Adding a Bedroom (and Property Value) to Our House!

If you remember back about a year, I shared this post about buying our house. We bought a new house and are the first home owners/occupants. However, we bought standing stock because we weren't willing to wait 3-4 months for the house to be built. The downside to that choice was we didn't really get to pick any of the fixtures/options/paint etc.

The people who "built" our house backed out of the house at closing and that's how we came to see the house. That couple had picked all of the options for the home. One of the upgrade options on the blueprints (you can see below) was turning "bedroom 2" right off the Master's suite into a "Master retreat." They chose to do that. Troy and I knew buying the house that that was wasted square footage for us. We are not people who hang out in our room. Ever. We don't have a TV in there. We don't want a home gym (gross) and neither of us work out from home. We have a loft upstairs for another hang out area/TV area, so this master suite was literally a room that we never went in. Optimus used it the most because he slept in a chair we had in the corner.



We began talking soon after moving in about what situation our family would be in to wall that room in again. Having more kids was one of those options. Our guest room is downstairs and living in Vegas, we knew we would have lots of visitors (and we have). It was important to us to keep our kids/noise away from guests and we didn't want them to share a bathroom with kids toys, diapers, and toddler pottys in them. So we knew that if we were going to have 3+ kids, we definitely wanted to wall in the room.

Some people would LOVE this space as a master retreat. We just don't need it. We are definitely living room couch loungers. As far as resale/rental potential down the road, most people that we know have 2+ kids and we know a few families (HI BRIE) who might be moving here and want to rent a house with lots of bedrooms. So we're hoping that having 5 bedrooms makes that a selling point for the house as a resale or rental.

Which brings me to the next point. We are having twin girls. Yes, they are sharing a room. At least for a while. The other bedroom in the blueprint (bedroom 3 in the corner) we are reserving for a future Aupair/guest room. We have a credit at a furniture store and in the next few weeks, we are going and getting unstackable bunk beds for the twins in the future, but for now, those can be used for a nanny or as a guest room. Aunt Kathy...we are doing this while you are here. YAY furniture shopping!

We wanted the twins near us and far from Avery (she has the room over the garage) for noise purposes. So the girls are getting the new room right next to us.

Here is the before view of the room, from our bedroom into the "retreat":

Here is after the wall went up:

And this is as the room is now:

If you stand on the other side of the wall, in the new space, this is what you see. You are looking at the new closet:

Standing where the closet is and looking back towards our room, here is the before:

And this is with the wall up. We are starting to get stuff moved in there and out of Avery's closet. It's a bit of a mess. But you get the general idea. We are sticking with the Eric Carle theme of "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" like Avery's nursery. We really loved it and it's gender neutral. The wall stickers have made it through 3 different rooms now and are still plenty sticky. Definitely worth the money :)

Here is the before angle looking from the window to where the new doorway went in:

And after with the new door:

And here is the before picture from out in the hallway where the door went in:

And here is the after:

We are really happy that we decided to put the wall up and the doorway in. If we had the option to build our house instead of buying standing stock, this is what we would have picked anyway, so I'm glad we went ahead and changed it. And it's nice to start nest a little bit for the girls :)

We still have a little furniture rearranging to do. We ended up getting rid of Avery's crib because it was a drop arm (and she's a climber) and it didn't convert to a toddler bed either. We wanted something for the 2 girls that was would be 1) safer and 2) have a longer lifespan of use for them. When we get the cribs we will be doing a little furniture jenga in there to figure out the best arrangement for a dresser, 2 cribs, a glider, and a bookshelf. When everything lands in it's final spot, I'll get you guys an update.

Avery is Home and We are Loving Life

Woooweee it's been a while since I posted. Sorry about that.

Avery came home on June 19th and we were very very excited. Troy was on midnight shift the day that she came home. He had worked from midnight to 8 and got home around 930, with intentions to sleep for a few hours before we picked up Avery and my stepdad from the airport. But then my brother called (he was on TDY to Nellis for a deployment training) and asked if we could go to lunch. And Troy was too excited to sleep. So to help pass the time until reunion time, we spent a few hours with Tyler.

Then it was time to go to the airport. Troy made Avery a sign. Yes. Troy did. I had nothing to do with this. At all. I think that other people thought that we were welcoming home a deployed soldier or something. Nope, just our 2 year old. And there is Tyler photobombing. Typical. And Troy's eyes are a little scary. Sorry about the poor quality iphone photos.

This is my first hug with Avery. She came down the escalator sitting between my stepdad's legs on one of the steps. She stood up right at the bottom and jumped into my arms, IMMEDIATELY talking and talking and talking. About what? I'm not really sure. Just long winded babbling with an understandable word every 15 words or so.

We took a family picture in baggage claim too. Troy insisted her sign be included.

We have been spending lots of time at the pool. Sometimes at the YMCA (it's a little crowded there some days), some days we went to our youth pastors house who has a pool, and another day we went to my friend's neighborhood pool (MUCH less crowded). Avery has one of those puddle jumper life vests and is getting more confident in the water. We've been reading a lot and Troy and Avery do puzzles a lot. We've had a couple play dates and I don't think Avery remembers her friends initially, but seems to warm up to people quickly, so yay!

Troy took a bunch of leave when Avery came home and he got to spend almost 2 weeks home with her, which was amazing. I worked for about half of that. Speaking of which, I worked a 40 hour work week last week. It's the FIRST TIME I've done that since before Avery was born. I was feeling pretty awesome about it. Troy was making me go to bed at 830 every night, which was annoying at the time, but a good choice.

I'm glad Avery decided not to squirt her mom, holding the iphone...



Avery has been GREAT in her big girl bed. She hasn't gotten out once. She goes right to bed at night and sits in bed yelling for us in the morning until we come get her. A couple people have asked how the edge of the bed "noodle technique" is working and so far, so good. She hasn't rolled out of bed in the middle of the night. My only complaint is the the noodle will slide off the edge and get caught in the elastic of the fitted sheet so you have to push it back up onto the edge of the mattress. But other than that, it seems to work well and is certainly cheaper than buying a rail. Win-win.

Seriously, I just want to watch her sleep stalker style. She's just so cute.

Happy Blogiversary to Me!

I MADE IT!!! I read somewhere that most blogs only have a 3 month life! I BEAT THE ODDS! It's hard to believe it, but one year ago today, while living in a hotel temporary living facility (TLF) in Alamogordo, New Mexico, this blog was born! My, how things can change in a year.

Baby Girl looked like this:

And we lived in this:

I can't believe that was a year ago...it seems like it was just yesterday!

Here are some statistics for you about the past year:

- BarnesDailyCircus has been googled 295 times (lets be real, 293 of those were probably my Mom)

- The very first blog I wrote had 18 page views. OH that is so low. Most of the blogs I write now average about 200 page views. Which is still nothing to write home about, but hey! Growth is growth!

- My very first commenter was Bethany Russell. One of my co-workers from Dover. HI BETHANY!

- My top 3 read blogs were:

1. Some nightstands that I re-did. The post was added to a home redesign blog and gets frequently clicked on from their site.

2. Where we announced we were having triplets.

3. Where we found out that one of the babies had anencephaly.

- This little blog won an award!!

- Most of the readers have been from the United States, but there are readers world wide. Who are you? Speak up! This is the list of top 10 countries reading.

United States - 19547
Russia - 596
Canada - 465
United Kingdom - 325
Germany - 284
France - 64
Japan - 63
Philippines - 56
Australia - 52
South Africa - 46

- Most people are reading from a PC! I don't know why this surprised me, but it did.

- I did a total of 156 posts over the past year. Holy cow. That's more than I expected when I started this blog. Especially since during the past few months, I've only been averaging about a post a week. So I was super good about posting in the beginning. No surprise there though. Avery was napping 2x a day and we lived in a hotel room in the middle of nowhere. I am definitely going to try an blog 3x a week. Don't hold me to that.

So thank you everyone. This past year has been a craaaaazy year and I know it's going to keep going full speed ahead. Come along, won't you?