The Inspired Housewife

My daughter is one of the busiest people I know. She is a mother of two under the age of two. She works six days a week in the ministry and yet still finds time to run and hang out with family and friends.

She turned 30 this weekend and I wanted to do something really special for her. We talked about sending her away on a mini vacation with her husband, but she really didn’t want to leave her babies. I understood, but it left me wondering what we could do for her.

A year ago her and her husband bought a really cute older home. The house had pretty much had a makeover done on it before they bought it except the laundry room and the master bathroom.

They have been slowly working on the bathroom but I knew that it would probably be years before they would be able to find the time for the laundry room.

It was bad!

It had lots of space it’s just that the space was poorly laid out.

We asked permission from her husband….on which we got an excited YES!

They had planned to head out for the day to the zoo with friends to celebrate. The minute they left we drove in and got to work. I should have probably aborted the plan when Mr. Amazing was scratching his head in the first 5 minutes…but I wasn’t going to be discouraged. I had a dream. Besides I watch HGTV, I know that amazing things can happen when people are away.

First thing that needed to happen…move the hot water heater to the garage…no problem..until Mr. Amazing pushed the pressure release switch and it broke off. OOPS. So there is one unexpected expense….a new hot water heater. We realized that her hot water heater was also celebrating it’s 30th birthday. We decided to provide it a trip to the dump for it’s birthday.

As Mr. Amazing took care of that, my other daughter and her boyfriend helped me take out cabinets and get the walls ready to paint. In walks Mr. Amazing with another problem. The layout our daughter wants for this room requires a lot of new plumbing and the way to do it right is the open up the wall  going to the garage and put the pipes in there. $$$ and more time.

Meanwhile back in the laundry room we discovered that the carpet in the room needed to go. More time. All the while my son in law is trying the best he can to stretch out the day. When he text to say they were on their way home my husband told him to drive by way of Kansas. At this time the yard was piled sky high with everything we had torn out and the water still wasn’t hooked up in the house.

We ran the best we could to get ready for the big reveal. Let me tell you it was nothing like the tv shows. lol

My poor daughter tried really hard to act excited .

We have lots more to do but I know that when we get done we will have added value to their house….and maybe make life a little easier for a very busy family of four.

Have you ever tried to surprise someone with a home makeover?

My girlfriend and I have decided to step outside the box. I don’t mean we are taking up doing really wild things, it’s just that our days of class field trips are over and I miss them. So we are trying to come up with some different things for us to do.

So the other day we went strawberry picking.

I had never been before …I’m not really sure why…but I hadn’t.

I wasn’t there long before I started  to relate the strawberry picking to life.

As I approached the fields, I started picking right away. It’s kind of late in the season, so it was difficult to find good ones and I found myself settling. Soon some not so pretty strawberries were in my bucket. I thought about how many times we all settle in life. God has something amazing for us, but we look with our eyes instead of our faith…and we settle.

We should have come earlier in the season but we were busy. This is often what happens. God has plans for us, but we think we are too busy…we will get to it later. If we had waited much longer, the opportunity would have been gone. How sad would be if we put God on hold in our life and one day we find our destiny no longer available to us?

Berry picking was hard because we had waited, but we didn’t wait too long. Yes, we had to go deep into the fields and be patient, but it was so worth it. God blessed our labor with a plentiful bounty.

No…berry picking isn’t my destiny…but it did remind me to pause and see His handiwork all around me.

Do you have something in your life that you have been putting on hold? Or maybe you have just settled with what is easy…Let me tell you…God has something amazing that He wants you to discover.

I thought I would show you my favorite place in my new house. It’s what I see when I stand at my kitchen sink. It makes me smile every time I see it.

If you were to ask any of my daughters what their dads basketball clothes look like this is what they they would describe. Mr. Amazing has always been good about seizing the moment when it comes to his kids.

This scene reminds me that a home isn’t really about beautiful decorating. Its about the memories that are made in those spaces.

Recently a girlfriend of mine said to me …You live in your house…I wasn’t really sure how to take that at first…did she mean that my house is messy? Then I realized that she meant …I’m not afraid to clear off the coffee table so that the grandsons can color….or to bring the basketball hoop into my living room

in hopes that some day I will have another generation to watch outside my kitchen window.

Tell me…what is your favorite spot in your house and why?

My mom use to have a friend that had an amazing garage….well my husband wouldn’t think it was amazing, but I did. There was nothing in it except their car …. and pictures hanging on the walls. I’m not kidding…I always wondered where they put all their stuff.

Unless we change the cottage into a work shop, I can assure you that my garage will NEVER look anything like that!

We haven’t done anything amazing in our garage yet. Mr. Amazing has done a good job of organizing it all, but I still have hopes of trying to make it look a bit better with some doors over the shelves like we had in our old house. My brother tells me “it’s a garage”. I just personally don’t like everything out on display.

We did work on one wall the other day…of course it was the wall with all of our grandson’s toys…lol

It started by looking like this…

After a quick trip to Lowes and about $80 we now have this

The long wall brackets were easy to cut to whatever length we needed with an electric miter box. If you don’t have one of those any wood cutting saw would work.

We have always just had plastic shelving units in the past but I love the idea of things up off the floor for cleaning purposes.

This is not a sponsored post…I just like the way it turned out so I thought I would share it with you.

So do any of you have pictures hanging in your garage?

If you have been following my blog for awhile you may remember me talking about my daughter’s dislike of headboards….http://www.theinspiredhousewife.com/2011/02/what-no-headboard/

In our last house I worked around this decorating dilemma by hanging pictures.

It’s not the ideal decorating but it worked. The problem I had now is we have 10 foot ceilings. These pictures where just going to look like postage stamps on this huge wall so back to the drawing board.

I thought for sure I could talk her into a cute padded headboard like this…

WRONG….

Then I remembered some shelves that I had in the other house. I tried to find a picture of them in my breakfast nook to show you but I couldn’t…sorry.

The point is it’s important when decorating to always remember to try different things. Just because an item has ALWAYS been in a certain room it doesn’t mean it might not work just as well…or maybe even better in another room.

 She loved them ! And it gives her a place to put all that stuff that is special to her.

I figure I can buy a headboard in 3 years…after she heads off to college. I may even leave the shelves up when I do. Do you have a headboard hater in your family? How did you decorate around it?

Just sitting and remembering back….

Back to when I use to spend this weekend finishing up dresses I made…making sure everyone had their Easter hats, shoes and gloves…making sure everyone’s hair looked perfect. Not to mention the Easter egg hunts and family gatherings….awwww.

Sweet memories…

I wish for you a weekend of memories that you too will look back on and smile some day.

HAPPY EASTER!

I made something the other day that my husband talked about for days….lol…in a good way. I am not a cook….I am really hoping to be one some day but I don’t really see that happening anymore than me becoming a swimsuit model. I tend to find a few things that I can do well and just stick to them. Well this is definitely one of those things . It is super easy and….my husband loved it!

I started with a package of crescent rolls. I laid them in a pie dish and just kind of mushed it all together….now my daughter makes this and she just uses a regular Pyrex dish but I like how it comes out like a pie.

 I then put 6 eggs into a mixing bowl and added a cup of milk and stirred.

 A large handful of cheddar cheese was next….don’t you love that measurement….lol.

In the mean time my husband cooked up about 6 pieces of beacon and then chopped them into small pieces.

 We added this and a small bit of spinach for color.Now comes the very important part…..You want to cook it at 425…my husband didn’t hear me say that and I didn’t check the oven so ours went in for half the time at 350 and then got bumped up to 425 …not good…that is why my crust turned a bit dark.

 So 425 for about 20 minutes and yours will look even better than this..

I had a reader ask me how I liked having a white kitchen. She too was thinking of using white subway tile and it got me thinking.

First of all…as I have said before …I LOVE MY KITCHEN! http://www.theinspiredhousewife.com/2013/02/loving-my-kitchen/

It also got me thinking about subway tile. My house is kind of a showcase for all the white subway tile that is made. One of my decorating dilemmas is ….when I like something, I tend to want to do it EVERYWHERE. If I’m not careful, my home can become a bit boring with everything being the same color and design.

You may remember the struggle I had with tile. I wanted something that would be ageless, yet I really didn’t want everything to look the same. My solution to this was putting white subway tile everywhere but in different sizes.

In my kitchen I used 2 x 4 tile.

This is a bit smaller than the traditional size but it really works for me.

The pool bath…..right off the kitchen…has a bigger tile  of 4 1/2 x 13. Because the rooms are so close to each other I wanted to make sure that the tile was different, yet the same. They blend nicely together.

I love the way the penny tile looks with the subway tile. Yes I am aware that my bathrooms are boring and need to be decorated. I’m trying, but for some reason bathrooms are hard for me. Probably because I use to always use wallpaper for a big bang and now my husband has banished wallpaper from the house. Trust me I spend a good portion of my day looking on Houzz at bathrooms trying to come up with ideas…it will happen…some day.

My daughter’s bathroom has  3 x 6  subway on the shower walls

and 4 1/2 x 13 on the floor.

And then for my bathroom I went for the really large subways that are  12 x 18 . It works well in the space because the shower is so large.

I had a terrible time finding flooring to go in this room . Subway on the shower floor just didn’t work for me so I went with the penny tile again. I know that doesn’t sound very creative but the truth is I don’t think anyone is ever going to notice that it is the same as the pool bath.

The plan had been for me to have an all white bathroom but I couldn’t find white matching tile that I liked. In the final hour I chose this wood look tile.

I LOVE IT! It shows nothing!

When I started picking out subway tile, I did it because not only do I like it but I thought it was cheap. I was wrong. I didn’t realize it until the installer told me that subway tile takes a lot of cuts so it actually costs more in the long run….oops.

Oh well…I am so glad I used it. I guess my advice would be this..

If you love it go for it….and if you need to, pause and get creative…you might be glad you did.

Today is my mom’s birthday….I miss her more than I ever dreamed I would. I was going to write a post about her today and as I was trying to think about what to write I went back and looked and found this post that I had written back in 2011…about a month before she died. For some reason I never posted it so I thought I would today……

This little light of mine…I’m going to let it shine…

I remember my mother teaching that song to each of her grandchildren. At the time I thought it was just a cute children’s song..what I realize now is that it was my mothers calling…

My mother is in the late stages of Alzheimer’s….and her body is weak from lung cancer…and yet she will tell me regularly…we must remember to count our blessings…

When mom and dad moved into the alzheimer’s unit almost five years ago there was no church services available. Soon my parents old Sunday school classmate realized this and started having church services every Sunday there.. today we had 20 people in attendance….pretty soon someone started Wednesday services too.

Jesus was a young boy when he was teaching in the temple…Moses was very old as he was leading the children of Israel…What I have learned is…man looks at age…God doesn’t.

We all need to remember to let our light shine wherever we are because we are never too young or too old to be used by God…

And when I count my blessings I thank God for giving me a mother that I can still learn from…even if she doesn’t remember my name.

Happy 85th birthday mom