Are you the type that gets a lot more done when you are under a time crunch?? We sure are!

The Second Time Around - 28 Weeks

noreply@blogger.com (Cassandra @ The Life of CK and Nate) — Tue, 13 Oct 2015 11:00:00 +0000

So total bizarre moment... As I was prepping to write this post I pulled up my post of when I was 28 weeks pregnant with Will. I hadn't looked over my posts in a long time so imagine my surprise when I was wearing basically the same outfit (different outer shirt). I guess we'll just call it my pregnancy uniform.

Want another fun fact? Will took this photo. The little guy is all about taking pictures right now and so we killed some time the other day with the tripod and I just let him snap away (got to love digital!). He wanted to take my picture so I decided to let him go and see if anything came out. I think we'll make him the official baby bump picture taker from now based on how these came out :).

Time has been a little tight recently so I haven't really documented this pregnancy like I did with Will so I thought it would be fun to do some comparisons of this pregnancy compared to the last one.

Symptoms:

The first trimester this time around was overtaken by a really bad case of bronchitis so everything else seemed minor in comparison. We also were packing up the house and moving so the extreme tiredness could have been due to the pregnancy or everything else, but boy was I tired. I luckily didn't have morning sickness again and by the time we were in AZ I was in my second trimester and they were finally willing to give me some antibiotics!

With Will, my second trimester was when my hip pain started pretty badly and this time around I managed to get to the third trimester without any major issues. I've had a few rough weeks but nothing compared to Will. I think it's mostly due to the fact that this baby isn't sitting so tight in as Will did.

The one major symptom that I have this time that I didn't have with Will is super high emotions. I blame all the extra estrogen from this baby girl for crying at even a semblance of a sad story (or a happy one at that)

Cravings:

I did my nothing but peaches routine again first trimester and transitioned into any high water content fruit or veggie (watermelon, cucumbers, tomatoes, etc). I had more aversions to food smells this time around and lived off of tomato sandwiches and cucumber sandwiches for a few months.

Now that I'm back on normal food, the only strong persistent craving I've had is for sweets... and not sweets I normally like but like cake and donuts.

Belly:

My belly is a lot bigger this time around (don't blame the donuts!) which has helped with the hips and people noticing I'm pregnant. I however did have a pretty funny encounter with a co-worker when my radiation badge fell on the floor and he picked it up and asked why there was a baby on my badge (you get a special one when you're pregnant). I've gained about 10 lbs and I'm measuring about 2 weeks big at this point.

This baby is considerably more active than I remember Will being. There are some days where she doesn't stop moving all day and I can just watch my belly jump around. I can distinguish rolls (which make me a little nauseous) and kicks and the size of my belly (and my ability to walk) seems highly dependent on her position. I'll have days where my maternity pants barely fit and then the next day I can fit into my (largest) regular jeans. It's weird.

Nesting:

We are literally building baby girl's room right now so I think that epitomizes nesting and we did a similar thing with Will. It's nice to have full creative control over a space and apparently we really like the time crunch.

I'm also having probably too much fun buying little girl clothes. Most of Will's baby clothes were given to us from friends who had boys a little older than Will and so I didn't really shop for clothes for him for awhile. I cannot resist bay girl clothes though and crazy Gap sales and so we're filling out the new baby's wardrobe quite quickly.

So those are the major highlights so far. We are about two and a half months away from my due date so we're in major reno mode! Here's hoping everything goes smoothly and we get everything finished ahead of schedule.

DIY a Copper Pipe Chandelier

noreply@blogger.com (Cassandra @ The Life of CK and Nate) — Sat, 03 Oct 2015 05:37:00 +0000

We have so much going on right now it's slightly crazy. We're actually making progress on the house, work is super busy, and Will has mastered climbing out of his crib which has thrown our sleep schedule into a bit of a tailspin.... oh and I just my third trimester

I finally took some time to organize some of my photos enough to actually show you guys some of what we've been up to. We're waiting on building permits to start work on the second floor, so right now we are working on projects on the first floor that do not require permits. If you want to see real-time progress on the house (and not wait around for me to find time to write) you can follow along on our Instagram or Facebook pages!

One of my favorite quick fixes is replacing cheap lighting with custom fixtures. Our dining room light was a pretty basic (and not that pretty) chandelier that we didn't even bother to center over the table when we moved in, so for the last few months, one of the seats at the table was the "hot seat".

I knew for awhile I wanted to use copper piping to make a new chandelier for the dining room. I played around with a lot of different designs and finally landed on a simple octagon shape that mimics the shape of the dining room table. It's a pretty easy fixture to put together so if you want to make your own, you'll need:

11 Copper Tees (1/2")
8 Copper 45 degree elbows (1/2")
2 10 ft long 1/2" Copper Pipe
1/2-in x 1/4-in Copper Threaded Adapter Fitting (female)
Metal Swag Light Kit
8 Porcelain Light Socket with a Die Cast Cap
Lamp Wire
Tape Measure
Pipe Cutter
Wire Cutters
Electrical Tape
Screwdriver
Marker
2 Part Epoxy

I laid all the fittings out on the table to get an idea of how big I wanted the chandelier to be. Measuring between two fittings gave me the length of pipe I need to cut (which for us was 7"). Since I was making a polygon on the outside, all the pipe lengths between fittings had to be the same. So, I marked out one of the 10' long pipes in 7" increments.

If you have a pipe cutter, this next step is pretty easy. You place the pipe in the pipe fitter and screw it down until the metal blade makes contact with the pipe. Then you rotate the pipe cutter around the pipe multiple times. Each time you go around, you tighten the pipe cutter until the pipe finally separates.

Repeat as necessary. After I cut all my exterior pieces, I dry fitted the outside of chandelier. This allowed me to figure out the spacing I wanted for the central row. I ended up using 9" long rods on the outside and 8" rods on the inside so that the central two lights wouldn't be exactly in line with the ones on the periphery.

Before gluing, I also wanted to make sure I like the light sockets we chose and that the die cast cap would actually work the way we wanted it to.

These porcelain sockets are pretty awesome. The nipple on the base of the cap fits right inside the copper tee and then the socket itself screws onto the cap. It really has a nice look with the copper and it made wiring everything significantly easier.

The last few pieces were the central rod and the loop at the top to hang the chandelier. Once I was happy that we had everything and that it all fit together correctly, everything came back apart for wiring.

Wiring something with lots of bends and turns can be pretty tricky so we decided to break it down into sections. The sections were basically going from one tee to the next. We wired the sections before we epoxied the connections so we had a little more flexibility and then carefully epoxied each section, making sure the wire stayed where we needed it to be.

We used a two part epoxy (which we also use on all of the rope pulls we make) instead of soldering the joints to give a cleaner look to the piece. Once each section was dry, we epoxied the remaining joints and epoxied in the die cast caps to the top of the tees.

The main wire came in through the central pipe. The top of the pipe got the threaded adapter so that we could use the light kit to attach the hanging loop. We had to cut down the threaded rod provided in order to get the loop to be flush with the adapter but no other modification was required.

Nate finished by wiring the porcelain sockets and attaching them to the caps and then hanging it up!

For now we have the inexpensive white globe lights in but I'm ordering some LED Edison bulbs for the fall/winter. Overall, it cost just under $100 for all the parts (including the white bulbs) and we're really happy with final look!

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Linking to: Classyclutter.net, www.remodelaholic.com

Thirty

noreply@blogger.com (Cassandra @ The Life of CK and Nate) — Mon, 14 Sep 2015 11:00:00 +0000

Every once in awhile my birthday lands on Labor Day. This not only means I get my birthday off from work, but I get a three day weekend to go along with it. It was nice that this hit on my 30th since I needed the extra day to adjust to the new number. There has been a lot of adjustment to "newness" the last few months and since I haven't really thought about 30 much it hit harder than a lot of other birthdays.

This year, Nate took charge of birthday stuff and planned a whole bunch of day trips around Arizona for us to explore! It's nice living near Phoenix, but it is also really refreshing to escape to the surrounding areas for a little quiet and a lot more greenery. We got to take a little breather away from craziness for a few days which I really needed so it was the perfect way to spend the weekend.

Warning... Prepare for picture overload... and enjoy!

Shopping/Splash pad/Lunch

Bartlett Lake

Sedona

County Fair - near Flagstaff

Thinking Outside the Box (store): Choosing Kitchen Cabinets

noreply@blogger.com (Cassandra @ The Life of CK and Nate) — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 16:17:00 +0000

This is a sponsored post. All opinions are 100% mine. Thank you for supporting CKandNate

We are officially owners of our third house. Kind of crazy. We don't really like moving but we do what we have to for jobs and it does give us the opportunity to rework another house, which is fun. When we look for a new house we look for a home that is livable the way it is, but clearly can afford some changes/updates to improve the value. The biggest sticking point for us in house searches are space and kitchens. Usually, space trumps kitchens and so we end up renovating the kitchen to get what we want.

In our first house we were able to reuse some of the cabinets to keep costs down. This was both good and bad. We did end up saving some money, but in order to match designs, we were forced into buying our cabinets from one of the box stores. This wasn't the end of the world, but I didn't love them and wasn't thrilled about the construction or quality.

Fast forward to our second house. We decided to go with all new cabinets. Higher cost, but at the time we thought we were going to be in that house for a long time so worth it. We got quotes from Lowe's, Home Depot and a few local cabinet places as well as pricing out cabinets from Ikea. Based on quality and price, we ended up going with a local company. We were able to get the exact design we wanted, at a higher quality, plus have the cabinets be american made, all for significantly less money than the box stores.

We really like supporting smaller business that can offer better quality at a lower price. Cabinet Cottage is very similar to the company we worked with and offer the same line of cabinets we ended up buying (and loving). If you are in the market, we purchased the Americana Capital series. We brought our floor plan to the store and had a design worked up there which Cabinet Cottage offers as well as Free in home estimates.

Even better, right now you can get 50% off wholesale cabinetry which include the Americana series. We went with an al-a-carte option and installed the cabinets ourselves, but with the 50% off you can put the savings towards installation and save your back! We loved how these cabinets held up over time and while we aren't sure what we are going to do with our new kitchen, the cabinets are our biggest complaint. So, if we decide to replace them, we will be looking at these again.

Do you love your cabinets? Let us know where you got them in the comments.

Defining Wasted Space - Floating Shelves

noreply@blogger.com (Cassandra @ The Life of CK and Nate) — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 01:01:00 +0000

Do you ever look at a space in your house and ask "Why"? As in, why did whoever design my house put that there or include a space or not include cabinet knobs? Well, our new house has quite a few things on that list and we're slowly trying to figure out what to do to make those things work for us. The easiest to figure out and fix was a weird space/alcove between our master bedroom door (left) and the downstairs half bath door (right).

This spot has quickly become the dogs spot for food, water and where they hang out when we're not at home so I wanted to create a functional spot for them as well as some storage to deal with the copious number of boxes that are still not unpacked. I initially was going to try to find unit that fit the spot but I wanted to keep the floor space open to the dogs so instead, I decided to put in some floating shelves.

This was a bit of a fly by the seat of my pants project. I took some quick measurements of the alcove and headed to Lowe's. I wanted to keep this project simple and keep scrap to a minimum so I stuck with one 4' x 8' sheet of 1/4" stainable plywood and four 1x2's (8 ft long each). I had the guy at Lowe's cut down the plywood into eight 45" x 1' pieces and the strip left over I kept to make a smaller shelf. Then I headed home to work with the 1x2's.

I started on the table saw. I didn't want to see any raw plywood edges so I used the table saw to notch out a 1/4" deep notch on either side of two of the 1x2's. This allows the plywood to lay flush with the top of the 1x2 and have some support (1/2") underneath so I didn't have to used more 1x2's than necessary. The other 1x2's were ripped so that they would be the same depth as the narrow side of the notched 1x2 to create support pieces for the wall.

I used our miter saw to cut everything down to length. The scraps were cut down to create this smaller shelf for the bathroom. This only left a small piece of plywood at the end.

All the visible pieces of wood got a coat of stain and then it was time to start putting everything together.

Since 1x2's aren't very thick, I predrilled all the support pieces. This took a little extra time upfront but it saved a lot of frustration of splitting the wood so it was totally worth it.

Next was figuring out where to put the shelves. Our laser level has been my best friend in this house and it made this project so easy to put together. I set up the laser at the height I wanted the first shelf and started putting up support pieces right under it.

I would check with an actual level to verify that the individual support pieces were level and then I attached the front piece.

At this point I had support on all sides so I could lay in my top plywood piece and use my nail gun to attach the top to the supports. I repeated this process for the bottom piece of plywood and that finished the build of one shelf.

To keep going, I set up a tape measure with the spacing I wanted between the shelves and then lined the laser up to right above the top of the tape.

Lots of repeating work later, I had four awesome floating shelves! I was a little worried about the shelves sagging but these things are solid. I also shockingly did not have to repeat any cuts and things fit together just how they were supposed to (benefits of a newer house??? things are actually square??)

I wasn't quite done yet though. I touched up all the nail holes with stain and then put a coat of polyurethane on all visible sides.

I used a satin poly so you can barely tell a shine difference (above) between the poly'd and non poly'd side but after a quick sand down after the poly dried, The shelves were nice and smooth and no longer had the rough feel of plywood. I've learned over the years that if you ever want to wipe down these type of shelves, this is an absolutely necessary step.

Finally, I was able to do some unpacking and styling. All our DVD's and shows and CD's (yes we still use these things and we even use our LP's, I just couldn't find the box that they are hiding in to put them up yet) are now readily available and since this is the dogs area down below, I decided to use this space to display all our favorite pups in picture form.

I'm trying to embrace the desert life so we picked up a few dry loving plants this weekend and the little bit of greenery is definitely making me happy.

The only thing left to do is find an appropriate basket to store dog toys on the lowest shelf and then I'm going to be super duper happy with the combo of utility and eye candy that this little no-space has embraced.

How about you? Do you have a space in your house that needs defining?

Linking to: Remodelaholic.com

Desert Photos and an Announcement

noreply@blogger.com (Cassandra @ The Life of CK and Nate) — Mon, 17 Aug 2015 11:00:00 +0000

Moving from Fl to the middle of the desert is a little extreme in terms of views. There is technically green around us but it's really different and the overall hue is brown. It doesn't help that the houses in our neighborhood are every shade of brown/beige you can think of. We slowly adjusting and it helps that we have these cool mountain views so we thought we would take advantage to get some family photos. It's been awhile since the last time we did this so someone has grown quite a bit.

The cacti around here are pretty cool. They are huge and they are everywhere. They are protected and it's against the law to cut one down and if one is starting to fall, they stake it up to try and keep it alive. I haven't really learned much about all the other plants but most of them have prickers of some sort so between them and the rocks it's not the easiest terrain. I have found some pretty good running trails, though and as long as you stay on them you can get around the desert pretty well.

Will loves the rocks and riding his tricycle around the neighborhood and I think we'll enjoy hiking once cooler water hits. Right now we tend to max out at about 15 min outside before the sun goes down.

The heat here tends to bother me more than in Florida but I'm going to mostly blame that on our little bun in the oven!

I'm about 5 months pregnant (which has added a little bit of extra craziness the last couple of months) and things have finally settled down enough that we decided to share with you all. I'm due right at Christmas so we are just starting to play around with nursery ideas and names. We've been a little more amped up about it this week since we just found out we are having a:

Baby Girl!

We actually found out that we were pregnant just a couple of days before I came out to Phoenix to look for houses so timing was good for me to find a house that would fit our growing family. This means that you'll get to see us add a bedroom and completely overhaul certain aspects of our new house over the next couple of months. Stay tuned because we have a pretty long to-do list and a pretty short timeline so things are going to be changing quickly!

Last Minute Kitchen Finishes

noreply@blogger.com (Cassandra @ The Life of CK and Nate) — Wed, 12 Aug 2015 19:34:00 +0000

Before we listed our house in Florida, we had a laundry list of things to finish. A lot of the things were small that fell into the category of you notice if they're not finished but they don't really stand out when you're finished. Then there were other things that stood out to us but if you didn't see the house before, you would never know they weren't always there. The kitchen area fell into that second category.

The back entrance was in some form of construction until about 2 weeks before we listed the house. Since we moved the door frame into the kitchen, we had to re-drywall and patch a good chunk of this space. We joked that by the time we got done, this space it had more done to it by square footage than every other space in the house. We ended up taking down the chalk board because we wanted to take it with us and painted the space the same color as our half bath.

The ceiling also needed patching so we added a plank ceiling similar to our bedroom, but this time we decided to do a square pattern with the light centered. We really got into ceiling design in this house and I think this is my favorite (the birds being a very close second).

Next, we decided to finish off the top of the cabinets with crown. We had planned on doing this from the beginning but had never gotten around to it. We already had bought the crown so it seemed silly not to install it. Nate added a border of scrap wood to the top as a place to nail the crown to and then trimmed them out, including the sides of the cabinets near the window.

Caulking and painting is always our saving grace when it comes to crown and it really makes the cabinets look completely finished.

Last but not least, we added a door to the pantry per the request of our realtor. We started with the door that used to hang between the dining room and kitchen.

Nate cut out the upper panel and cut it down for the pantry door frame and I gave it a new coat of paint that I mixed up by lightening the kitchen ceiling paint. We wanted the light from the pantry to still make it into the kitchen and so we started looking around for transparent options for that upper panel. Since we didn't spend any money on that part, we decided to go with glass and to keep with the age of the house we got glass that has chicken wire embedded it in. We got it at a local glass company and it's a really cool look that makes the door look a lot older than it is. When the door is closed you can't see the contents of the pantry but still get the great light. the glass cost about $120 but I think it was totally worth it since we wouldn't have been able to buy a door like this for under a few hundred.

Those three little things really finished off the kitchen. I wish we had been able to enjoy them more (or take that door with us) but it was worth getting everything in tip top shape before listing the house.

What projects do you put off doing and then wish you had done them sooner?

Will's New Room

noreply@blogger.com (Cassandra @ The Life of CK and Nate) — Mon, 03 Aug 2015 23:14:00 +0000

Welcome to Will's big boy room. AKA the only unpacked and decorated room in our new house. We already showed you his new bookshelves that I made out of gutters and now it's time to show you the rest of his new space.

The big goal was to get some color going in his space. Since we are most likely going to move again after my residency is over, I decided to work with the beige paint and add accents of color in the blue hues.

We added one more gutter shelf over the couch for some stuffy storage and I spray painted a peg board in the same color as some of the shelves and hung baskets to get the diapers and wipes up off the changing table.

We loved Will's big alphabet and Fibonacci number murals in his nursery but this time I wanted something we could take with us if we move. So, I picked up a pack of Eric Carle number a letter flash cards. They are super cute and colorful and if your little loves Hungry Hungry Caterpillar they will be all over these. I used some twine and clothesline clips to hang the cards. The great thing is that the numbers have two sets of flashcards so one can hang and you can use the other set.

Over Will's crib (which we are keeping him in as long as possible... no climbing out yet) I have my favorite little animal pictures by Sharon Montrose and then Will picked out the giraffe cutout from Hobby Lobby. It's the first time he's really wanted something so it's now right where he can see it.

The last couple of things we did was add Will's name to his door and put a peep hole in it. It's nice to have the option to check in on him without opening the door, especially since he likes to do gymnastics in his crib when he should be taking a nap...

So that's Will's new room. It's working really well for us and it's nice to have his room free of toys so we can focus on it being more of a down time space for reading and sleeping.

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Colorful Gutter Bookshelves

noreply@blogger.com (Cassandra @ The Life of CK and Nate) — Tue, 21 Jul 2015 11:00:00 +0000

Guess what?

We finished a whole room in the new house. As in, everything has an away place and we have actually put things up on the walls. It feels pretty good.

Not surprisingly, we decided to fully finish Will's room first. We wanted him to be settled in first and so last weekend when he and Nate were off at a family reunion, I made a big push to finish his room. Today I'm going to share how I added a ton of book storage to his room.

My biggest complaint about this new house is the lack of useful storage. My second biggest complaint is that the entire house is painted this beige color and I'm not a fan. But, until we officially close I'm not painting and so I'm trying to be ok with the color and bring in some brighter colors in other ways. This brings us to the colorful bookshelves. They are made of gutters and are super easy to put together... but first a little backstory.

This is where the room started. Lots of beige, skinny baseboards and no window casing.

The number one thing we did (before the rest of our stuff arrived) was to get black out curtains for the windows. Since AZ doesn't do the whole daylight savings thing, the sun comes up at 5:30 am right now and no one wants a 2 year old up that early. I got these curtains and the rod at Ikea for under $60 for everything and then I picked up a couple of tie backs in the clearance section of Lowe's. The only challenging part of install was that we didn't really have anything to stand on yet and so I pseudo balanced on our new Ikea chairs to screw everything in (with a regular screw driver... no drill). It was worth it though... these curtains make Will's room almost completely dark.

Next up was doing something with all the wall space. We put Will's bookshelf in the playroom so I really wanted a way to display all of his books and allow him access to some, but not all, of them. Our friend Desi mentioned the idea of gutter bookshelves and it seemed perfect for either side of the window. If you haven't see gutter bookshelves all over Pinterest, don't worry, I hadn't either until recently.... but apparently it's a thing. So this isn't a novel idea by far, but since I put these together before seeing the copious amount of examples on Pinterest, I thought I would share what I did since I did a few things really differently.

I started in the gutter isle in Lowe's. I initially wanted to do metal gutters but between the fact that this Lowe's was very poorly stocked on metal gutters and I was a little worried about the potential sharpness of the metal ones, I moved to a PVC option. The gutters themselves are cheaper than the metal ones (at just under $4 for 10' vs ~$10) but the end caps are much pricier (~$2.50/side vs $0.70/side). If you aren't doing many shelves then this isn't really an issue but I wanted to do 6 shelves so those end pieces added up quickly. You don't need the end caps but they provide a ton of stability so if you are putting things like books in them, it's a good idea.

I ended up getting two 10' long gutters and a total 14 end caps (I made 6 shorter and 1 longer shelves). I brought everything home and used our new toy (a major upgrade since our old chop saw bit the bucket right before we moved) to cut the first gutter into 4 30" long section and the second into 2 30" and 1 60" section. I'm not a fan of cutting PVC but since this new chop saw is on rails, it made it super easy to cut the gutter all the way through with just one cut instead of two.

Most everyone seems to keep their gutter shelves white but I wasn't going to add more neutral to an already boring room so I brought the cut pieces and the end caps out back to spray paint them. I picked two colors, a dark blue and a teal which just happened to match our umbrella. I strung up a rope between the umbrella and our back fence and hung each gutter piece off of it. We've used this method a few times now for spray painting and it works really well. I only sprayed the sides of the gutter that would show (aka not the back) and even doing that we needed to go get a second can of the dark blue (the color we did 4 shelves with).

I initially painted the end caps flat on plastic and then once I assembled everything I sprayed the edges. The end caps literally just pop right on so once I did the finally spray I just let everything dry overnight and they were ready to hang.

I ended up using drywall screws to attach these to the wall. Each shelf got 5 screws which may seem like overkill but I wanted two to go into studs, two to go through the top corners so that the end caps were also secured to the wall (which adds a TON of stability) and then one to go near the base of the shelf so that it didn't wobble. I predrilled holes for the three that weren't going into studs, attached the shelf to the wall and then used our stud finder to find where I needed to put the final two screws.

Once I had one side up, the hardest thing was making sure that they shelves on the other side of the window were level with the first side. This we a little tricky and I ended up having to redo them three times before I got it right. The mistake I kept making was that the back of the shelf is a little lower than the front, which is slightly different than the top of the end cap. So if you are trying to do the same, measure to the top of the end cap... it's a lot easier than the other two.

I love how these came out. They are super sturdy and hold a ton of books. We were a little worried that they would bend under the weight of the books but they are very solid and only bend if you pull hard on the middle of the front. Even then, it won't damage the shelf at all.

Will can reach the books on the bottom shelve and so we put his board books on those. All the ripable books are on the higher shelves so that he has to ask to read one. He seems to love the independence of being able to get (and put away) his books and will point and ask for higher ones. Being able to see all the covers has been a real success in increasing his reading interest. Overall, these shelves are both a design and utility win and all in I spent just under $50 for all the shelves (including the long one).

I'll share the rest of the projects and his full room (including where the long shelf went) as the week goes on but first.. have you tried the gutter shelves? I'd love to see pictures of how yours turned out!

Before and After: Downstairs Bedrooms

noreply@blogger.com (Cassandra @ The Life of CK and Nate) — Tue, 14 Jul 2015 00:50:00 +0000

Filtering through all our projects, even a few rooms at a time, is quite the task! It's definitely fun looking through the old projects though! Here are the downstairs bedrooms and the master bath before and afters

What we did:

Closed off the door to the sunroom
Added the fabric canopy
Installed bamboo shades
Installed wall-to-wall carpeting
Made the map art
DIY'd the gold dipped lamps
Painted the walls
Bumped out the wall to make room for the kitchen appliance wall on the other side
Built two closet spaces on either side of the wall bump out
Brought electrical up to code
Installed the plank ceiling and replaced the boob lights
Installed crown molding
Added the barn door on one closet and built shelving for the other

What we miss:

The coziness of this room
Character
Shelving
Believe it or not... the carpet. We have laminate in our new bedroom and the dogs' nails on it is one of the worst sounds ever

What we did:

Removed the large mirror and repurposed it into two smaller ones
Tiled the wall
Replaced the sink and faucet
Painted the vanity and replaced pulls/knobs
Leveled and replaced the flooring
Added an attached toilet paper holder
Re-grouted the tile in the shower
Replace the marble threshold in the shower
Replaced the door to the bathroom
Replaced lighting over vanity
Used PVC pipe to create holders for hair tools

What we miss:

Vanity storage
Places to put shampoo, condition, etc in the shower that's not the floor

What we did:

Painted the walls
Painted the alphabet and Fibonacci spiral murals
Sewed the elephant valances
Revamped dresser 1 & 2
DIY'd a baby mobile
Installed wall-to-wall carpet
Installed washer and dryer hookups
Built the laundry unit
Fixed dry rot around window
Replaced ceiling fan
Added curtain between bathroom and Will's room

What we miss:

Can I say everything? I loved this room and we're working to make Will's new room as comfy as this one. More specifically...
The murals
The laundry organization
The curtain... much harder to sneak peaks into Will's room now.

4th of July Fun

noreply@blogger.com (Cassandra @ The Life of CK and Nate) — Tue, 07 Jul 2015 11:00:00 +0000

I hope you all had a wonderful 4th! We had fun exploring Phoenix a bit. It was a bit overwhelming trying to narrow down what we could/wanted to do for the 4th since Phoenix has a TON of different activities/celebrations/fireworks displays. It was hard to know what's worth going to and what we should skip since we're so new to the area so we picked a few things nearby.

Butterfly Wonderland

We've gone to a few butterfly atriums over the years and it's always a great way to spend a couple of hours. We last went when Will was only a couple months old in Gainesville and he definitely enjoyed it a lot more this time around. He actually looked at the butterflies (although he called them airplanes) and smelled the flowers. There were also puddles to jump in and huge fish. It probably is the most humid place in Phoenix which was awesome for me and my never ending stint with bronchitis, but we were all a little overheated and sweaty after about an hour an a half. Luckily, there was also a really cool 3D movie about monarch migration and a few smaller exhibits inside.

In-N-Out Burger

We didn't grill but we got our burger fix at In-N-Out. We had never been before and it was surprisingly good. Nate even claimed that it is now his favorite fast food burger which is a pretty high mark to hit. Will was so funny with his little jug of milk. He acted like he was in a "Got Milk?" commercial for the entire time we were in the restaurant.

Baseball in Surprise, AZ

After nap time, we headed west to Surprise, AZ where we got to see the Seattle Mariners play the Kansas City Royals. It was a free game with a can donation and we got seats in the shade. The game was also really good with a combo of really great plays with just enough errors to make it really interesting. After the game there were fireworks and despite asking for "booms" all day long, we only got about 5 fireworks in before Will was done and we headed out. Driving home we saw about 10 other displays go off from the car which was really impressive.

The only fail of the weekend was trying to see the fireworks on the 3rd a little north of us. It wasn't really our scene and right before the fireworks were supposed to go off, a huge storm came in and the lightning was pretty intense so we headed out before we got poured on. We did get to see a huge cactus decked out in christmas lights though. We all were trying to figure out how someone got stuck with that job (pun intended). Overall, it was a great weekend exploring the city.

How did you celebrate the 4th?

Arizona House Living Room... Sort of

noreply@blogger.com (Cassandra @ The Life of CK and Nate) — Tue, 30 Jun 2015 01:46:00 +0000

Today was my first day of residency and I did not reach the goal of getting everything unpacked. I got about 90% there on things I could unpack and we still have a bunch of boxes that we just don't have a place to put the contents. The biggest issue is that the Florida house had so many built-ins by the time we were done with it and the new house has nothing for shelving. It's a big beige box.

Above is the relator pic of the dining room/living room combo before we moved in and below is the real life chaos that is going on in the same space now. We are having a hard time with the amount of blank wall space combined with lack of shelving so for now, nothing is on the walls (except the TV). We have been going through different ideas for a couple of weeks and we think we have at least one wall figured out so hopefully things we'll be on the walls and out of boxes soon.

While we are trying to figure out the walls, we've also had a floor situation. We only kept a couple of rugs when we moved and one went in Will's room so we were left with the one from Will's playroom. I love this rug but it is too small and too beige for the living room. I never intended it for this space but with the hard tile we needed something for this spot until we found a new rug.

After checking Craigslist a million times in the last two weeks, I finally found a winner. I got an 8' x 10' barely used Pottery barn rug with a rug pad for $150 (woo hoo!). It makes such a huge difference and I hate the beige walls just a little bit less now.

The chairs are also new to this house. We got them after the second day of having nowhere in the house to sit while we waited for the truck to get here. They're from Ikea and so far I love them. They are deep and SUPER heavy so they don't move around.

Small changes and a little progress at a time is how we're rolling right now.

How do you unpack?