We’re going to take a moment and touch on our final and biggest project we completed before moving!

So a long time ago I alluded to some DIY built ins to go in conjunction with our DIY Armoire and we’re officially finished with it (obviously since we’ve moved)!!! There was months of begging and plenty of sales pitches that fell on deaf ears but he finally said yes and I literally jumped on it! I didn’t want to give Todd any time to change his mind!! I had already scoured Pinterest and Houzz to get inspiration and we really couldn’t agree on how we wanted to construct it…Todd’s a super visual learner so he couldn’t figure out what I was saying so we spent a few weeks going back and forth trying to agree on how we’re going to construct it! The only thing we were able to agree on was not building the bookcases themselves, thanks to Ikea we only had to do minimal changes but it saved us about an extra 6 months to complete the project!

Once we finally agreed upon how to build the structure, off to Home Depot we went!!

Daddy and Tenley enjoying their picks!

Tenley loves to ride the carts now! In this picture she was SO little!!

We of course snagged some PureBond Plywood…we literally will never get anything else!! Not only is it formaldehyde free but it’s also GORGEOUS!!! …meaning Todd and I really we’re bummed to paint it, Todd actually tried to talk me into staining it a few times!

Todd decided to build a cleat along the back wall into the studs and then build a box up front…let me just say that the weeks we went back and forth (and too many drawings to count) he just needed to run with it and figure it out on his own! We should have measured it a few more times before we assembled it since we literally had to reassemble it a few times!!

Couldn’t pass up this candid shot of Tenley “measuring” the bench. This side was actually our first one and was used as a point of reference for the second side!

Once we had the main structure built it was adding the walls and trim, again we of course used PureBond plywood for the benches as well. We’ve gotta make sure that we build with the best products… especially for Tenley! Unfortunately, at this point Todd needed assistance meaning that I offered a foot while keeping my hands occupied keeping Hurricane Tenley from “helping”.

The benches were used to store excess Tenley toys…

What were going to miss the most about this house was the time spent looking out the windows…especially watching Tenley, watching the dogs!

So he sent me this picture and text and it was just perfect!!

With this caption…
“So…I’m packing stuff up and I set the tape down and can’t find it. I asked Tenley to help fond the tape and she brought me this. Too cute.”

That’s our little DIYer!!!

Here’s a shot of the storage and Todd clearly loves his truck!!!

So on to Tenley…

She’s a beast, weapon of mass destruction, or hurricane!

Seriously…all apply to her! She’s still not sleeping through the night!! But she’s the most fun little person ever and we’re obsessed!!

As far as talking is concerned, not much has changed. She’s going to be a late talker, she’d prefer to point and squeal but she understands everything! We’re constantly blown away! With her cold and RSV she’s become a pro at blowing her nose, well at least that’s what we tell her. She will grab the kleenex and blow out for you, it’s impressive…Todd still hasn’t gotten that one down. Speaking of a cold/RSV…it’s made us really prove how much we love her, we’ve been using the NoseFrida instead of the bulb to get her snot…it is so amazing but man can it be gross sometimes!

Yes…you literally snuck the snot out!

On to pictures of Tenley!!!

Tenley riding Buster (Nana and Papa’s dog)

Tenley’s now in love with wearing hats! Making mommy and daddy proud…that’s a SF Giants hat!

She loves reading and absolutely loves her daddy! Why yes, Todd is wearing one her of old beanies from when she was a baby!

She has a HEAD full of hair!

…where we brought Tenley home to

…where we brought our puppies home to

…I wasn’t finished.

…the house we made our home

Crap! This is harder than we thought! WAY harder! We’ve been praying like crazy that if this isn’t supposed to work out it’ll be totally clear to us.

Keeping the house show ready has been darn near impossible with Hurricane Tenley. Last Saturday, while I was at work, Todd was trying not to panic while Tenley was destroying the house as he was cleaning up. She likes to take out all her toys, our clothes, her books and all the lids in the kitchen…she’s a beast and leaving landmines throughout the house doesn’t bode well for our attempts to show the house.

We were completely blown away by how quickly its gone! Friday we listed the house and within the first few hours we had an offer! Not any offer was less than asking price, in fact with the exception of one, they all exceeded the asking price! TOTALLY not what we were expecting but it’s totally been something we’ve come across as we’ve been hunting around for our new house! I can say at this rate we will be living with my parents come April 10th…we just keep praying that we find our next home soon and that if we don’t everyone walks away alive!

A fun little video of Tenley wearing my shoes for the first time…you know, to keep things light!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSsm1Kyf7u8

I’m terrified and maybe a little sad. Actually pretty sad…and I’m the one pushing to move! There’s so much I still had planned to do and none of it can be done because we’re selling it! We’ve already done things to put us outside of our neighborhood and we didn’t even come close to touching the things I was super jazzed about!

This is the home we brought Tenley home to!

I mean this is the house where we learned how much we (mostly me) love to DIY and make a house our home!

But for us, the scariest part, are the houses we’ve seen…they’re nothing short of terrifying! And truth be told, it’s been super demoralizing…our house has already leaps and bounds better than those ones!

We’re going to be selling the bachelor pad and buying a fixer upper.

This will no longer be our front yard soon!

The initial plan was to save (HA!) for 3 to 4 years and buy brand new but the more we looked, the more I realized I want to build new. Originally I wanted and fixer upper and Todd say no way in heck, after looking at model homes I realized that we weren’t going that route so I gave Todd the ultimatum build or fixer upper. Apparently that made his decision easy because fixer upper it is!

The plan has changed drastically from making it fabulous to live in to making it acceptable to sell! Trust me, that’s a huge change for us! I had big plans to reveal including taking down walls, building a breakfast bar, extend the bottom cabinets, pain the cabinets and have open shelving on one wall in the kitchen.

We were going to do so much to the game room and finally touch our bedroom, guest room and front bathroom! Oh gosh, I didn’t even mention the back yard!! According to the realtor, we’ve outdone our area so we don’t really need to do much, we have just a few small things!

There are some things that need to be done though…

• Finish off the end cap where we tore down the wall
• Patch a hole in the wall (that we already started)
• Install baseboard in the bathroom (it’s only a 2 ft section)

Not much right?! Yeah…meaning next week we should have the house listed on the market!

I just cannot believe how quickly it’s going! Just last week we weren’t buying or selling and this week we need to start thinking about packing and storage! We will be sharing whats going on along the way!!

When we started shopping around I really was concerned about the chemicals that were used in the products especially with Tenley hanging out…you know, with it taking months there will be lots of her hanging out with an incomplete project chilling around. We decided to use PureBond because they’re formaldehyde free, we heard amazing things and because their plywood is of the highest quality! Seriously…if you’re tackling a project you will want to use PureBond and it stains BEAUTIFULLY but that’s a project for later!

See, isn’t it beautiful?! Go run to Home Depot now because it’s AMAZING!

We ripped the boards down and painted them before hand…it’s a 7 foot Armoire (70.5″ x 84″ x 20.5″ to be exact), painting it assembled after may have been easier but before hand is our kind of thing! We ended up putting all the boards in the game room…because safety hazards hanging out in the largest room in a house with a crawling baby makes perfect sense!

We Kreg-Jig-ed the walls and made sure everything was square by using the 90 degree angle clamp prior to assembling and gluing. We thought we could assemble it and then we could easily just lift it up and put it into place, easily being the operative (and very wrong) word here.

The super awesome part was once we got it up we realized we needed to take it down to add some support…a wobbly armoire is a really horrible idea, trust me! Looking back, I can laugh and be completely embarrassed but in the moment two completely sleep deprived people trying to get together one huge freaking structure up making virtually no noise is less than fabulous.

There was lots of leveling, pushing, tweaking and once we got it right where we wanted it Todd used brackets to keep everything in place.

We really wanted something similar to the inspiration photos I used to conn show Todd so we used lattice around the exterior of the door, I apologize on the quality of the picture (and mess), Todd took it while I was busy working on surviving Hurricane Tenley.

Almost complete…just needs the trim up top!

Todd was so proud of himself!

There will be more pictures soon, and fancier ones, but Hurricane Tenley broke (yes broke) my SD card so my pictures are GONE! Worst part, we’ve got more projects started (and finished) so we can’t show you an after till we complete the rest of it! We’re SO close!

So…what do you think? Am I crazy? Do you love it? Are you undecided? Just wait until you see what else we’ve done!

That’s a sneak peek of our 6 month project!