Some shots inside the house

Somehow, yesterday I missed a whole section of shots I took inside the house before we moved everything in, so let me share those with you today & maybe a bit of what are plans are.

So above is a close up of the dining area and a peek in to the kitchen.  The bottom photo is the entry way from the front door, going into the living area which is where I'm standing.  The ceiling we are going to paint white, all the mint green is going to painted a slate grey (like the grey in the wallpaper in the bottom photo).  All wood borders we are going to be white as well.  My china is in the hutch above and the decor of these two rooms will be based off my china.

They are extremely special, my dad got them while he was in the Navy in Japan and they had been given to his mom, my Grandma.  When she passed, they were passed on to me and they are one of the true treasures that I own.  They are Noritake China Rosales #5790.  Sorry, I ended up posting another post with the image, haha.  Click on the link to see an image    Anyways, so the walls are going to be grey, white borders with hints of pink to match the rose.  We will be keeping the dark wood that is on the hutch windows and the living room arch going into the dining area.

Here's Lara's room again & the reason she picked this room over the other one.  That neat little cubby hole on the left side with the little door.  She's wanting to go green in here, I'm really hoping she goes a light green with white trim but she's thinking of a grass green.  I am considering trying my hand at stenciling so maybe somehow through that, I can make the grass green look ok in here, haha.

Anna's room needs a lot of work.  Stickers on the ceiling, lots of patching on the walls but I think it will look really nice once we get it all done. 

Upstairs now, this is the master bath, I don't like where the tub/shower is placed it leaves a lot of wasted space behind it.  If we ever actually buy this house, we want to look into getting that situated better.

The master bedroom closet, this is my side Vince also has one but he doesn't have a bar in there to hang in clothes up on.  So for the time being, we are sharing this one.

Our groovy retro master bedroom, it looks out over the front of the house.  I have no idea what I want to do in here but the carpet and wall border needs to go (as well as the light fixture in the corner). 

This is the red room which is now our office.  We want to pull the carpet up to where it's down to the wood floor, hopefully it is in good shape.  That in itself will tremendously cut down on the red which is really over bearing in this room.

The boys room is actually the nicest bedroom in the house.  It's pretty much all set to go, even the carpet is new and not the shag carpet that covers most of the house.

Now, I'm down in the basement.  This looked to be a canning/pantry room.  For the time being my model horses will be going in here but I'm thinking of selling a huge portion of those off.  In which I would like to keep this room as an additional pantry room. for the kitchen above.

Vince has two rooms here that adjoin together, this is his area.  His locksmith stuff and mechanic tools will be going in here.  This is across the hallway from my pantry room up above.  I'm sure Vince will be changing things around in here quite a bit.

This is the main area of the basement which is a play area for the time being.  The sheet you see hanging on the wall to the right (behind the end table) is actually a door way that goes outside through a little shed.  It's boarded up right now but ideally, we'd like to get rid of the shed and put some sort of door here to where it's a straight access outdoors.  At one time, ages ago, the residence of the house actually kept their horse here in the basement which is why there is an basement access to outside.  There's details all over the basement that really shows you this (which is SO cool!) but that will be later.

Walking around the corner, there the rest of the basement.  That is a hot tub there, I'm not sure if that belongs to the landlord or the previous tenet left it there. It seems to work though we haven't actually turned it on (& we don't plan to to be honest).  It's all hooked up anyways.  Moving in there was alot of furniture that was left behind from the last person that stayed here (including trash...ewww...)so I'm not sure who owns it.

Well, I'll wrap this up now.  I think I'll go back & post a little something with my photo of my china set just so there's not just an image of a plate set all in it's own blog which seems kind of silly to me for some reason.  Take care ♥

Noritake Rosales 5790

Noritake Rosales 5790, a photo by Joy K. on Flickr.


This is my photo of my China set.  I actually shared it here to go with another blog & since it seems silly to have one post of just a photo, I thought I'd post some information here about this set.

As I mentioned in the other blog (Some shots inside the house), my dad had bought these for his mom while he was in the Navy and stationed off of Japan.  Just to make things clear, I am not an expert in China sets, this is just information about my china in which I love.  Follow the link below if you are interested in learning more about it;


Noritake Directory

The move in

The move in took us just over a week to get it all done.  It was a very long and tedious process, I swear I lost at least 5 lbs during that time.

We made one move with the big Uhaul truck & than everything was moved with Vince's trailer.  We had some  casualties, we lost the washer & dryer and a box of Hallmark Christmas ornaments (which I have not had the heart to go through & see the damage yet).  Vince's dresser was smashed when he was moving it into the house & while going up one set of stairs but we were able to place everything back in it's place, & it seems to be holding up now.  I doubt it will make another move though but thankfully that should not happen anytime soon.  Honestly, everyone needs a new dresser set anyways, including the kids.  Another item on the to do list.  One of our dear friends from Academy had an extra washer/dryer set, so thankfully we are not without that.

I'm seeing less & less boxes now.  I haven't touched the basement, the boys rooms or our room yet.  Closets need to be set up so we can start putting clothes away.  Right now, Vince is using my closet as his closet has nothing to hang his shirts on.  The boy's clothes are still in boxes & Lara's closet is too high for her to reach so we need to make some adjustments in there as well.

I apologize for the delay, I've been taking the pictures the whole time but have either been too busy or too tired to work on a blog.  So I have a card full of images that I need to share with you.  I'll try not to do too much in one blog.  For todays blog, I'll try to keep to the images of us moving.

Here is where it all started.  Thanks to Craigs List, we were able to pick up a huge load of moving boxes.  They totally dwarfed our old living room.  The kids had so much fun sliding down them and hiding underneath them.  Especially the boys.

In the middle of all the moving, Vince retired from the Army! Woo! Here he is, his last day wearing a uniform.  I have to admit, I am going to miss the uniform. 

The kids made the most of their days while we were packing things up in the U-haul.  Thankfully we had gorgeous weather during most of our moving days.

All right so here are moving in.  Things are a mess!! Also these are some of first views inside the house.  The pink room is Lara's, she's wanting it to be some shade of green in here (I'm hoping a light green but last time she told me she wanted a grass green.  Hmm).  We are going to remove that black 80's wall that was stuck on the wall for what ever reason.  It's really tacky.

Anna's room, she want's a pink room.  We gave Lara first choice on the room she wanted, so this is why they have these rooms.  I know it would have been simpler to have it the other way around but all the walls are being painted anyways

Standing in the living room looking into the dining room and the kitchen is through that door way. That is a built in hutch over there on the left.  It also opens up on the kitchen side as well as on the dining room side.

My lovely, lovely kitchen.  I love this kitchen.  The floors needs work and walls need to be redone.  Everything's not put away yet here in these shots.  It looks so much better today. Don't worry more photos are coming so I'm sure I'll show the end results.

 This is a sliding door leading out to the back deck & you can see the other side of that hutch I was telling you about earlier.  It still needs cleaning up.  I've cleaned up the Dining room side now but not the kitchen side.  So much to do....

Unpacking my china to put in the hutch I'd left a pool of moving papers all over the floor.  The boys loved that! They kept diving into it & "swimming" through it, haha.  They were having so much fun, I loved watching them.  Free entertainment while unpacking, you can't beat that.

Okay, so I'm going to end this here.  Hopefully I can do another post tomorrow as I really need to get caught up with everything that has happened around here.  Take care everyone ♥

Taking on the shrubs

So, I've not been on much, quite honestly, there's not much for me to write about other than the little quirks the kids do from time to time. 

Thankfully, my husband is now medically retired from the Army and readjusting to civilian life.  With that, we are moving in less than a weeks time to a little town out in the country with just a hair over 1000 residents. 

We found a gorgeous 5 bedroom Victorian there for rent, absolutely beautiful but in need of many minor repairs.  For a 100 year old home it was surprisingly updated more than expected and in very good shape.  As far as we can tell, this is the only Victorian in this little town for what ever reason, I do not know.  I am trying to discover what the story is behind this house.

We love this house so much, we are seriously considering buying it & staying in town as opposed to our original plan, of living out in the countryside.  The nice thing is, we can live here for a year or two, do some minor work to it & decide what we want to do or even if we can afford to own & live in the house.

So, back to the point, what better to blog about than projects we do around this beautiful Victorian?

Our first project was the front yard shrubs that line the front of the house.  The shrubs you see in the photo above are only a quarter of the shrubs in the front yard.  From the road, it looks like the house is being eaten alive by shrubbery.

As I mentioned, my husband has recently retired from the Army & what does my husband do his first day of retirement? Trim, chop and saw his way through the shrubbery.  I doubt he's ever worked more than he did that day.  The day after that (Oct. 9th I believe), the whole family is working on the shrubs, lol.

By the time we were done, we managed to locate the end of the sidewalk.  Vince was aching all over & I was exhausted, but the sidewalk is already so much better.  Where Vince is at the end (photo below) is where the sidewalk stops.  The last few bushes down there we want to remove all together to make the sidewalk more pronounced from the front.  Vince was trying to use a towing rope to yank those out but the rope broke after the first bush was taken out & that pretty much ended our work that day. 

Still loads more to do on the landscape.  A lot of the trees I'm not fond of but I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt since it is fall, and they are pretty bare right now. 


Moving day is this coming week end, I expect the next blog will be about that with photos of tons of boxes and utter mayhem on the inside of the house. ♥

Money is tight

Money is tight right now & Craig's list is a godsend! We've been living on Ramen noodles pretty much a good part of this week & I'm out of diapers for Noah (Aaah!).

We've posted a number of items up for sale and that's what's been keeping us afloat. It's typically not this tight, in fact, I don't think we've ever been this broke since we first got married over 1o years ago.

That's the way it goes. Besides, how can we enjoy the good things in life if we don't suffer the hardships as well ;)

Rough Day

So, yesterday we were supposed to head to Missouri for a family reunion this coming week end...of which I am employed to take some photos of.

We're still here in Colorado and Vince is working on the van...do I really need to say more? We are hoping everything will go well and we can leave either tonight or tomorrow.

Anna is excited only for the promise of a pool being at the hotel we will be staying in. I am hoping to visit my family but time will be tight. I'm not positive if that will happen or not, which reminds me, I need to call my mom today.

Anything and everything that would and could go wrong went bad yesterday and Vince's stress level was way high. High enough to punch holes in the walls, thankfully, I was able to keep him cooled down enough to avoid that. He's better today but not all together happy of what happened yesterday and the resulting extra work he is having to put in today on the van.

I pray things will go more smoothly today and we can head out with out any more issues.

Hitting the trails!

To kick off our week-end we headed out this morning to Pike National Forest Trail Head at Waldo Canyon. We brought along our dog, Buster for the venture.

Quite honestly, we meant to go to a different trail until we came to the conclusion we'd missed our exit, than we came upon this one. So glad we did as it was a much better trail and the girls loved it. I only say the girls as the boys had it made, sitting in their nice and comfy packs on our backs.

We want to get the girls some hiking boots next time and made do for walking sticks with plain old wooden dowels from Home Depot, haha. The girls decorated them up with markers and they got a lot compliments on them from other hikers as we walked the trails.