Kids With a House Update: Month #2

September 10, 2020

Written by Daisy Montgomery

A lot has happened since Elijah got the keys to his first house 2 months ago.

We are quickly learning the lesson behind the book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. Restoring an old house is a slippery (+ very fun and exciting) slope! Here’s what we’ve been up to!

Hardwood Floors

If you’ve been following along our Instagram or Facebook, @fernwayhome, then you’ve been getting real-time updates on the house, so the hardwood floors are old news to you! The floors were one of the very first things we did to the house. During our engagement, we’ve been trying to focus on the exterior the house… but this is a prime example of the slippery slope like I mentioned earlier, ha! We just knew that if we were ever going to do the floors, now was the time to do it.

The previous owner had put in all new carpet, but we just couldn’t have these beautiful pine floors hidden any longer! We pulled up all of the carpet, and had to scrape up the linoleum in the foyer. Thankfully, Elijah is the most patient guy I know, so he sat there and carefully scraped up the linoleum for hours. Meanwhile, the others & I pulled up all of the carpet staples in the house-all 1 million of them.

We had JJ Hardwood Floors in Murfreesboro do our floors, and we couldn’t have been more pleased with the way they turned out!

A fun tidbit: The transition piece in the picture below was salvaged out of an old church in Murfreesboro. It’s the little things like this that make our new-to-us house feel more like a home.

Sample Paint Colors

Last week, Elijah and I went to the paint store to pick out a few samples. We chose our colors by driving around town and taking stalker pictures of our favorite houses. There’s a house in town that Elijah has talked about and loved ever since we were in high school, so we have driven by it one too many times to “study” it! Do you have any idea how many variations of white there are in this world?! We ended up with 4 colors, and I don’t think any of them would be a bad choice.

Here’s our ranking of the colors we chose:

Silos White (It’s a color that we had custom mixed at our local paint store to mimic Magnolia Home’s ‘Silos White’ color. We love the way it pulls cream!)
White Dove by Benjamin Moore
Simply White by Benjamin Moore (Love the crispness of this color, but Elijah & I think it’s too bright for our house.)
China White by Benjamin Moore (Even though it’s a beautiful color, it turns gray on our house!)

Painting was actually our next step, but once again, COVID had to change our plans. Elijah needs to replace a few siding pieces before we paint, and the lumber was delayed by 3 months. These days you just gotta roll with it! Good thing is, we’ve got plenty of things to do in the meantime!

New Front Door

Elijah & I were both raised in the most loving church families. Through every big transition in life, our church family never fails to show up & love in big ways. Now, every time we open our front door to our first house, we’ll be reminded of this kind of church-family love.

A couple from church called us the other day to let us know that they had a front door in their garage, so we drove over to look at it! It. Was. Beautiful. And…they wanted to give it to us. It will forever be one of our most precious gifts & a humbling reminder of the generosity we’ve been shown at this point in our lives. It is mahogany with glass in it! A perfect fit for our house. It won’t go up until after we paint the house, but we propped it up just to get a glimpse! We already can’t wait to send them a picture of it on the house.

Sidewalk & Shed Removal

A boy and an excavator.

By far, this was Elijah’s favorite part of the whole process…DEMO day! His family had rented an excavator for a project they are working on, so Elijah jumped on the chance to use it for a day. I had no idea how much time machinery saved…and how much fun it added!

We got the sidewalk removed to make room for our pea gravel driveway & new sidewalk! And we also got the shed and well house removed in the backyard. The dumpster arrives today!

He took me on a ride. The people passing by on the road giving us funny looks were one of the best parts.

Brush Removal

On the side of our house, there was a giant hedge of brush and weeds. We had a love/hate relationship with it. 1) It provided privacy for the backyard. 2) It consisted of awful weeds and made the house look uncared for. While we had the excavator, we figured out that it would easily pull up brush. Our idea was to remove the brush on the inside of the fence, and keep the privacy on the outside until our landscaping on the inside of the fence matured to create privacy. Little did we know, it would just end up looking like a really bad haircut. SO-back to the slippery slope-we decided to rip up ALL of the brush AND fence, and build a new one with privacy plants. I’m laughing at us as I type this out. We’ll keep you updated…