Huston Farmhouse: half bath

Another makeover at the farmhouse....

Here's what the downstairs half bath looked like when we first looked at the house before we bought it. The walls were a light (dirty) yellow. The bones were good, but it greatly needed some TLC. The faucet was beginning to corrode and the mirror was white with yellow stain marks on it. The towel rack and toilet paper roll holder were in odd places. The light and outlet covers were rusty, too. Here are some before and afters...

The only thing we spent money on was a new rug, towel rack, faucet, toilet paper roll holder and toilet handle and a quart of paint ("Muted Sage" by Behr). The oil rubbed bronze light fixture I wanted was $65, so instead I got a $6 can of oil rubbed bronze spray paint and sprayed the existing light fixture to match the other new fixtures.

I also repurposed the mirror. I decided to mod podge it using lettered scrap paper that I had. 

 

 

Some other before and afters...

I was really excited to finally use these three pictures that my cousin, Chris, took. After our Poppop passed away, Chris took some black and white photos of our grandparent's house. I have some very fond memories of growing up around this house.

Here are the three pics up close:

 I'm pleased with how everything came together in this little bathroom!

Huston Farmhouse: Homeschool Room

We are super excited and feel incredibly blessed to call this place our home now. 

 

We are loving being able to go back to our country-living roots that we both grew up with. It was a long and complicated journey to get here (more on that another day), but we're here now and have been very busy transforming this old 1900 farmhouse into our home.

Since we are starting school tomorrow, one of the first rooms we transformed was our homeschool room. The previous owners had it painted yellow and dark red. We painted all the trim white and the walls light green. Here are some before/afters... 

(I'll post the BEFORE first and the AFTER pic of the same wall right below it.)

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

  

 

 

And just a couple more of the kids' reading corner...

 

These are shelves made from desk drawers. It was an old desk we were getting rid of years ago, and I painted them and turned them into shelves. They were the prefect (free!) addition to this reading corner.

I hope to post more pictures as I get the chance. We don't have internet at our house yet (that's another long, stressful story) so I can't post very often. So, more to come when I can! 

 

They Were Hard-Working and Talented

About a year and a half ago, Callan and Kinsley read a book called They Were Strong and Good by Robert Lawson as part of their homeschool. Mr. Lawson's book told the story of his parents and grandparents and how they were ordinary people who were "strong and good" and who made the United States of America a better place to live because of their contributions.

So in turn, we decided to write a book about our grandparents and great grandparents, modeling it after Robert Lawson's book. We called our book They Were Hard-Working and Talented.

Callan wrote interview questions for his mom, dad, grandparents and great grandparents. Then Callan and Kinsley interviewed everyone while we videotaped their interviews. Just this past September we got around to watching all the videos. When the person on the video said something that C & K wanted to include in their book, I would pause the video and type what they wanted to say. They wrote the headings for each page and cut out the typed words and pasted the book together.

Enjoy reading it!

We made our title page just like his. He put a cluster of objects in the middle of the page. Each object represents a person in his book. So we did the same. Each of the objects on our title page represent a person in our book, too: birdhouse, drum, microphone, sewing machine, loaf of bread, motorcycle, bank, dodo bird, farmer, baseball bat & ball.  

We used the same wording for our Foreword as Robert Lawson did.

 

 Their Author's Page...