Life is Beautiful

Motherhood, Sewing, Family

Dream Home Come True Ep. #2: Breaking Ground/Laundry Room

~ Dream Home Come True, HOME, HOME BUILDING, Jay's DIY

This post is in partnership with Elkay. I’m so excited to show you what our laundry room will look like!


We finally broke ground!!! After waiting 4 months for the City to approve of our plans, I cannot tell you enough how excited and grateful I am that this day is finally here!!!

In this episode, I’ll take you with me to the day of our ground breaking and the actual first digging of the dirt, and then a reveal of what our laundry room will look like! Watch it below!
 

 

 
 

 
Let me know if the inspiration photo for our laundry room spoke to you as much as it did to me, because I love it. So much. This is actually a kitchen renovation for a beach house by a talented designer named Will Taylor, you can read his kitchen renovation post here.
 

 

 

 

I knew I wanted my kitchen cabinets to be a light color but I loved this design so much, I had to think of a place to incorporate it into, and thought the laundry room would be a perfect place for it, mainly because of that beautiful white farmhouse sink, I love the idea of having a big farmhouse style sink in the laundry room for putting all the dirty clothes in there to wash, or to dye my clothes for my refashion revisions, or to bathe my grand-babies in like 20 years! I just like to plan ahead, guys, is that so wrong?
 

 

 
 

 

I found a beautiful farmhouse sink from Elkay that will go perfectly for it, and it arrived right on time as I was making this video so make sure to watch the video for the unboxing and see just how big and spacious the sink is! It is a fireclay single bowl that is 29-7/8″ wide which is so roomy, I fit two of my kids in the sink at the same time. I always wished I had a beautiful farmhouse sink to bathe my kids in when they were little but since it’s so big, I can bathe them in it now, even my 11 year old! Haha, I am totally joking but I just might try to bathe my 5 year old in it, don’t judge me.
 
 

 

Photo by lifefromhome.com
 
The sink is super heavy and sturdy and very high quality, I didn’t realize just how heavy-duty it was until I tried to move it and couldn’t so Jay had to help me. He doesn’t like many things but he really likes the size of the sink and was impressed by the quality! Also because it’s made of fireclay, it’s super durable, easy to clean and it’s s scratch and stain-resistant.
Photo by @barij
 
 

 

The best part about this sink is that it can be installed in two ways: as a flat front or with the decorative band at the top as the two photos above show. Which one should I do for my laundry room?
 

 

I love that Elkay offers versatile styles for one product, such as the interchangeable apron, where you can switch out the front part of the sink to many various colors such as platinum, sapphire, champagne, scarlet and many other colors, to change according to season, holiday or mood!
 
 

Elkay offers a variety of beautiful faucets, drinking fountains, cabinets and more, checkout www.Elkay.com/ for a list of full products.

And let me know in the comments what you think of our future laundry room and which sink style you think fits in my laundry room. Things are rolling along quickly now that we broke ground, so make sure to subscribe to watch more of our Dream Home Come True series!

 
 
 

A 3 a.m SURPRISE

~ HOME, Jay's DIY

 

 

Back in 2009, two months after I had my second child, my brother got married in Korea so I took a solo trip for a month(my parents were living there at the time) with my 18 month old and a 2-month old. When I came home, he had a lot of surprises for me with our house such as a new fireplace, my new closet, a surprise for the girls and more, you can see the before/after photos here.

When I was in New York for 5 days when I was pregnant with my third child(Jay surprised me with a trip to N.Y to see my brother and my best friend), I came home to a spotless clean house with everything deep cleaned(even behind the oven and the refrigerator), a handmade chore chart that they all worked on by coloring it, laminating it, and with magnets on it, the girls listened so well and were happy, and the laundry all caught up. He made dinner with vegetables, went on a swim play date with my girlfriends and their kids where he packed handmade musubi’s for even my girlfriends and they all asked him for a recipe, basically he was me but x10 better. I asked Jay how it was and if he thought it was hard and he just said, “Hard? Nah, it wasn’t bad at all.” (see the post here)

A part of me was glad he not only survived but obviously thrived, but a part of me was like, “All I ever wanted to hear when I come home after a long trip is for my husband to say to me, “Oh, I don’t know how you do it, I have so much more respect for you and all the other stay at home parents out there, it was the hardest thing I have ever done.” But instead, I am the one feeling guilty that I should be doing more when he’s at work!

And last week when I was in Charleston, SC for a blog conference, I came home to find the biggest surprise ever. My husband’s hobby is to flip homes and rent them out and move to another old home so after renovating our first home, he bought our current home with the plans to renovate and rent. But life got so busy and even though he had intended to renovate every single year for the past 9 years, it never happened. This is the reason why we are building a new house, because after waiting patiently for 9 years, I told him I am done waiting and he has to set a timeline and really follow through on renovating and if he didn’t, then we get to move to a newer house that doesn’t need any major renovating, or we get to build a house.

So as you can see in the photos below, we’ve had this carpet for the 9 years we’ve lived here. NINE YEARS!!! It’s the carpet you find in your High School, the ones that are multi-colored and hides everything so it never looks dirty but it never looks clean either? The carpet where if you drop something, you just give up and walk away, it’s lost forever? Yeah, that kind of a carpet. We also have light brown shaggy carpet in our bathrooms too, don’t be too jealous. I am always hesitant in sharing our beautiful carpeted kitchen and bathrooms because the internet can be a place of jealousy and comparison and I never want people to think I am rubbing it in their faces. Because I am super humble!

Well, what I didn’t know while I was gone was that Jay decided the day before I came home, that he would replace our carpet with a new wooden floor. So without further ado, I introduce you to my carpet which I fondly named, Drop Something, Just Walk Away.

 

BEFORE

Now that you have seen this immaculate beauty, please take a deep breathe and remember the quote, “Comparison is the thief of joy.”

 

PROGRESS

Jay says the girls helped out a lot!

 

AFTER

watch the video below for the surprise at the end!

(the first part is taken from my Instastory archives where I got so many comments saying, “Wait, is that carpet in your kitchen?” so I gave a little tour and it was probably my most engaged story ever! People loved that it wasn’t the perfect, Pinterest-worthy house that they see everywhere and an Instagrammer actually had an ugly house! Hahaha.

What do you think? Doesn’t it make our whole kitchen/dining area so much brighter? It only took him 12 hours to install them by himself! He did ask me what color I wanted our wood floors to be for our new house so he matched the color to what I wanted. Since we will rent this house when we move to our new house and wanted it to be low maintenance and last through all the tenants, he chose the luxury vinyl planks. I like them a lot and love that I don’t have to worry and stress when me or the kids spill something and am debating whether to get these or the hardwood floors for our new house? What is your vote?

And follow me on YouTube if you want to follow my new series, “My Husband is Building Me My Dream House!”

DIY DREAM HOME: MY HUSBAND IS BUILDING ME MY DREAM HOUSE! Episode 1

~ Dream Home Come True, HOME, Jay's DIY, YOUTUBE VIDEOS

 

 

Welcome to our 1st episode of “DIY DREAM HOME: My Husband’s Building My Dreamhouse!” Click play to see the design of our house, where we will be building and the difficulties we faced trying to design a home we love!

 

(Captions from the video):

I am so excited to share this journey with you!!! This series will be a year long series where I will take you on our home building journey from start to finish, tips, tutorials and the mistakes I am sure we will make along the way so you don’t make the same mistakes! In our 1st episode, I will be sharing with you how we chose the design we finally ended up with, the hardships we faced(even some fights we’ve had), how we were able to resolve our issues, our land where we will be building our dream house and a sneak peek of what our house will look like! So get ready, I am so excited you will be joining us on this crazy journey!

We were suppose to move into our house right now, like this month but we haven’t even broke ground yet. Ugh. I will tell you the reasons why it’s taken us so long.

M husband and I have completely different tastes when it comes to exterior style of homes. He’s more modern, I am more classic, he’s more trendy, I am more timeless. But we are both stubborn and strong-minded. Which equals a lot of disagreements. So we weren’t sure which way our house would go. But one day, on the 4th of July my husband’s favorite Holiday, as he was setting up all his ridiculous amount of fireworks he bought, he said to me, “Sarah, if you let me buy this many fireworks every single year from now on, without complaining or whining once, then I’ll build you whatever exterior house you want.” I thought about it for 10 seconds and said deal.

So it’s a win win, husband gets to explode plethora of fireworks every single year without me complaining that fireworks are money getting blown up, because it literally is, and I get a house of my dreams!

 

My Dream house

We tried to make my vision of the house work along with the floor plan that Jay picked out soon after, but it was a disaster. Jay didn’t want French doors, French windows, the design wouldn’t work with the floorplan, so after compromising so many things things I loved about the house and going back and forth with our architect tens of times and re-designing, the end result was a disaster. It looked nothing like my original idea, It was a really badly designed house, it looked like a big school house. I hated it. So I put my foot down and said, “We are starting all over and this time I will design the exterior of the house, and only THEN you can design the floor plan.”

 

The misaligned front door, the horizontal windows, the side buildings being wider than the center, and the weird side pop-outs with the sloped roof…. WHAT….

 

So we started all over, which set us back a good 9 months. BUT we have finally designed a house we love, both inside and out and we are so excited to get this started!
I do have to say we fought a ton during this process of designing in the beginning. We fought like we’ve never had before, it’s like parenting where all your worst faults get magnified by a 100x fold and this monster in you comes out that you never knew existed. Many people have told me it’ll test your marriage and lots of couples end up in a divorce through the process of home building and I understood why! I cried many times and one late night in the middle of our fight and I was crying, my husband looked at me and said, ‘If you knew just how much I loved you and how much I pray that this house will be the house of your dreams, you’d be less worried and trust me more.” And as he said those words, it was as if I was him for a moment and I felt exactly how his heart felt and just how much he loved me. It was such an overwhelming love that encompassed my whole being that I was so taken aback. I knew he loved me but I had no idea he loved me that much. That night changed our lives. We both ended up crying and talking it over and decided that keeping our marriage strong and respecting and making each other happy was more important than a perfect house or getting our way. Since then, we haven’t fought once and it’s been 11 months, and our marriage is better than ever.

 

My husband, when he was younger, helped his dad build 3 of their houses in Hawaii from scratch so he knows a lot about building and construction so he will act as our general contractor, saving us about 15-20% of the cost of our house. And he will try to build as much as he can himself, which will probably save us another 20-30%, so we are basically building our house at 50% off or more.

 

So are you ready to see our land and our house design? Let’s do it! Watch the video to see what our house will look like and let me know in the comments what you think!

 

 

 

Like this post? See similar posts:

Husband Renovates My Parents’ Kitchen/Dining room

Ugly 70’s Bathroom Renovation DIY

My Husband’s Man Cave/Tool Shed DIY

 

DIY: UGLY BATHROOM TO A BEAUTIFUL NEW BATHROOM RENOVATION

~ HOME, Jay's DIY, YOUTUBE VIDEOS

 

Watch this episode on how my handy husband turned an ugly, outdated, carpeted bathroom into a clean, sleek & feminine bathroom in this bathroom renovation makeover.

We are building our dreamhouse so I hope you’ll join us for our “WE ARE BUILDING OUR DREAMHOUSE” series coming soon! In the meantime, you can follow me @dreamhomecometrue on Instagram for updates and design inspirations.

 

 

Want our bathroom? Shop it below(not affiliate links):

Allen + Roth white vanity with Carrera Marble top

Pfister Ashfield Brushed Nickel 2-handle WaterSense faucet

Pfister Ashfield Brushed Nickel 1 handle bathtub faucet and rain showerhead

Jensen Medicine Cabinet by Rangaire

American Standard Acticlean toilet

 

 

*Thank you to Lowe’s for partnering with me on this bathroom renovation project.

 

 

 

 

Like this post? See similar posts:

Dream Home DIY Episode #1

My husband’s man shed

~ HOME, Jay's DIY

 
 
 
Jay’s dad came soon after we had the baby to help Jay build a shed.  Jay learned how to build from his dad when he helped his parents build their 3 houses in Hawaii from ground up.  Did I mention Jay’s dad built their very first home in Utah when he was in his early 20’s from ground up?  He couldn’t find any houses he liked so he thought to himself, “Why not build one myself?”.  So he went to the bookstore and bought a book on how to build a house and that’s how he learned to build and renovate.  Genius?  Yes, I think so.
 
Here are the pictures of the process, enjoy!
the girls being little helpers by cheering on while eating popsicles. 🙂
Jay’s friend came and wanted to learn and help, thanks Wayne!
no Achilles, it’s not a dog house for you, sorry!
look how little Aiden was!  and my husband looks HOT!
 
 
And the finished result!  it took them only a week to build but these pictures were taken last month.
 
Now Jay has a place to store all his tools!  And a place to sleep when I don’t want him anywhere near me. Haha, jk jk.  As long as he behaves, he’ll be just fine.
 
It sure is nice having a handyman in the house.  We are going to renovate the upstairs of our house this year and last time he renovated our towne home that we used to live in, I was pregnant so I couldn’t help out much, but I am so excited to help him and learn a lot!
 
 
 

See similar posts:

Dream Home DIY Episode #1