Category: Design Tips

Design Tips, Journey

One month in!

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It’s been about a month since we moved into the house. As mentioned in previous post, not everything is finished, but it was finished enough to encourage us to move in. Completing the bedrooms and kitchen countertops and getting running water in the kitchen were the turning points. Easy enough to continue using the basement bathroom until we get the master bath and hall bath complete. The biggest winners in the whole thing are the dogs, who are thrilled to have enough indoor space to run around in…and they love watching the traffic go by!

A new thing for us was having to purchase window treatments. We’ve lived in rural homes for the past 26 years or so, and didn’t ever invest in window treatments since there weren’t any neighbors. Now, with being right “downtown,” they are a must for most of the street facing windows. I had some vision in mind and was determined not to be too stressed out and we were able to pick out curtains for the living room and both bedrooms in a single trip! A few images from the bedrooms below.

Peder ended up taking a trip to Wisconsin and while he was there we had a “eureka” moment to have him go to Ikea to see if he could find some shelving for the kitchen that would match our industrial/modern vibe. This was definitely a great call as he not only found the shelving, but also the perfect door/drawer pulls and a movable cart for storing the dogs’ things. I’m sure he wasn’t the first person to shop the store while having someone else on Facetime helping make decisions!

Peder has started work on tiling the front porch. A bit of a learning curve on this one with the large tiles and a new “system” to help with keeping the tiles level over a large span. The project started out with a 3-4 day process to spread out thin layers of a self-leveling compound to take out the 1.5 inch difference in the concrete floor end-to-end. We assume that this area must have at one time been an outdoor porch and the slope enabled water drainage. Pictures below show the initial progress. This same tile will be used for the kitchen, so this is basically helping Peder with working out the kinks.

Design Tips

Inspiration overload

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There was a time when Laura’s iPhone camera roll was filled with pictures of dogs and kids. Anymore, it is a jumble of design ideas. The Christmas to New Year break was filled with HGTV binge watching and now the weekends are planned around trips to home improvement and design stores. Adding a “living blog” to capture some of the early ideas. We are capturing more ideas on Pinterest (OlivePit2Perfect) as well.

Pool and patio choices…

Bathroom ideas….

Kitchen ideas…

Counter and Cabinets we already selected

Sun room ideas…

Design Tips

Iterative design

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This past week we finally received our building permit which officially marked the end of demo and shift to construction phase. We’ve settled into a routine where Laura walks the main floor of the house each morning to either disrupt or confirm Peder’s plans. The beauty of doing the work ourselves is that there really isn’t a penalty in the form of a change order if we make changes along the way. Instead, we are able to embrace iterative design.

These choices may be very simple, such as to paint or not paint accent bricks black. In this case, we simply painted one of the sills and confirmed this is the look we want. Worse case, we could just simply paint over it again in white or another color.

Painted one sill black and decided it was the way to go!

Other decisions may require a bit of imagination to envision how the space is going to look. This past week, we used a tape measure, blue tape, boards, and some foam insulation to help with visualizing the dining room space relative to future placement of our couch in the living room. Since this will be an open concept mixed space, we want to make sure we are maximizing sight lines and flow. As Laura ”sat” in various seats around the mock dining room table, we realized that where we had planned to open a wall to create easy access to the hall bath would better serve as a dry bar and side board area. Had we left the design as originally planned on paper, we would have been left with that awkward bathroom door in sight of the dining table.

Blue tape on floor and temporary horizontal board nailed to the wall mark the knee-wall, the pink foam board is the rough size of the dining room table. Board and level on the floor mark the “flow zone.” Tape measure ensures adequate accessibility.

Design Tips, Journey

First full week at West Olive

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We have been living the new lifestyle of RV life on the West Olive property for one week now. It can best be described as a week of organization. When we moved household belongings from Centerton to the new house, we pretty much did a dump and run. Everything to the garage or the RV. This of course created zero space in which to live or work. We easily could have been featured on an episode of Hoarding: Buried Alive!

We prioritized the week in terms of health and safety. This meant getting some field fence up to create a secure place for the three dogs so they didn’t have to be kept in the RV 24/7. We then turned to getting the washer and dryer hooked up and the utility sink re-hooked up in the basement. We created a clean-ish area where we could wash dishes and clothes (see pics in basement gallery.) Next, we got the basement bathroom fully cleaned and painted and fixed the shower so it worked. With new daylight bulbs above the sink and a bright shower curtain, it is a relative oasis in an otherwise scary-ish basement (see pic in basement gallery) as long as you don’t look up! Finally, we installed some motion detector lighting between the RV and the house so that early morning and late night trips to the bathroom or laundry are safer.

Laura spent one afternoon raking leaves from the pool patio area. It was about a mountain’s worth! But this makes for a much better spa experience than wading through knee-high leaves at night in flip flops!! Peder mounted our solar-powered yard lights around the top of the fence enclosure which makes for great ambiance at night. It’s pretty cool sitting in the spa at night listening to the city sounds and looking at the stars. We can just imagine how much better it will be when the pool area is finished. Laura’s and Matthew’s other chores were to organize the RV and the basement storage room. Meanwhile, Peder focused on the garage. It took about 3 days, but there is finally “a place for everything and everything in its place.” We definitely should have bought stock in plastic totes!

We closed the chapter on the demo phase of the house with the removal of the third dumpster! Matthew spent the good part of one day raking all the gravel and dirt around the driveway where the dumpsters were parked and used a magnet sweeper to ensure all of the roof nails, screws and pieces of metal were removed. It is amazing how many missed the dumpsters and were just waiting for an unsuspecting tire.

The room above the garage is almost complete with Peder installing all the trim today. The carpet is scheduled to be installed this coming Monday, so we should be able to move furniture up there either Monday night or early Tuesday. On Tuesday, our main contractor, Carlos, will also start painting the exterior of the house. The choice to paint or not paint was a big one. While we kind of like the old-style brick, it is just that…old. It definitely dates the house and touring other older brick homes in Rogers and Bentonville shows that painting is probably the right decision from an eventual resale point of view. We found an inspiration house and are going for similar colors. We already had the roof done in Rustic Slate and all the trim, facia and gutters in black. The house color Laura chose is Sherwin Williams White Flour (SW 7102). We have the Pella sales rep coming next week as well to measure and give us a quote on black-trim windows.

Inspiration House Colors
Design Tips

Choices, choices…

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Over the past couple of weeks, as we’ve waited (somewhat impatiently!) to see this purchase through, we’ve done a lot of researching on ideas, drawing and redrawing plans, reviewing the photos and videos Laura took during our few brief visits to the house for inspections and such. We started saving ideas to a new OlivePit2Perfect Pinterest account and will be using this blog site to capture others. Our biggest concerns are creating the right vibe to the house, when we don’t really know what era to really capture. One thing the house has going for itself is lots of windows. So, ideally, we want to capitalize on that light and create a home that is comfortable and welcoming.

If we had an unlimited budget, we’d hire a professional architect and design team. Instead, we are relying on Peder’s 35+ years of home construction and remodeling expertise, five personal home renovations, and Laura binge-watching HGTV!! Laura’s color pallet preferences are definitely evident in our current home — gray, white and black — leaving the color to the art hanging on the walls.

Over the next several weeks we are going to be pressed to make some decisions about where to take down walls and where to put them up, what paint and flooring is right, and how to improve the outdoor living areas and landscaping. Our guiding principle will be to choose things we like but also feel will appeal to future owner(s) and to keep our total investment at a point where we can make a profit when we eventually sell.

Our biggest choice has already been made…jump in with both feet!