Makeover Wednesday: Bathroom Makeover

Here is the first of our home make over posts!

I, Heather, repainted the master bathroom.  It's a modest makeover, we only did paint, but it's pretty striking and lots of fun!

Before

Before, right after I started taping.

Man, that was a LOT of taping.

Tape Removed!  I'll leave the cleaning till tomorrow...

All clean and pretty in the daylight.

I didn't like the wood or the tan counter top before,
but now I like it with the blue!

And we're all set up!

Painting the bathroom at all was kind of a wild hair.  I went from, 'Hm, I should paint that bathroom before I clean and unpack it.  Stripes sound fun!' to taping it all off within about fifteen minutes.  For all the fore thought that didn't go into it, I like it a lot!  Jeremy was kind of shocked and surprised and still getting used to something so terribly daring.  But it looks nice and it doesn't look too girly.. at least the parts without flowers :).

God's Coming Through Already

    Well, we are within two weeks of closing escrow on Dusty Acres. Our closing date is technically this coming Monday, but there is still some work the seller has to do on the house before our FHA loan will close. They should be completing that work today. And after they finish their work, I get to pay my stupid tax (Dave Ramsey's term, not mine).

     I daftly volunteered to paint some bare wood on the front of the house in order to "sweeten the pot" a little bit and make our offer seem more appealing to the seller. It was by far the least expensive fix of all of them and I decided that we could handle the cost (meaning the cost of the paint, because we will be doing the painting ourselves, "I'll get by with a little help from my friends").

    They say that two of the most stressful things in (an ordinary suburban American) life are 1. Escrow, and 2. Moving. They just may be right. It is all we can do right now to stay calm and collected, and to tell the truth, things are not exactly peachy-keen in the McCool household at the moment. On my end, I am handling the escrow and watching my savings account dwindle as more and more sudden (and rather unexpected...since I've never done this before I did not know what to expect) costs come up in this process. We have been praying that our funds will prove to be sufficient and that we will have a little leftover for some repairs and improvements. We are making priority lists of how urgent all of the changes we want to make are and then we will see how far we can get on the money we have available.

    Two of our main priorities are:
    1.    painting the front of the house (we cannot close escrow if we don't)
    2.    getting a stove (so that we can eat once we move)

    God has already started answering our prayers. In the last few days both of these needs were met. I work for the company that owns the apartment complex we currently live at. I work with supplies to make ready the apartments as they become vacant and repair occupied units. My boss is the manager of all the supplies for the entire company (58 properties in all). I simply mentioned to him that we are looking for a stove for the house and asked him if in the improbability that his drivers picked up an old beat-up one that still actually worked, would he consider sending it my way? He asked me a very unexpected question. He said, "How old is the stove in your apartment?" I found out it was "original" which actually means about 7 years old. He said he would have no problem replacing it when we move out and passing our stove on to us! Blessings galore. That's at least a $100 appliance that we no longer have to buy.

    Also, my dad told me the other day that my good friend's dad used to be a house painter. I have known this guy since I was born and I never knew he used to be a house painter. I called him for some tips and he had lots of suggestions. I was glad that I had talked to him. I need all the help I can get making this house look nice and covering the naked wood and I have to do it really really quickly. I was planning to spend a few hundred dollars on paint and supplies. He called me today and said that he just happened to be at the hardware store and asked if I wanted him to pick up some paint for us. He found a 5-gallon of greyish paint for $30.00, deeply discounted because it was a tinted color that had been rejected by the buyer. I told him that would make a good undercoat, even though we had planned on painting it white to match the rest of the house. He called back about twenty minutes later to tell me that he had dug into the employee at the paint counter for a while and found that they actually had a 5 gallon of good quality almost totally white paint with the primer mixed in already for $25.00, discounted for the same reason. So if the colors match OK, the $250 - $300 I had planned on spending on paint just dropped to $25.00.

    God is good. He is still on the throne, and prayer most definitely changes things. I dropped about 20 lbs of worry with these two developments. Jesus said (as related in Matthew 6:25-34) that the lilies of the field and the birds of the air do not worry about what they will wear or what they will eat or where the money will come from, but God still feeds and clothes them. He then goes on to say, "Are you not worth much more than they?" He then explains, "[The world] eagerly seek[s] all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you." Heather read this to me yesterday afternoon when I was in the middle of a stress meltdown. Today, God took care of us. He'll take care of you too if you will only ask.

Grace, 

Jeremy

Heather's First Walk-Through

I walked around the barren little house of brick and rickety windows, planning, searching, seeing it not at all for what it is, but for what it could be.  Refinish this, paint that; add a wall here, and that chair would be perfect here...

Still, I ran into spider webs.  I can't find anything to like about the style of a few things in the house.  The outside is wilderness, from the first inch off the cement slab in any and all directions.  I got bit by an ant outside, a very large black and red one.  I anxiously watched my toe for swelling - none came.  Peabody,  who is robust 2 year old wiz kid, required someone to carry him at all times.  He was afraid of the 'sharp tings' outside (meaning the low lying brambles) and was generally rather anxious, which could have been mostly due to hunger, but it only added to my own general anxiety.

My chest was hurting.  Sometimes I suppress my anxiety so well that the only way I even know that I'm not dealing well is that my chest hurts.  It's a bad sign, I know.  But it passed once I started admitting to myself that I might be scared.

I'm excited still, though.  Buglet was very, VERY into playing with the dirt.  She was dressed in her white 'cupcake' shirt and pink leggings and she was pretty dusty by the time we piled into the van to head out.  We're all pretty stoked about the infinite possibilities of a 2-acre yard.  Turning the existing shed into a rabbit and chicken barn.  Turning the formal dining room into a home school classroom - which, appropriately enough, seems to have not one, but at least three wild bird nests just outside the large eastern facing window.

There is a lot of work to be done.  Some for safety, some for comfort, some for style.  We were reflecting on all the provision God has seen to for us to get this place, and especially about the little bit of money we'll have left over after closing.  We've decided, against all the better judgement the world has to offer, and in an effort to force us to rely more on God's provision, that we are going to give half of that leftover money back to God - wherever He leads us to put it.  We'll surely have enough left for the basics like a stove and capping some random indoor gas valves.  The rest of that meager fund however, will hopefully end up showing someone just a little taste of how much God loves them and wants to take care of them, too.

Blessings,

Heather