Tidy Brown Wren, bringing order to your nest

Our little playhouse is finally finished.   It's been a real labor of love and a challenge to keep the budget low and use what we already had on hand. Click on A Playhouse Story if you want to read about our little house.   This was how it started out (minus all of the junk we hauled out of it). And now I'm proud to show off our little playhouse all gussied up and ready for some visitors.   After all of the demo and painting, we only had a few more projects to finish up.  One of the projects was adding a new (old) window to brighten the interior a bit more.   Then the fabulous duo known as Son & Hubs put in a remnant of carpet that our oldest daughter was getting rid of.  She donated it to the cause. A coat of paint on the outside made the two non-matching windows look like they were meant to be together.  By the way, all of the old windows we use in our projects have either been found on the cu...

  One of the things I love about living at Brown Wren Acres is opportunity to teach my grandlittles about nature.    Our first little grandgal is fascinated by the newest group of chickens we raised from peeps.  She's not quite sure if she likes them, but she can't take her eyes off of them.  They are in our portable chicken coop that we move around the yard.  These Buff Orpingtons are almost ready to go into the big pen with the older hens.  They should be laying eggs in a week or two.   

Once upon a time a family bought a house that came with a wonderful little playhouse attached to the deck.  The youngest daughter in the family was married in the backyard of the home and used the playhouse as a backdrop for some of her wedding photos.  Read all about the wedding here . Alas, the family's children were already grown,  so the playhouse was used as a storage shed for all of the grown children's old toys.  You should also know that the mother of the family (aka "Honey")  had a tendency to hoard sentimental things.  She could not help herself but she is much improved now. It also housed folding chairs and Papa's  hammock - anything that didn't have a home somewhere else. It was dark, crowded, and spidery. So one day Honey had a great plan - have all of the grown children come over (dinner was promised) and insist they go through all of their old toys and get rid of any they didn't want to ...

Yes, we survived the kitchen remodel and I'm back to blogging again - I hope.  The kitchen has been done for about 6 weeks now but between my camera breaking and some glitches with loading photos into blogger, I've been an absentee blogger.  A big thanks to those of you who were concerned about me and checked in on me.   So. . . do you want a tour of the new space? A few months ago, my kitchen looked like this. . . And this. . . And this. . . And there was a window looking down from our upstairs bedroom. . . Then we decided to remodel and went through this for awhile. . . And some of this. . .  The room was finally starting to take shape.   And then we had this!! I wasn't sure what I was going to do about the island.  I really liked the functionality of the piece, but it was too busy and too white.  My new cabinets are a vanilla color and the white island was just stark. ...

Our kitchen remodel is almost done and I haven't posted photos in awhile.  We had a delay in finishing the project when the floor guy never showed up.  Our contractor had to bring in a different guy to complete the flooring with stain and 3 coats of finish.       Notice our new lighting - exterior lighting from Lowe's.  We put in three lights - one over each window.  We were still waiting for the cabinet maker to bring in our missing glass-front cabinet (see the empty space with phone wires sticking out on the left side?) The ceiling fan purchase was quite a saga.  One was ordered and paid for, order canceled, new one purchased, parts returned, ceiling fan installed, and finally hooked up.  Whew, done!  It is a Hunter ceiling fan hardwired to a wall switch but also has a remote control for fan speed and light control.  The flooring was finally finished and the glass-front cabinet installed.  Dust and f...