Immensely Grateful

Have you ever been overwhelmed by gratitude and gratefulness?! That is how I have been feeling these past few days. I just finished on Tuesday my best year of teaching that I have had yet. I am married to the best guy I know and my best friend. I have PHENOMENAL neighbors! And I have the best circle of friends EVER.

Growing up, I never had one group of friends that I felt 100% myself with. I had friends, no doubt, and great ones even. But I never had that group of friends that you see strewn all over Facebook. I have always been envious of those people. I always, growing up, wondered if I would ever get those kind of friends.

You know... the kinds of friends that...

...help you build a fence at your new house an hour away.

...help you lay subfloor in your kitchen and tear out the old stuff..

...the ones that call and say I am having a garage sale tomorrow and need help setting up (and we miss you)

...invite you over for dinner just because they want to spend time with you. 

...call when they have a family pet pass away and they know you'll totally understand and come over to hang out to help ease the emptiness.

...call to tell you a story instead of text because they want to hear you.

...check up on you when you are having a rough day or you haven't heard from in a while. 

...you don't get to see near as often as you like but the friendship is strong.

...go to lunch with you just to hang out and spend time together.

And since we have moved out, I am also so thankful for the neighbors God has blessed us with. It's fun being able to be a part of a family and the kids' lives (even if it's just small stuff). But we have been blessed with the best neighbors! I feel like this is what neighbors are supposed to be like---help each other out in big and small ways, whether it's unloading our trailer or helping them build a fence. Our move out here would not be near as wonderful without the neighbors that we have. I hope they know how much we love them and are blessed by them! 

I always wondered if I would EVER have a kind of life that blessed me with friends like that. And I have those people. I can think of about 12 friends that fit into this category for me. I call these people my framily. These are the friends that have become my family and today I just feel so grateful for where we have ended up in life. 

I used to dream about my future and never in my wildest dreams did I imagine a life like this. Country living, a framily better than anything, and a teaching job that I can (probably) retire in. What a blessing!

About the house... we have to fix the foundation--get the house releveled, which has stopped almost all finishing work on the inside. So we have been doing work on the outside by the carport and trying to get that in good enough shape. In the meantime, summertime has officially begun. Our anniversary trip and river trip are next week and then we go back to slowly but surely working on bits and pieces of our house. 

 

 

Kitchen Pics and Pick-Up Sticks

Kitchen progress is really taking off!  We have pulled off the shiplap on three of the four walls of the kitchen so we can insulate the exterior wall. Soon we will sand the shiplap and seal to re-install.  

 

We have insulated the exterior wall in the kitchen, replaced all the subfloor and began laying a small section of our new flooring so we could finally build our custom sink cabinet. 

 

 

Have I mentioned how awesome our neighbors are... they come over and help us lay subfloor or even put in our heavy cast iron sink!! 

Of course, this has taken a bit longer than excepted because in the middle of this progress we had to finish gathering the branches and limbs from a tree Shae and Dustin cut down. 

 

Does anyone else remember playing the old school game "Pick Up Stix?" I used to play it all the time and thought it would be a useless skill until I had to haul off the branches of a dead sugarberry tree. 

 

Once that was finished we were able to continue the work in the kitchen. For the first time today in about 2 months, I was able to do dishes in a sink again with warm water (not in wash tubs in the backyard with freezing cold water). 

 

 

Porcelain top for our sink base.

 

Old steel work bench base...

 

Working kitchen sink!! FINALLY!

 

As we continue to plan out the details of our kitchen, I get more and more excited to see it all come together. Shae took off two days of my Spring Break so hopefully we will get much more accomplished in the next 48 hours.

Kitchen Demo Day

So one of the reasons we loved this house so much was the potential we saw in the kitchen. Imagine with me... the space is 13x22. Shiplap on all four walls and original beadboard ceiling. Beautiful. And now, a blank canvas. All the paneling and Sheetrock is off the walls and the shiplap is all exposed. The ugly and poorly constructed sink and cabinets have been destroyed. The rest of the discount tile and flooring have been removed. And now we are back to blank and open so that we can now build and adjust and arrange as we see fit. 

Yesterday's goals were as follows: demo the kitchen, pull up half of the original pine floors, reinforce and support the floor joists in that part of the kitchen and lay subfloor. We were able to get all of that accomplished!!! Happy day!! Thank you to Dustin Musick and Lucas Desrochers for all your help with #demoday!

So here are the pictures... 

First, kitchen demo.

 

 

Blaze is so helpful. He's our jumper and he jumped up there with Dustin. 

 

 

 

The kitchen and cabinets and stove used to be on this wall. 

On top of this old subloor that was glued down to the pine floors was super ugly tiles. 

 

Then we moved the refrigerator to the other side of the room.

Second major project was pulling up the floors in half of the kitchen. The boys worked really hard on this part. And we were able to save over 100 square feet to use for patch work in the rest of the house! YAY!

 

 

 

 

After this, the guys (Dustin and Lucas) had to leave. We are SO SO THANKFUL for their help.

After lunch and a trip to Lowe's, Shae and I began to work on reinforcing and supporting the floor joists. 

 

For those of you that don't understand (like me before yesterday), the big beam is a sill beam and the horizontal ones are floor joists. We took those metal brackets (joists hangers) and screwed them in to the sill beams at all the joints. Our joists are notched into our sill beam so this step made the joists already stronger before we even added the additional support underneath. 

 

We then added a treated 4x4 underneath the joists using concrete blocking and shims. After that we used four more joist hangers to attach the support beam to the joists. We probably over-engineered all of this but now our floors don't bounce like they did before. 

 

Then we got a visit from the neighbors. We love our neighbors!!! 

 

Bailee thought it was so cool to be standing on "the earth" in the house.

 

And Brenden's face is just awesome!! We have THE BEST NEIGHBORS in town. Such a blessing!!

Our last major project for the evening was laying subfloor. We made custom cuts to the pieces so that we could stagger the pieces on the floor. We were almost done making all the cuts, when it started to sprinkle. So that put everything into super high speed to get the plywood inside the house. And by the time we had gotten the last of it in the house, a torrential downpour began. We had NO IDEA it was supposed to rain. So that was fun... NOT!

 

 

 

And the last step of the evening... nail in the subfloor. 

 

And all the tools... oh the tools!

We accomplished a ton of work yesterday. And I am so excited to continue working on our kitchen projects. And what I LOVED the most yesterday... working side by side and shoulder to shoulder with my husband. I am so glad that God led us to this great adventure together. 

We are tired and worn out and sore. But we are so happy with what we accomplished yesterday. 

2 Months Later

It's hard to keep up with blog posts in the middle of working.. but now, it is Christmas break so I have the time. We have been very busy this season with flea markets and lots of traveling. We were out of town almost every weekend in October. 

So we have done a few projects at the house in between the busyness... the first project was continuing the siding on the front side of the house. While I was gone at camp in mid-October, Shae worked very hard one night to put up our cedar shake siding. 

 

 

 

Then we replaced the front steps to our house. Shae and I had both taken the Friday off before our last Flea market of the season. And the morning that we were planning to load all the furniture and projects out of the house and onto the trailer, our concrete stairs had crumbled. 

 

More recently, we have had our sweet puppy get sick with Parvo. He is doing much better after a long stay at the Emergency Vet. 

 

 

After Thanksgiving, Shae began to take down the wall and built in shelves in the living room.

 

He also repaired the floor from where the fireplace used to sit before the previous home owners took it out. We are in the process now of shifting that wall over and creating a hallway from the living to the back of the house. Eventually, we will have a middle room in the house that will be another bedroom.

 

This past weekend, while I was away from the house one evening, Shae fixed up our laundry room space--I now have shelves and a hanging rack for clothes so our sweet puppy doesn't eat anymore of my shirts. Also, he added a door in the doorway so that I don't have to go the long way to get to the laundry room. 

 

 

Hopefully over break we can get some more little projects knocked off our list. The next big project is to lay subfloor in the kitchen. That will definitely be a project day with (hopefully) the help of many friends! 

And this morning was a new kind of adventure... in my attempts to take a shower this morning, I noticed the shower wasn't draining.

 

So I watched a short video on YouTube and found out how to thaw out a frozen drain pipe. 

 

So I had to crawl under the back corner of the house to access the frozen pipe. Then use a hairdryer to thaw it out. 

 

 

It worked! I was able to get the whole thing done all by myself when it was 17 degrees outside!!! 

There are always adventures at the Kipp's house!!

Demolishing Friends

Saturday September 24th was one of my favorite Saturdays so far. We had a great group of friends show up and they worked hard for us. We, of course, paid them with great food and fellowship.

We had 4 friends come over--Brent, Matt, Dustin and Alex--and the original plan was to paint the house but Shae and I had taken care of that task during the week. So instead we said goodbye to the horribly Pinterest-fail scrapbook wall and the boys got to take down lots of junk. 

I was amazed by the work that was done in such a short amount of time. In between major demolition moments, Alex and I would do our best to clean up the area. 

Pictures say and show it best...

Here are some before pictures of the ugly scrapbook wall and turquoise room.

 

 

 

And here are the after pictures... we have a living room! A legit "sit down and watch TV living room"... we haven't had that in months. Sunday night we actually sat together on our couch and ate ice cream and watched some TV. It was so wonderful to enjoy immediately the fruits of our (and our friends') labor!! 

 

Lanae came towards the end of workday and helped us get the living room put together. 

 

And as much as I love the end product. I most enjoyed watching it all come down. So here are some of my favorites of the day. 

These pictures display the beginning of the wall tear down. 

 

 

 

And then all the wallpapers we discovered...

 

 

From the looks of things, we used to have a fireplace. And this was the wall it was on. Because of the holes and rot, this shiplap had to come down. But we got some great salvage pieces from it.

 

 

 

And then we discovered that under the Sheetrock on the ceiling was beadboard that is original to the house. And once cleaned up, the floors are going to look phenomenal!

 

 

Overall, it was a great day with the help of great friends! I love how God has blessed us with such great people to do life with that they would spend a Saturday throwing around sledgehammers and working hard for their friends. I LOVE our village!!