Feathered Friends at the Holec House

First of all happy Mother’s Day to all mothers and especially to my mother. I am so very fortunate to have you in my life!

Now for the skinny on our feathered friends. Last week Kaylee brought home a collection of three neat looking eggs.

She knows better than to take eggs out of a nest, but she’d been watching these eggs for a week or so and noticed the parents hadn’t returned. Being the animal lover that she is, she scooped them up and brought them home.

She played a little trick on her papa too. When they got home, she ran outside, made a little grass nest in the backyard and proclaimed “daddy! Look what I found!” She’s quite the jokester, really, she gets us all the time! She then told him about how they were on the ground, the parents hadn’t returned and the kids were playing with them. She was worried they’d get cracked.

She did some research at school and found out they are Killdeer eggs. I was pretty impressed she had figured that out! To read more about them, click here.
Apparently, they’re very pretty birds with a long incubation period (22-28 days) so there’s still a chance they could hatch, although rare as they were snowed on last week. We shall see! Currently they’re contained in Kaylee’s homemade bird house with a heating pad beneath them.

We also have a cardinal nest in the bushes right out front.

Here are a few pictures of the cardinal eggs and babies.

They’re fun to watch!

Itching For A Project

It’s been about 6 months since my last post and our last major project (the roof.)  I’m officially itching to tackle a new one.  As I was perusing the blog Young House Love (one of my favorites) I came across this post that inspired me to add some much-needed closet storage to our master bedroom.  In a nutshell, they built two wardrobes, one on either side of the bed.

Here’s the finished product:

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I love the soft look created by the curtains along with the fact that using curtains would be far less expensive than doing custom wood wardrobes.  And doesn’t the little nook make you want to snuggle in bed with a book?  I love it.

Anyway, here is what our master currently looks like:

As you can see, we have a similar setup with plenty of room for a wardrobe on either side of the bed.  Especially one you can customize!  And man do we need the storage.  Why?

This is our current “master” closet:

As you can see, there’s absolutely nothing about it that screams “master.”  It is, true to the old home standard, tiny.  It’s so tiny, that I’m the only one who uses it.  I actually took over both closets on the first floor (guilty face.)  Poor Trent is stuck with the one in the basement.

He’s a trooper and doesn’t seem to mind, but eventually we want to finish the basement and will turn the room with his closet into a bedroom, so we have to create his closet space someplace else!

Speaking of creating storage, I found this bed frame with drawers beneath which I think would be perfect for us.  I foresee a trip to Ikea and the Cities in our future!

The Rain in Spain Stays Mainly… In Our Basement.

What would a blog about our house be if it only included the fun projects? This project=notsofun. Zero fun, actually.

We knew at one point there had been water in the basement, but we’ve gone two years without and were really hoping for a few more dry years until we could afford to get it water proofed. No such luck!

Here are some pictures.

I created a pathway with the two by fours below to help water flow to the drain…In this room you could actually see the water pouring in through the corner.  Sigh.

Our first step was to move all the furniture into the drier areas of the basement, of course the only two rooms with water are the ones that had carpet.  Anyway, the laundry room is now a bit of a mess…

Fortunately, we have carpet squares, so they were easier to pull up than the real deal. Dad was a huge help–he came over around 7:00 that morning with the shop vac and a few other goodies. He helped us lug the tiles through the window and to the garage where they could dry.  He also recommended we make sure our gutters were flowing properly and that water was exiting them as far away from the house as possible.  He even came back an hour or so later and set up a few of his ladders for us.  What a guy!

After the carpet was out, we started trying to squeegee the water toward the drain with this gadget dad brought us.

It worked pretty well!

This weekend Trent and I lugged all of the tiles out on the lawn to dry during the brief bout of sunshine we had.  After a few hours we hauled them back down into the basement and stacked them up.  We decided not to lay them down yet since more rain is forecast this week.  :(  Fingers crossed we’ll have a dry basement!

Roofing Rally!

About three months ago, I wrote an excited post about the fantastic deal we got on shingles for the garage. Well, with the help of many family members and friends, we put them up! We had 90+ degree weather all weekend, but we managed to get the job done with no casualties, whew!

Day one, Saturday, was spent removing old shingles, cutting out rotten plywood holes and replacing them with new.

Auntie Beth and cousin Megan came too! We Koester women are certainly not afraid of a little hard labor.

We were fortunate enough to be able to borrow a dump truck from my Dad’s company and then dump it at my uncle’s construction company afterward, saving us at least $500. We’re so lucky! The truck backed up right into the garage, which made for super convenient shingle disposal.

Dad and I snuck off to Lowes to get a few materials and much to my dismay, Dad wore his rockin outfit–ahh!

I was a little freaked out that our jimmy rigged bungee job wasn’t going to hold out, but it did!

My cousin Matt and his wife came too–Lynndi was up the ladder ready to hop on the roof, belly or no belly. Thankfully, we were able to convince her to “supervise.”

Most of the crew called it a day around 4:00 Saturday…

until Pat showed up and put Trent back to work laying tar paper.

Trent and Pat had just finished the tar paper when my mom and dad’s Dinner Club arrived for a tour! Always fun to see them.

The fun started bright and early Sunday and Mr. Jaxson was all business …

Sunday was a SCORCHER, especially since the tar paper we were standing on was black. It was SO hot that Trent’s shoes literally melted. Not a great picture (dad’s fault,) but you can see both the actual shoe with the bottom sliding off, as well as a piece of the heel that came off in the background.

We did end up having to run to Menard’s because we were short a few bundles of shingles, but it only set us back about 45 minutes. There’s a snag with every project!

We finished up around 5:00, just in time for dinner. Below you can see the two-tone shingles, and be sure to notice how we artfully arranged the end caps!

It was a long weekend, but it feels GREAT to have such a big project out of the way. Thanks a million to all of our friends and family for helping make it happen, we love you all!

A Zoo-y Fireplace Update

Well, painting the fireplace wasn’t zoo-y really, but we did take a little trip to the Omaha Zoo, hence the title.

Actually, painting the fireplace was fairly simple, just time consuming. Here are a few before shots:

I’m sure by now you all know about my strong feelings of hatred toward brown in our house… I HATE it. You can only imagine how much joy it brings me to see our dirty looking, poop brown fireplace be transformed into a crisp, clean white one. Yay! Another project I’ve I wanted done for almost a year checked off the list! Well, almost anyhow. I’m not quite finished yet.

This photo really captures the drastic change, I think:

Like I said, fireplace painting is fairly time consuming because of the roughness of the brick. It’s taken about three coats (would have been more had the fireplace not been painted previously.) I used a super fluffy-fat roller and got the narrow spaces with a brush.

Today I’ll be finishing it up with a coat of trim paint on the mantel, but the brick portion is finished!

Here’s the before shot again.

So.Incredibly.Ugly.

As I mentioned above, we took a little trip to the Omaha Zoo this weekend with Trent’s family. I’m writing this post on the ride home, actually. Oh how I love my iPhone! Anyway, we had a great time. Here are a few photos.

It was hot (90+ degrees) and we walked from 9:30 to 4:00, but it was well worth it! Back to painting when we get home and then early to bed for all!

Living & Dining Room Makeover (Finally!)

Well, it’s official, we have FINALLY started the living and dining rooms! Just before we hit the one year mark in our home. Better late than never, I suppose.

The living and dining rooms are in the front of the house, so we decided painting one room at a time would be best so that we wouldn’t be totally exposed. Especially since there are 11 windows involved–having no curtains is basically an open invitation for neighborhood spies.

We did the dining room first, here are some photos of the process:

Before

As with any project, we ran into a few snags. We realized there were some small cracks in the plaster that needed to be filled before we could paint.

Luckily it wasn’t a major setback and we were able to paint a day later.

Trent usually does the rolling and I do the detail work like trim and edging.

Here are a few photos pre-curtains.

And now for the curtains… which are a bit of a pain. First we pre-drilled holes and then each curtain required 4 screws to be screwed in by hand.

The finished product!

It’s still a bit of a mess… I was too lazy to clean up just for a few photos. I’ll post some pictures of a tidy living and dining room after they’re both finished, probably next week.

Until next time!

The perfect shade of gray

Remember awhile back when I posted this picture and said I thought I’d finally found a color for the living room and dining room?

Well, that was about six paint samples ago.

Currently, our wall looks like this:

And this.

And this.

You see, I’d really like to use one shade (or one shade and a lighter version of the same shade) for the living and dining rooms because they’re essentially one consecutive space. I want to keep the flow, if you know what I mean.

It is sort of divided by the little chunk of wall (I have no idea what you call it–a separator??) It’s where a beam would be, but there’s no beam.

Anyway, it creates some separation between living and dining room, but I still feel like the space calls for either one color, or two very similar colors.

Here is the current view, from the dining room into the living room. As you can see, I’ve added yet another paint swatch next to the window on the left…

Another factor in our color selection is that the dining room is visible from the kitchen, meaning that those colors need to blend nicely.

Also, our couches are this shade of gray (is it grey? does it matter?)

I’m on a grey kick. I really like the look of a warm green-grey with the white trim and oak floors, but I have to coordinate with the green kitchen color and the grey couches.  Here are the colors we’re working with:

Right now, the color sample on the walls is senora gray.  I guess it is gray?    Oh well.  Trent and I are OK with senora gray, but my friend Hanna was over this past weekend and she said she thinks it’s a bit too blue and that it’s a little too close to the color of the couches.  I think I agree (and I trust her design opinion,) it’s just that I’m tired sampling “the perfect color” only to find it isn’t perfect.  Frustrating!

My next thought is to try the spanish olive (slightly more green) in the dinging room and then use the spring thaw in the living room.  I think the spring thaw is light enough that it won’t look like too similar to the color of the couch, but I guess we’ll have to sample and find out for sure!  My husband will be so thrilled…

Oh well, until then my dining room will just have to remain looking like this:

Things could be worse, I suppose.

On a side note,  my wise friend Hanna got me a great birthday gift this year!

Trent told her I needed art and so she picked this out for us.  I LOVE it.  It makes me want to find a color even more so that I can find a home for it on the wall!

I also got this fountain for mother’s day.  I love the soft, soothing, trickling sounds it makes and it’s rustic charm.

Well, that about wraps it up for now.  Hopefully I’ll have the wonder color selected before my next post, but until then please feel free to give me some color advice!