Prairie

A Library Wall

I have had a set of bookcases in every home that we have lived in…..and I always wanted built in’s. Anything to make me think of a library. I am in love with the smell and feel of books. My mom was a librarian and I have very fond memories of going with her to set up the library before school started. If I was lucky I would be able to finish my task early and go sit in the stacks and read. I can still feel the book shelves at my back as I sat on the floor and read books in the YA section. I still have a Kindle but it always comes back to that physical connection you have when you come across the perfect book.

Think of me as Belle. All I want is a giant room full of good things to read. In reality I have a wall to work with.

Step 1: Measure out said wall and determine how big I can go.

Step 2: I purchased some Ikea Billy shelving for this project. as you can see in the pic below, work at it late into the evening.

Step 3: Live with the shelves for awhile….promising myself that I will buy that trim the next time I am in town so that I can finish my project. even though I drive to town for work every single weekday…….that manages to not get done for months.

Step 4: Dig out all my books and records from storage and fill my new shelving to capacity. Try to make room for cute tchotchkes but fail miserably and realize that I have too much stuff. Shrug it off and buy more books!

Step 5: Finally, the majority of the trim is up but in true to us fashion we are sitting at 95% done. 2 more pieces are still waiting to be installed at the top of the unit. It will be months before this happens. LOL!!

Step 6: Use bookcases for my backdrop for all kid photos. Time capsule of the kids and what we were listening to at the time.

And Success. What about you??? Library lover? Book lover??

Attic Bedroom Update 2

What a wild ride this has been…..but we did it! A whole bedroom built from the studs up.

I am not even sure that I can share exactly how excited the girls were to get this done. We have been talking about this since we purchased the house last spring. Let’s take a looksy on where we came from:

Looking back, I can’t even believe this only took 6 weeks.

Shiplap? Wood Slats? Whatever you want to call it – we have it and I love it.

And here we go……..drum roll……

Jules and Jane’s Attic Bedroom

Goofing off in their new space.

Jane’s spot

Jules’ spot

Loungey lounge

So pumped to be done with this!!

I purchased as much as I could from local stores and so if it says similar, it is because I found them at a store you need to come to ND to shop at. I also pulled from other rooms in our home and from items I was holding onto from our home in MT.

Source List

Lights: Slim Profile LED Lights – Similar

Art: Alice in Wonderland Print, Psalm Print, Miss Moon was a Dog Governess

Bean Bags: Pink, Teal

Bedding: Pink – Similar, Teal – Similar, Seersucker Bedding

Pillows: Teal Sequin – Similar, Pink Sequin – Similar

Lamp: Organizer Lamp, Crystal Lamp

Beds: Quick Lock frame (so easy!!!!)

Attic Bedroom Update

I have been sitting on a plan for the Attic Bedroom since we moved in this past summer. We were just waiting for Dave to have time to devote to putting in the insulation.

Scary phone photo of the stairs leading up. I did not even see this space until after we bought the house.

ALLLLLLL the stuff the previous owner left behind.

I posted about my outline for the room and the fact that the girls had come to me with a layout and their color scheme ideas…..SO CUTE!!!!!

As a reminder (or introduction) the upstairs will house Jules (13) and Jane (9). The girls will be sharing ~700 sq ft with their own bathroom.

All the work shown below is the unattractive stuff. LOL. Unattractive but necessary.

The base of the room is getting done.

That super fun stuff is getting completed by Dave. hahahahaha I have been playing around with the footprint to ensure that we can get a bathroom up here eventually. When we bought the house, there were plumbing lines roughed in to this area….right next to the stairs. After some exploration we realized that they cut(!!!!!!!) the floor joists to put those roughed lines in. seriously, people. I love DIY – but I love educated DIY. Dave and I sistered new joists in and took out the roughed in lines so we could start from scratch…..the right way.

As a reminder (or introduction) the upstairs will house Jules (12) and Jane (8). The girls will be sharing ~700 sq ft with their own bathroom. In the below layout I put the bathroom back next to the stairs to see how to would work out with lines and layout.

In my previous two plans – 1. I had the bathroom in this space, but way smaller. 2. I had the bathroom in the center of room on the north side (where the desk with the purple chair is below).

After much back and forth we are going with the first choice.

Dave has really honed his skills in texturing. I remember the first project we did with the texture gun….and it was …….interesting. hahahahahaha interesting in that you could have cut yourself on the wall with how deep the texture was put on.

But as you can see, it looks fantastic.

Our next issue was the type of lights to install. Our clearance was quite small so Dave found these ultra slim LED lights. I am so impressed with how low profile they are.

Seriously!! Look at how thin they are. It is a very easy install – a large hole drilled through our wood slats, wire it up and clip it in.

Dave really chose well on those lights.

Dave was out of town, as usual – but this time he did not get a full weekend at home. He was here for just over 24 hours, so our finish work was delayed. Sigh.

More to come!!

Planning an Attic Bedroom

Well – the majority of what we want to finish construction wise is complete on the main floor. So I am moving on up those stairs and getting my game plan set for the attic. The girls will be sharing ~700 sq ft with their own bathroom. I dropped some info into a room builder to play with layouts and I will start with this:

The plumbing lines were already run when I started on this version. It was pretty easy to decide where the beds and desk would go based on the walls clustered together on one side of the room. After some exploration, we found some issues with the plumbing that was roughed in. Based on that knowledge we feel good about moving the bathroom to the center of the attic. That aligns the plumbing lines with what is on the first floor and basement…..but it does make things more difficult for me in designing the room.

The bathroom will have the only ‘walls’ extending into the room. I have decided to either use wooden slats or metal rods from floor to ceiling around the stairs to keep as much natural light flowing through the room as possible. There are only a few furniture pieces that are must haves from the girls perspective:

2 beds
2 desks
2 chairs
2 toy chests
1 set of cubbyholes
TV
bean bag chairs

Everything else is optional and I think we will keep it pretty minimal as a start to ensure that I do not over fill it!

Jules and Jane came to me with a plan – they would like the base color to be grey and white. Then they can each pick another color to highlight what is theirs. Jules would like blue or teal – Jane would like pink. Color me surprised 🙂 We will pick and choose what from what we have and then do some bargain hunting at the stores we have locally.

Jane’s Room in MT

Jules’ Room in MT

Jules’ Room in ND

and here we go!

Prairie Cape Bathroom

So I got around to naming our new house….Prairie Cape…cause she’s on the prairie and she’s a cape cod style house. Super original, I know. Anyhoo, we are just wrapping up the big ticket items on our main floor bathroom remodel. Yahoo!!!!

Before:

look at that wallpaper! I tried to salvage a piece so that I could frame it, but it mysteriously disappeared.

First up – we replaced all of the windows inside the house (except the front 3, because they are HUGE and special order). Our first inclination was not to do a full gut, but once we pulled the rotten pieces of drywall out, we just kept going. I wanted to keep the retro vanity so badly, but it was damaged when we took it out. 🙁

The boards under the toilet and bathtub were not able to be salvaged so new boards were placed on that side of the bathroom.

A big decision for us was what type of material to use for our shower – we wanted to go full tile but quite frankly neither of us was interested in going full in on another bathroom right off the bat. It sounds terrible but after redoing 3 bathrooms in our last house….we.are.tired of bathrooms. lol. So we did a shower insert and for what we want right now, its perfect.

Itsn’t it pretty??!!

I reused the bathroom mirror which is slightly larger than the vanity, but I have decided to deal with it so that I can have something from the original bathroom in place.

There is still trim work, bathroom accessories and the whole moving in thing left to do – but other than that – We have a fully functional bathroom and I am sooooo happy.

Source:

Light: Design House

Shower Head: Delta Windmere

Shower Kit: Sterling Ensemble

Shower Door: Sterling Finesse

Vanity: Marrakech from Menards (discontinued) Similar: Paige, Crawford and Burke, Odyssey

Mirror: Vintage

Planning the layout

Oh man – things are changing even as I speak! ps….ignore the dimensions that I have for the bedrooms below – they are oh so wrong. oops.

Anywho – the layout that I have below is what I built to give me an idea of where we were going to put our furniture and what we would be keeping.

If you follow me on Instagram, you saw us combining 2 closets. The 2 closets between the bedrooms will now be one big one. We decided to do that so that we could eliminate a door and have another uninterrupted wall. I was really looking forward to not sharing with Dave…but the trade off is worth it.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Whitney Gonitzke (@prairie.and.lake)

The master and guest room will now flip flop. The guest room will double as the music room. Jules and I are setting up an area for her piano and violin – mostly so that she has a place for her lessons.

The girls have opted to share the upstairs – they will have ~650 sq ft to play with when setting up their room. They have sketched out at least 3 different floor plans for me. LOVE IT!!!!

They will have their own bathroom upstairs – we are fighting with some plumbing lines that are already existing and a very slanted ceiling, so it will be tight…..but it will be all theirs.

I love this part of renovation, its all possibility and dreams. I will just ignore the budget piece of it for now 😉🤣🤣

Prairie House – Small House trend??

Our first house was not even 900 sq feet total. You read that right, NOT EVEN 900 sq ft – and we were happy there. The first 2 1/2 years of Jules’ life was in a 2 bedroom 1 bath with a big garage. We fit well in that house but concerns about school districts spurred us into looking for a new one. We ended up with more than double the space in the blue house and it was sitting on 1/2 acre of land as well. It did not take long to fill that house to overflowing with stuff. A full house, a full garage, a full playhouse and a full shed. Jeez.

Now we just purchased a new place in North Dakota and as we are planning how to move forward with our plans, I am reminded of a post I read in Life Edited. Life Edited pulled the below image from a Wall Street Journal article about the book “Life at Home in the 21st Century”. (once again you read that right…a post about an article about a book) It’s really the Life Edited post that opened my eyes with their round up of data on house square footage and the change that has occurred over the past 50 years. It mirrors what Dave and I did. We started with less than 900 sq ft and doubled it for our next place. But how we lived in that larger space is echoed in this image.

The U.S. Census Bureau reports that the average newly constructed home is 2,422 (as of 2017) – this is actually a decrease from 2015 where the average reached an all time high of 2,467.

I hope that means that more people are realizing that there are places in their house that they never use……AND that having that extra room invites us to have more crapola. How can we fight off the inevitable creep of stuff?

Reminder as to what my library clean out looked like:

*and that’s just one room! I shudder just looking at it.

Does all that extra space make you happy or just frustrated that you have to clean a room that you rarely step foot in or has your ‘stuff’ there for the guests that stay twice a year.

Here are some handy data points from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (I love data points!!)

Click here for the webpage

UG! Ladies!!!! 2 hours and 15 minutes? Let’s stack your day with work, house work and then free time……The average commute time in the US is 25 minutes. Say closing time is 5 pm, you will be rolling up to your house around 5:30pm and starting your household chores (not including the actual time it takes to eat the food you prep)….your free time starts at 7:45. Ew.

Stay tuned for my plans on how to keep this to the minimum for our family.

**Also on a final note – this post on 21 Surprising Statistics That Reveal How Much Stuff We Actually Own from Becoming Minimalist is an eye opener.

Never Ending List 2019

We purchased our house and cabin in 2018 – the house got a lot of attention…..with good reason. We really wanted to live in it. This year will hopefully have a better balance between the two locations.

So here we go

House

Last piece of drywall and trim in the bathroom. get it to 100% done
Trim out the built ins

Replace last 3 windows on the front of the house
Finish trim in the house (affected by the last windows)

Roof – update to metal
Siding is in our garage waiting to be installed
Addition!!
Landscaping, parking area

Cabin

Re- wire
Reinforce the foundation

Re-work the front porch
Non- lake water
Parking area

We were very successful on our 2018 list and I hope that we are just as dedicated to getting this one done as well. At the beginning of the year, it is so great to be able to congratulate yourself on a job well done, but also look forward to see where you are going and where you hope to be in the future. not gunna lie – I am really looking forward to the time when the major construction projects are behind us…..hahahahahaha Wish us luck!

When we first met, Dave took me to his hometown in North Dakota and I fell in love. Peeps- it’s small, 20 people small. But we decided that we would end up there…..granted I always thought it would be closer to retirement, but life happens. You guessed it. We now live in super small town North Dakota…..our addition to the town has increased the population by 17%.

Seriously! We are 20 miles from a town of 2,500 and 60 miles from a town of 30,000.