Last week, I shared pictures of the inside of our home. I am horrible at responding in the comments (even though I love and appreciate them so much!), but I wanted to be sure to answer all of your questions! Feel free to add more questions to the comments of this post, and I promise to answer them there as well.
Courtney & Jenn:
Where did you get the big clock?
During the building process, my husband became an eBay expert. Our kitchen sink, the pebble floor tiles, the aluminum speed rail and more all came from eBay sellers (don’t worry, they were all new items!). The clock hands and the mechanism that turns them also came from eBay, and Sean just spray painted them silver. The numbers are actually house numbers from Lowe’s.
Eileen:
I was wondering if you or your husband could go more into detail about the bathroom (the walls, the flooring etc.) I would also like to know more about the slider barn doors. I had shown my husband a picture of one about a month ago in a magazine as my master bath has no door on it and it bothers me. Last question where did you get the ceiling fan?
Okay, Sean just answered these questions for me:
1. The tile behind the sink is glass mosaic tile (from eBay)
2. The shower flooring is river rock tile (also from eBay), but he broke it off the tile mesh and did it by hand because he didn’t like the pattern created by the floor tiles.
3. The shower walls are galvanized roof panels, secured with galvanized roofing bolts. He first attached hardie board to the walls and then bolted the panels to that one by one, caulking behind each as he went.
4. We (and I use the term we loosely) built the barn doors using 10×1 pine planks. Sean and his dad cut and laid out the vertical pieces and then glued the cross pieces and nailed them in place. He caulked the lines between the planks on the inside of the door with a clear caulk.
We got the barn door tracks and hardware from Tractor Supply Co., but any farm supply store should have them.
5. The ceiling fan in our bedroom was a special order item from Home Depot.
What region/beautiful area is it that you live in?
We’re in the mountains of wild, wonderful West Virginia.
Lisa:
How do you keep a sofa so white with 4 children?
Ha. No, really, I’m laughing here. That sofa was probably the second dumbest purchase we made. Not because of the color as much as because of the weave, which traps any spills or stains in the fabric. We wash the covers regularly, have replaced it once already, and we have a small steam cleaner. All of that, and I promise it shows much more wear and tear up close! I would do a white couch again, but it would have to be a tighter weave or, preferably, microfiber or leather.
Elka Minor:
How you manage to maintain that (even if only for long enough to photograph) is beyond me considering you have children.
Because my husband has poured his heart and soul into the design of our home, he did clean up (just like we do when we’re having guests over), so this is definitely a cleaner version of our house than you would find on a normal day. However, it stays fairly neat and tidy most of the time anyway, and our secret is that we literally straighten everything up twice a day — before lunch and before bed. Toys all get put away, books get put back on the book shelf, crafts get cleaned up and piles get sent to their homes. We all work together, and it doesn’t take a super long time, and it means that the mess only gets overwhelming on rare occasions rather than every day like it used to!
I was having a little chat about your shower last night with hubby. Is it easy to clean… do you get fingerprints like stainless steel? Does it rust? Or is your shower large enough where the water isn’t constantly hitting it? I absolutely love the look of it!
The galvanized steel doesn’t get fingerprints or rust, but we have had some issues with our hard water leaving a gross film on it that’s killer to get off. Last time my husband buffed it, though, he wiped all the walls with baby oil afterward, and that’s made a big difference. We also have a no-washing-the-walls rule, because when the girls put soap on it, that’s pretty hard to get off too. It’s fun and definitely less maintenance than a traditional shower, though!
Tsh:
Why do you live where you do? Is it because family is near?
We moved to southwestern Utah after we were married (and we loved it there!), but when we were pregnant with #2, we realized that it was way too hard being so far away from all of our family. We moved back in with my parents for a few months while we figured out what we wanted to do, but we’re from just north of D.C., and it’s ridiculously expensive (especially since the housing bubble was at its peak then). We knew we wanted a couple acres, so we started looking in less expensive areas, and we ended up in West Virginia just about two hours away from most of our family.
Please feel free to leave any additional questions in the comments, and Sean or I will answer them there!
