Handmade Home #11: Living Room Progress

I am very thankful for the amount of space in our living room. We knew we wanted to have big groups over on a regular basis, whether it be mission teams or groups from our church, so we drew up our great room to be pretty large. When we had that first team over there was plenty of room and plenty of air moving through so that it wasn't too uncomfortable! I cannot wait to have some ladies activities here very soon.

This is the way my living room is currently looking:

Wood for the false ceiling is way down on our list, so you can still see the peak of our roof and all of the wiring. Probably a good thing since we can see wet spots this way and know where to seal it better!  Our lights are from the market in zone 1 in Guatemala City. They were about $5 each... who needs a West Elm?!

{Those aren't wet spots, just different batches of concrete}

Without the ceiling it has a different feel than it will eventually. The false ceiling will be on top of that white beam, so you will still see it. Did you notice our ceiling fan?! I LOVE having ceiling fans. It changed our life!

Here is my thrifted hutch that Jimmy refinished for me! It has all of my serving dishes in it and all of our board games and puzzles in the cabinets below.

The wire roll table is from the Kekchi radio station! I saw it lying around and asked if I could have it. We still want to clean it up a bit. Jonah and Silas love stashing things down the hole that is in the center of it. Whenever I can't find something, that is the first place I look! 

The orange quilt was made by my great grandmother. She loved to sew and make things! I never knew her but I feel connected to her for sure. It doesn't have a backing on it, so I am going to finish it. I'm so thankful my mom let me bring that back with me!

We joke that the chair on the left is mine and the chair on the right belongs to an old man! If Eden ever sees me sit in the swinging chair she comes running. She likes swinging in it even better than the hammock. I want to make a foam cushion for the bottom of it, but I'm still looking for the right fabric. 

Jimmy came home with these one day!

We put one in the corner and stuck a plant in it. We probably need to seal it or something. 

And finish sealing our floor... one day! That pretty circle on the floor is from when there were a couple of the masons at our house working on the smooth coat on our walls, one of them went out to the wood shop, brought back a can of stain, opened it, and then left it there on the floor laying sideways and open. NO ONE needed stain for anything... I don't get it. It doesn't matter since I want our floors to have character, but seriously I was planning on my kids christening those floors with all kinds of character, not a curious mason!

I really tried not to buy fabric while I was in the States since it is cheaper here, but geometric prints are impossible to find, so I did by one yard of this zigzag home fabric. So far I only made one pillow, but I might have enough left for the chair cushion. My mom made us the furry blanket the first year we were married. It is perfect for windy evenings on the couch. 

Jonah wakes up like I do! One day I will introduce him to coffee and then all will be better!

On the other couch is another pillow from Ikea, but those granny squares are homemade. This was my first crochet project. I love crocheting, it is the perfect road trip activity! 

I originally made it to cover a changing pad for E's room, but since she will be out of diapers before she has a room I decided to keep it in the living room. I hope to add to it eventually. 

Eden is always in this rocking chair. She hasn't fallen yet. I move her out of it probably a dozen times a day, but she knows how to get down by herself just fine too. That spot on the couch is E's contribution to color in the room... it's a still wet grape popsicle smear! I love that crazy little girl!

Here is the other side of the room. Jimmy's parents bought him this tv for his 30th birthday. I new I wanted to kind of camouflage it. 

Jimmy has been making fun of me for months. I have been collecting paca (thrift store) frames just for this wall... hoarding them really. Most were between $2 and $4, except for the frilly one from Solola. 

Jimmy was even more thrilled about my stockpile of frames when it was time to hang them all!

This is the frame from Solola:

Jonah and Silas made this painting for me the other day specifically for this frame. Silas painted the top half and Jonah the bottom. They are VERY proud of it! It makes me smile each time I look at it. 

Most of the frames looked or still look like this:

I have been refinishing them a little at a time. I am going to print photos for most of them. I picked up some mattes in the States, so that I could print 8x10'a in my home, but I will have to order a couple of 11x14's to come down with the next team. I haven't found a place here that can do it, there is probably a place in the capital.  

Our family has been studying a lot about gratefulness so that filled one of our frames. It is some linen and fabric scraps: 

Jimmy brought the boys back a huge starfish from the island of Livingston, so that was added to our wall. 

So I still have a lot left to refinish and fill. 

We picked up another chair that matches the boys' for Eden when we were in Solola. My cousin gave us this kids' table and the last team was nice enough to bring it down with them. Jonah and Silas love doing puzzles on it.  It is hard to find dry wood here that doesn't warp or have bugs in it, so a nice flat surface that I don't have to treat with toxic chemicals and then give to my kids was very welcomed in this house!

The dresser that sits below the tv is from the boys' old room. It has bugs in it even though we treated it. Unless you use arsenic, I haven't found anything else that works. We were going to get rid of it, because I was tired of having wood dust on all of their clothes, but it sits here for now. A credenza isn't on the list yet. It will probably sit there forever. I kind of like it. Somehow in our move we lost 2 nobs though... that's what happens when you move things in a cattle truck. Classy! Becca gave me the beautiful planter for my birthday. I love it! 

So that's where we are for now. The room needs a larger rug. I would love to make a bright colored braided rag rug. I saw this one on furlough:

The lady whose house it was in is coming down on a team soon and said that she would teach me! We will see. I don't have that much scrap fabric, so by the time I buy enough to make one this big it might be cheaper just to buy a finished rug. But the process would be lots fun and it would be an original!

Thanks for visiting our home!

My Poor Bug Bitten Babies

It is so hard to seal your house here. We are fighting a mosquito battle... and we are losing! I spray my kids each night when they get out of the shower. Right now I think California Baby Bug Spray works the best. It doesn't have any DEET in it, which is good since we use it every day and my kids sleep with it on. I don't spray their faces however.

My kids' faces look awful. I tried to get a photo of Eden's face this morning. She was crying about not getting a pancake fast enough at breakfast. You can see the tear in her eye. Then she got a pancake and realized I was taking her picture and looked at me with a big smile and said, "Cheese!" Silly girl! 

My poor babies' faces are covered in bug bites. Two metal workers welded our last screen in yesterday and now we have a lot of caulking to do. We need to find some weather stripping too and then get some spray foam for other cracks. 

We are setting off some bug bombs today we brought back from the States and leaving for 4 hours. Today is our 9 year wedding anniversary, so we are headed to Santa Elena for a lunch together. Our baby sitter is on a trip to the States, so the kids are coming on our date too... we like them a lot, so that's ok! Plus this is a perfect time for the bug bombs!

Please pray we solve this problem. This many bites makes me worried about more Dengue. 

Forever House #14: Kitchen Island & Countertops

...our journey to rent free living, all the entertainment minus the headaches.

When designing the layout of our house we wanted to make it so that we all were together as much as possible. That's why we have the great room. Our current rental house has our kitchen and living room on opposite ends of the house. It's small enough where you could shout back and forth, but you still feel alone in the kitchen. Since I spend A LOT of time in the kitchen I wanted to be able to cook and clean up after a meal and still be WITH my family. 

Jimmy usually sits at the kitchen table while I'm making breakfast in the mornings reading news and emails. Jonah and Silas are so cute. They like being with us, so almost every morning they sit at the table and do puzzles or draw until it's time to eat. I love it! 

So I wanted my entire kitchen to be in an island where I could work facing my family. It is L-shaped. My stove faces our dining room table and my sink faces the living room area. I will have drawers across the front wall under the windows too that will have all of our small appliances on top. Here is a photo with Lico standing where my stove will be:

Poor Jimmy... they started my island and then I worried it came out too far, so they move it.  Then they started it again and I thought what crazy lady would make her counter area smaller, so they moved it back some and started again. I think I am losing my mind with all the decisions. Anyway my indecisiveness left a mark in the floor, so Jimmy surprised me and carved our initials in it to make me think sweet thoughts of him instead of frustration with myself every time I see it! 

We have been talking about countertop options for years. I wanted something on which I could roll out dough. I knew I didn't want tile. Granite is available here and it is significantly cheaper than the States, but it was still more money than we wanted to pay. I love the look of concrete, but we just didn't think it would be done right. At Thanksgiving we just happened to be talking about construction and Stephen (our friend who helped us with the floors in the great room) convinced us that a concrete countertop just might be possible.  He also had the right tools to vibrate all the bubbles out and make it smooth and offered to help. Jimmy read up on it and ordered a couple of finishing things to be sent down in a bubble mailer and I blinked and then all of a sudden I had beautiful concrete countertops! (That's probably not how Jimmy and Stephen would describe it.) But it was seriously the fastest thing from talking about it to having it finished that has happened in our house yet! 

Jimmy and Lico took a lot of time building the forms. They had to be perfectly level. My stove is a drop in stove top and my sink is an undermount, so they had to measure everything exactly. Here you can see the opening for my stovetop and all the steel that reinforces the concrete: (My hard drive crashed, so I only could find a fuzzy instagram shot) 

Jimmy and Stephen spent an entire day pouring our counters. 

We are so thankful for Stephen's generosity in giving a whole day to this. 

He and Jimmy did a WONDERFUL job. Here is a shot of the next day: 

Jimmy kept adding water to help them dry slowly. Here is what they look like with the forms taken down: 

They are nice and chunky, 3 inches thick!

This is what they looked like untouched:

 Until Jimmy spent several hours with this:

 He sanded and buffed and sanded and buffed. Then he used this:

It's car wax but it is made from some type of palm. It is food safe and seals the counters with a waterproof, heatproof coating. You originally do several coats and then maybe once a month after that. Here is kind of a comparison shot. The island has been cleaned up, but doesn't have wax, the back counter does.

Jimmy keeps going back and tweaking things. He's funny. He won't stop messing with it. I love it! It is so smooth. It feels exactly like if you were touching granite, but it has more of an esthetic that fits our house. It even sparkles like granite:

 Our mason said the sand comes from a river where they find silver. So there may be actual silver flecks in there. It is pretty whatever it is. In this shot you can really see how they shine:

 I'm telling you these are show stopping countertops!!!

{The lights are in temporary spots}

Can you tell these girls are happy with their kitchen?!

This was right after Jimmy dropped in my stovetop!

Jonah and Silas have already hopped up there. I think we are going to have lots of fun cooking around that stove. And here is the money shot:

Jimmy was very proud of this. I may or may not have complained A LOT about my other stove that I cannot get level. 

As for the cost, it was right under $200 for all of the materials and labor (what we paid Lico to do the forms). I am so thankful for all the hard work Jimmy has put into creating such a great kitchen for me. Last night we got to use it for our Super Bowl party!

 We had such a great time with our missionary friends! There aren't very many missionaries in Petén, but the ones that are, are pretty special!

Our living room furniture is there! Just a couple more doors to finish and some screen to put up and we are in!!! Maybe by next week... 

CRAZY ITEM OF THE DAY: 

We were driving home from church yesterday and we were a block away from our house on a dirt road. A very nice large pickup came tearing around the corner without looking and just missed us. Jimmy swerved as fast as he could and honked his horn to try to get the guy to stop before he crashed into us. It would have been on mine and E's side. I think there was a guardian angel in between our 2 vehicles and he definitely got smushed. We have tinted windows and he had tinted windows, so we couldn't see who was in the vehicle. He backed up so we could keep driving down the road, but then he turned the opposite way he was going to turn and started following us... what! Honestly nice vehicles in our neighborhood are usually involved in some shady things. Who knows what he was up to following us, but I doubt it was apologizing. So we drove past our house and then he turned onto a different street. So... very scary followed by a dose of creepy. I am so thankful that God protected our family. 

Forever House #13: We Have Floors!

...our journey to rent free living, all the entertainment minus the headaches.

We hope to move-in sometime within the next month, so there will probably be a couple forever house posts here close to together. We are finishing 2/3s of our house and then we will save the other 1/3rd to do a little bit at a time over the next year. It will just be nice not to have to drive back and forth anymore since our church and the pastors' institute are in that town. 

We have this awesome friend Amy who on top of writing all kinds of drama scripts for us and coming down on missions trips to head up different outreaches, works for a plumbing company! Jimmy really wanted PEX tubing for our house, but we were going to have to pay to have it all shipped down here. Well Amy found a distributer for us here in Guatemala! Jimmy even went to Guatemala city with our plumber to take a class on how to install it. 

Here is the manifold that Jimmy installed: 

The white box is our hot water heater. It is going to be so crazy having HOT water in our shower and not a luke warm trickle from a widow maker. I really figured I'd be using a widow maker for the rest of my life. This is just a special blessing. The shower will be the best part of this house!

Beyond that, I will have HOT water in my laundry room... we are talking crazy talk now! I am just so excited! 

{Laundry Room}

There is even a drain in the floor in there!

{Master Bath}

Jimmy also put hot water at our bathroom vanity. He is looking forward to having hot water to shave by. We are going to be so spoiled now. 

We are going for rustic, but even with rustic you have to be precise about certain things. We like the look of concrete floors. Polished gray concrete is kind of classic. It won't go out of style and it's a neutral that will go with anything.

To help stabilize the floors, above the rock layer is a layer of steel mesh. Jimmy has done a lot to prevent moisture from coming up through our floors, one of them being that underneath all the floors below the mesh are tarps. They hadn't done it in this photo, so they had to lift all the metal up and put them down. I think we are the only ones here that do it this way because our mason was pretty reluctant to do it.  

Then the floors are poured on top of that. They use strings as a guide to keep it level. 

 Our masons poured our back patio first. They used a hand trowel to smooth it out. I like to see the trowel marks, but they did them in straight lines... awk! That makes it looks like something you didn't do right rather than quaint rustic. I haven't taken a photo yet, but you can kind of see the lines in the photo below:

They poured a couple more little rooms, like our master bath and closet before they got the technique down just how I wanted. Random... as in random trowel marks are hard to do apparently! The trowel marks are nice though because when the floor is wet there is still enough traction to keep you from falling. That is a big problem we have had with kids living on tile. 

The hard room to pour was going to be our great room. Again, it is our living room, kitchen, and dining room all in one. There was no way that our masons would be able mix enough concrete by hand to pour the whole room in one day, which meant there were going to be lots of large seams. Plus the ratio of each batch is a little different, so there would be lots of variation over the room. 

We have two friends who were a big help with this problem. Arlen has been letting us use his cement mixer for a while and then our other friend Stephen offered to lest us borrow his cement mixer and power trowel along with the chance to hire his experienced group of masons for the day. Stephen and one of his boys came with his guys bright and early one morning to pour our great room floor. 

Here are the two concrete mixers going at once!

{Stephen is in the white hat}

They had the entire room poured before noon!

It takes a lot of work!

Here is the power trowel:

Lico stayed till midnight. That is the amount of drying time needed before you can use this machine. It vibrates the floor to get out all the uneven parts and makes it incredible smooth! 

We are so thankful for Stephen coming that day. With his experience, men and machines we ended up with a pretty spectacular floor!

The rest of the floors in the part that we are moving into have been poured as well.  My shower has a nice little step down to keep all the water in, but even more importantly... the drain is the LOWEST part of the shower floor. We tested it... several times... we just like watching all the water actually go down the drain. That is unheard of here. No more puddles and slimy shower floors... woot woot!

 There is sand all over the poured floor because that is how they keep it from getting scratched while they are still working in there. The walls still needed a smooth coat. We went back and forth at which to do first, the floors or the walls. Is it easier to get walls off of floors? or floors off of walls?, because concrete gets slung everywhere. After doing one room walls then floors we decided it is better reversed. 

Jimmy had them put down a tarp so there is as little clean up afterwards as possible. Still you have to go around all the walls and clean the stucco off our pretty floors, but with some paint thinner it comes off just fine.

The stucco on the outside of our house we will finish over time as well. It has a texture to it. It took several attempts at getting it just right too. I don't think any of the masons here in Petén have done work like this before. It took some patience on all of our parts. Here is what it looks like:

Don't look at my windows yet... that is for the next post! The stucco where the windows go had to be completed before they could be installed though because we do not want concrete chunks all in our screens and on our pretty metal windows. 

There was another issue. 99% of the outlets in Guatemala look like this:

The hole is too big for the outlet... drives me nuts! Well this is the first and last time it happened in our house.

Here is one finished right:

It is the finishing of things that will kill you. Detail and presicion isn't of much concern here in Petén. Maybe because everything is made of concrete... I don't know. But Jimmy fought for anything in our house that was finished precisely... fought hard. Jimmy chose his battles. You win some and you lose some. We won't mind when this whole construction process is over. But who enjoys building a house anywhere in the world?!? It will make you nuts. 

One last thing, here is our cistern, water softener, water purifier, and pump that Jimmy installed. 

It is working very nicely! Clean water right out of the tap... yay!