The State Of The House Address 2024

We’re at a pivotal moment right now with the house AND the blog. An EXCITING pivotal moment for both entities. I probably should have titled this post “The State of the House and Blog Address 2024.” But anyway, I digress.

So many things have been moving and shaking, projects moving forward, things we’re about to tackle, and so many updates to share that I decided to put it all into one big post. And I am here for it and excited for the things to come.

In the words of Todd Wolfhouse in the classic movie Beerfest, “This is that moment that only exists in sports – where the coach gives a speech on the jumbotron to get the hometown fans fired up!” If you’re into saucy humor, catch the whole clip from Beerfest for the full pump-up effect.

I know…I could be punn-ier. But I am a stay-at-home mom with two young children at the end of summer vacation. I am le tired. My humor is napping.

So cheerio, mate, let’s get to it! Read on for some exciting updates on what’s to come here on the blog and in our home.

Life Update

The biggest update is that the kids head to school in just a few, short (yet long) days. BOTH kids. While Rowan heads to second grade, Beatrix is about to start preschool.

This moment is bittersweet. On one hand, I’m SO excited to have a school day’s length of time to work on projects, write blog posts, and create content to grow my business. Can you imagine what I can do with that much time?!?! But on the other hand, this time at home with her has been SO sweet.

I didn’t get this time with Rowan. I worked full-time at a demanding job and constantly felt stretched between work and family time.

Because of that, sometimes I overextend myself in this season of momming young children. Like focusing my attention on them 100% and ignoring everything else. Or feeling guilty for doing a little work when they are playing quietly together.

And I know better. But that mom guilt is real and I find myself playing Pop The Pig for the 100th time that day instead of finishing a nagging project (I see you playground project and raise you bedroom wallpaper).

So I’m ready to divide my days and have better boundaries. While the girls are at school, it’s blog and project time. When they’re home, it’s family time.

The Big Surprise

Typically, preschool in our school district has been a half-day program for three-year-olds, but a full-day program for the four-year-olds. There was an option for full-day preschool for the younger kids, but you had to pay for it.

Thus, we had always planned for Bea to attend preschool for just half the day as a three-year-old.

But when we went to preschool orientation, they informed us they were trying to change the program to a full-day, free program, for both age groups. This was to make it easier for working parents to take their children to the public preschool.

A couple of weeks ago, we received confirmation of Bea’s enrollment in preschool (yay!) AND that it would be a full day (double yay!).

So here’s to getting seven (count ‘em…one, two, three, four, five, six, SEVEN) full hours every school day to myself to work, tackle projects, tend the house, and grow a garden.

I am sad about my youngest heading off to full-day school but excited to dive into my business goals. It’s a weird tension.

Which leads me to…

Business Dreaming And Privilege

I feel BEYOND grateful that I got to be a full-time homemaker and mom for the last three years. And just as grateful to pursue my business goals full-time this coming school year.

That privilege is not lost on me. My husband Colby, has been so supportive throughout this season of me crawling toward my blog and business dreams while caring for our girls.

While I do feel the pressure to get a “real job,” entrepreneurship is calling my name. We decided to give myself the time and space to give it a go. So I’m going on record and giving myself one year to hit my revenue target, which is more than my old salary as a marketing director.

The BIG Business Dreams

While I’m in a dreaming mode, I’ll share my other dreams for this business of mine. The big ones! The ones that will take years to come to fruition, if they ever do.

I’m a big believer in income diversification and right now, all my eggs are in the display advertising/Google search results basket. Which can be volatile when big updates happen.

Some ideas I’m looking into:

• Adding affiliate links to posts (maybe Amazon, Etsy, and Home Depot)
• Furniture flipping
• Teaching online classes
• Enrolling in an interior design program and taking on a few clients
• Turn an outbuilding into an accessory dwelling unit (a small apartment)
• Purchase an apartment building for long-term rentals and renovate the units for blog content (the condition of rentals in our community is abysmal and I want to change that)
• Open a co-working space
• Start either an online or brick-and-mortar vintage shop (maybe both!)
• Perhaps reopening the Etsy shop

Ahhh…one can dream.

Garden Update

Alright, onto the great garden update for 2024.

Remember when I talked about the kitchen garden? Then declared I was going to set up the kitchen garden by the greenhouse so I could plant that garden this year in that smaller location and renovate the old garden space? It’s all in the kitchen garden post if you missed it.

Well…on a positive note, I’m glad that I’m ambitious!

Precisely none of those plans came to fruition.

I was off to a great start with seed starting, but planting time was suddenly upon us and we were nowhere near ready to build garden beds and create a kitchen garden in front of the greenhouse.

I decided to just plant a bed or two in the old location. Well, that snowballed and I just kept planting all spring long. Aall but 10 of the 50-ish garden beds in my garden got planted before petering out during a 3-week heat wave where I couldn’t even convince the kids to go outside.

I’m debating planting a fall garden after the kids go back to school. There’s still a lot of growing time left in our season for the colder weather crops. But we’ll see. There’s a part of me that just wants to put the garden on pause until next year.

Until then, I’m enjoying a banner year for kale, chard, and my favorite sun gold tomatoes.

Project Updates

I know, I know. I owe you all kinds of project updates so here’s the Reader’s Digest version for you. But I’ll share more as we move into fall.

Girls’ Shared Bedroom Project

Honestly, I hit so many snags with this project that I just put a pin in it for now.

To recap, here’s the initial design plan, narrowing down the wallpaper options, and selecting the wallpaper.

First snag. Spoonflower was having a wallpaper sale and I went to order the wallpaper the girls decided on. I double-checked with them to make sure it was the pattern they wanted. Well…they no longer wanted a jungle theme and changed their mind to a Barbie theme, then a circus theme, then a dog theme, and now I don’t even know what theme they’ve moved onto now.

Picture me throwing my hands in the air out of frustration. I give up! Kind of.

But I learned a lesson, a very valuable lesson. They are kids. Their creativity and imaginations run wild. They can’t commit to a theme, which I didn’t want to do in the first place but leaned into it when they got so excited about it. So I need to keep everything colorful yet neutral-ish so the decor can be changed on a whim.

Snag two. One of Colby’s sisters offered us a free bunkbed for the girls’ room, which is great because it saves us some money. The kicker is, we have to go get said bunkbed which is four hours away, with our old truck which needs to be replaced. We’re 98% certain said truck will break down along the way and we don’t want to deal with that right now.

Truck shopping has commenced. But have you seen how much trucks cost these days?! We’re taking our time and looking for the right deal. Once we have a new truck, we’ll go on a bunk bed retrieval mission and start the girls’ bedroom project back up.

Playground Project

The playground renovation project is close to finished and about 80% done. I posted a week one update and I almost have the week two update ready to go.

Spoiler alert…the construction part is done leaving the painting and accessorizing tasks to finish. I cannot wait to test out the new paint sprayer!

Playhouse Project

I know I totally left everyone in the lurch about the playhouse project after announcing it last summer. We have made some progress but I haven’t been sharing about it.

Our biggest problem with the project was dealing with a family of skunks living under the shed floor. After discovering them, we quickly acquired a Have A Heart trap and have been trying to de-skunk the structure. We think they’re all gone now.

Since then, we cleaned out the shed, took the old flat roof off, framed and installed a new roof, and have been working on replacing the floor.

One thing that’s holding up the project is the compost pile beside the playhouse. It needs to be moved before we can do much more. The problem is some volunteer baby blue hubbard squash plants growing in the compost that we don’t want to disturb.

I’ll likely finish the roof and the floor, try to make the structure safe and weather-tight for winter. Then I can move the compost pile in late fall before the ground freezes.

I honestly don’t see myself finishing this project until spring, but that’s fine.

Greenhouse Project

Ugh…the greenhouse project. I feel like progress came to a screeching halt this spring.

We pivoted to finish the kids’ play structure in hopes of having it done for summer vacation. AND because working in and on a greenhouse in 98-degree heat is not my cup of tea.

I was also amidst the window glazing step of the project and wasn’t feeling completely on board with the method we were using to glaze windows. We’ve been using a window glazing silicone, which is fine. But we were also just putting a bandaid on the window glazing, only fixing the worst window sash and the broken glass.

If I’m going to work on a project, I want to do it right. I’ve been researching more classic methods of reglazing windows using linseed oil putty and want to reglaze and restore every window sash in the structure. It’s not a quick fix for sure.

There is also a hold-up on how to finish the gable ends. We decided to fill in the gables with polycarbonate, mostly for budget reasons. It’s not sitting well with me and I would much rather wait, save up some money, and purchase automatic louver windows instead.

When you know yourself well and know without a doubt that I will forget to open up the greenhouse when temps soar, scorching all my baby seedlings, you save up for the automatic venting.

I want to try to work on the greenhouse this fall when temps are cooler. While I would love to FINISH, finish the greenhouse this fall to have it ready to go in early spring, it will be a miracle if I finish glazing and repairing all the window sash.

What To Expect With The Blog

So going into this next season, with so much free time on my hands to work on the blog and projects, here’s what to expect.

More Posts

Expect more posts and especially more consistent posts on this site.

Right now, I’m trying to post every Monday and Thursday. But realistically, I’m lucky to get one post up per week despite my best efforts.

While I haven’t nailed down my posting schedule, I’m trying to post either three times per week (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday) or every three days. I want to write more and share more frequently in real-time than I’m currently doing.

For now, I’ll keep posting twice awake and ramp up from there. I just don’t want to bite off more than I can chew.

Better Presence On Social

I found in this season of being stretched too thin among projects, parenting, and writing that social media majorly got neglected. It was the first thing out the window this summer.

But I’m bringing it back like Will Smith dragging an alien back to base. Independence Day anyone?!

Stella Angie’s getting her groove back so you’ll find me primarily hanging out on Instagram MUCH more regularly. I may even try my hand at Reels, but still images will forever have my heart. And stories!! I love stories!

What To Expect With Projects

Let’s have a heart-to-heart about what to expect with projects around here shortly. Two things.

Finishing What We Started

First, I fully recognize that Colby and I both have a finishing problem. We are both starters. Kicking off a project? No problem, let’s go! Seeing it through to 100% completion? Now that’s hard.

I’m trying hard to become a finisher, seeing a project through to the finish line, and keeping us both in check about starting too many things.

So in the next few months especially, I’m trying to finish all the things we’ve started. Like the playground (so close!), the playhouse, the girls’ room, and the greenhouse.

I also have some other projects I’ve been working on behind the scenes like redoing a closet into an art supply closet and reorganizing all the kid’s craft supplies.

There’s also a new hallway closet we pseudo-built a year ago that needs finishing. Plus, our bedroom, the attic closet, and the subway tile bathroom also need that last 10% to be DONE done.

You can see a sneak peek at the new closet shelves in progress in our decluttering when overwhelmed post.

The Great House Reset

Second, we’ve been feeling behind on both house and property maintenance since the day we moved in. Our inspector even warned us about the state of things when he said, “Well, you don’t have anything majorly wrong but there are a lot of medium-sized projects.”

Nine years later we are still chipping away at those medium-sized projects. Putting a bandaid on things until we have the budget to really make repairs and chipping away a little at a time while also trying to make this home ours.

This home also came with a lack of closets and storage space. We’ve never really addressed this. So when kids came along and the things started accumulating, we find ourselves overwhelmed with stuff with no place to put it. Even after doing a decluttering challenge the house still feels like a mess and disorganized.

Our yard is also feeling neglected and overgrown with invasives that we can’t keep up with. I see you sumacs and raise you cow parsnip (I think that’s what it is…we affectionately refer to it as “the fluffy stuff”).

I’m feeling the pull for a great house and yard reset. Like going top to bottom, cleaning, decluttering, organizing, and getting the whole space prepped before our next round of renovations.

It’s also a great time for house reset. After the kids go back to school and before the holidays.

Cheers To The Shifting Seasons

To recap because SO MANY WORDS. Both kids are heading to school full day while I get to blog and finish projects all day, expect more posts, find me more often on Instagram, focusing on finishing projects first, and stay tuned for the great house reset of 2024. And scene.

So cheers to a shift in seasons. While incredibly grateful for this last season, here’s to the next. I’m ready for my project mojo to return along with some creativity.

Pssst…And thanks for sticking around for the ultimate Angie’s Roost update. It’s like our own little State of the Union address. Perhaps we should do one every year.

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