Wow! Where has time gone? I’ve been meaning to get around to this post but time has really gotten away from me lately. With school starting back at our home, those posts are soon to come as well, square dance classes starting up, and so many other things going on life has been a blur lately. However, we had some plans get canceled out on us this weekend so I have a little bit of time to get to my blogging.

I better get to work on telling you about what we did because its already late and I have been taking a screen-free break on Sundays. This project actually took us two weekends to complete and it has made such a BIG difference in our little house. It might not be practical for everyone but we are loving it and so are the kiddos!

As many of you know we moved into a small cabin last year. We went from about 2,000 square feet of living space (plus a huge storage shed) to a little over 600 square feet with practically no storage except for a small area that we had tarped off on the porch. We have arranged and rearranged furniture so many times and we were making this little housework but we really needed a little bit more living space.

All of this rainy weather had really gotten us into the mindset that we needed to do something. We did go house hunting but honestly that just really isn’t in the budget. I have been on a mission to pay off some debt that has accumulated over the past few years. A divorce, a daughter’s wedding, sickness, and life have caused me to overextend myself financially and I am tired of being semi-broke so we will hold off on the house buying for a bit.

The next option is to add on but that is so expensive. We did the next best thing, we just added a sleeping loft to the living area. Kinda ‘little house on the prairie style’ and the kids are loving it. They call it their ‘oversized bunk bed’.

We started off by going to Elixon’s Lumber Company to pick up a bunch of 2×6’s, a couple of 2×8’s, and some other materials. We started with the framework here:

Then we added some plywood for the floor:

After finishing the floor we put up some rails.

Then we put up the ladder so the kiddos could get up and down.

Please don’t look at the mess… I promise it’s cleaned up now 🙂

I also added some indoor/outdoor carpet to make it a little cozier. Then we added the mattresses and a few foam mats that we already had.

They have since rearranged the mattresses a bit so that they have a little more play area. I put up a motion light and then I added a gate to go over the hatch when they are sleeping.

I love this mattress cleaner!

While it wouldn’t be ideal or practical for us grown-ups to sleep up there it is perfect for the kiddos. ‘Downstairs’ we now have quite a bit more room and we have been working on getting the house rearranged.

The house is still a work in progress and we are still working on making it comfortable but this project has made a big difference.

My next weekend project was to clean off the porch. We had planned to close it in as a storage area but it hasn’t happened and I really would like to have a place to sit outside sometimes. I think I like the idea of a screened-in room more than a storage area.

My plan was to go through a couple of boxes at a time but once I got started I couldn’t stop. I found that some of my carefully packed totes had been knocked over and the tops had gotten knocked off. Not only that the porch had a couple of leaks that we didn’t know about. This was not a good discovery at all.

After many tears and a lot of sorting and purging I was able to bag up a lot of things that needed to be thrown away. I also organized the remaining things into totes and carefully stacked them up until we can make a place in one of the buildings around the house. Once that happens I will also be boxing up some of the extra items in the house so we can be a little less cluttered.

The porch is looking a lot better now and Mr. Awesome has some things to go throughout there before can start to enjoy our ‘new’ outdoor area. Once we have everything moved off we can take down the tarps and hopefully get to work on screening it in. Yay!

This weekend was going to be a shed decluttering weekend but that got canceled as the helpers weren’t feeling up to it. Maybe next weekend. We did, however, get some ‘new to us’ furniture moved in and moved out some things that we didn’t need. Little by little our house is getting more and more organized and feeling more and more like HOME SWEET HOME.

I’ll be posting my other project from this weekend soon where I transform this window below into a piece of art that we will enjoy for a long time.

It may look like this is a pretty view but the window was actually very hard to see out and was driving us a bit crazy. It had actually been boarded up for quite a while before we moved in. 

Anyway, please like this post and follow our blog for updates on new posts. I’ll also be working on sharing some of our Little House On The Prairie Adventures too. We’ve been having such a great time using this in our homeschool so far.

Talk to you soon!