Tag Archives: new home

Bedrooms- Part 2

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Time for this week’s installment from 4 Moms, 35 Kids….

Today, we’re sharing the second half of the bedroom posts for 4 Moms, 35 Kids–

Since we moved into this house, we really haven’t done a lot with our bedrooms (trust me, we’ve had enough to keep us busy in other rooms.! )

The girl’s room is beautiful, but dark. For the short term, we would like to paint the paneling.

Emma and Jon both sleep on trundles their Papa made (when they don’t crawl into bed with someone else, LOL). They are on wheels and easy for them to pull out from under the bunk beds. They are made to fit a crib mattress.

The big boys share a room with the office. I can’t explain how long this room is, but it’s odd, to say the least. It would easily fit two queen size beds with dressers, etc. Our very next project is to finish out one of the rooms in the basement for these boys. This room will become our pantry/laundry area.

Thank you, for visiting! We’ve made some great, new online friends during this series. I hope you’ll visit back again soon.

Kitchen/Dining Room

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4 Moms, 35 Kids is hosting another blog carnival. It’s been fun to scroll through the other family homes. It’s a great way to pick up ideas and it’s just plain fun to see how other larger families live.

It’s time for another installment of our home…

Quite honestly, I’ve been dreading the kitchen/dining room post from 4 Moms, 35 Kids- but, only because our home is “in transition”.

When we purchased this home in January, it was actually a 3 bedroom with an attached apartment.

Little by little, we are making it all one big house- we finished the living room first (scroll down to see pictures).

Next, we’ll be finishing out one of the downstairs bedrooms for our bigger boys.

For now, this is what we have:

Joshua, making biscuits in our current kitchen-

Courtney, is making me a cup of cocoa (yummy!)-

My favorite kitchen pictures… I want to decorate with some of these colors.

My favorite part of the kitchen…the prayer board. We love praying over families–(if you have a picture you would like to send along, drop me an email!). I’m collecting them as I unpack.

I hope at some point to have several frames of pics to hang along our dining room walls.

This kitchen will eventually become a bedroom with steps to the side that lead to the attic.

What is now the dining room used to be an exterior porch.

You gotta love this floor! Courtney says it makes her feel motion sick when she looks at the picture. *Smile* Trust me, you get the same feeling in person.

This is currently the family room. When we are finished with our home, this will actually be the kitchen and the family room will be located where the dining room is currently.

Have I confused you yet?

This is the dining room:

We are eating at two folding tables for now. When we finish the new dining room, Paul plans on building a table large enough to seat us all– for now this works great!

We do change the table arrangement on Sunday when the church folks come over for fellowship lunch.


Our little school shelf for books used every day.

This is the view out the dining room window, which I love.


This is the “apartment kitchen” It’s now being used for our freezers and food storage.


Eventually, we’re opening this wall completely:

and this wall:

to look like this wall (which a friend did for us when we moved in):

to create our dining room. It will be just between the family room and the kitchen. (My daughter reminded me, when we move in- this floor was plywood. It had mostly been painted. All of it unless you moved the rugs. We stayed up one night and rolled the floor with blue paint and then sponged it with white and a lighter blue. Oddly enough, it looks pretty decent and will definitely work until we make it to these rooms for the re-vamp.)

I’ve had several ladies asking when we were going to post pictures…I’ve warned you it was going to be interesting!

Paul and I enjoy the building projects, but I’ll admit I’ll be glad when we’re a little further along in the process. I think it will be nice once it’s done– but, that’s sure to be a while off!

Paul reminds me of an old Chinese Proverb:

“Man finish house, man die.”

Enough said. *smile*

Thank you so much for visiting our place! We like to think that there are no strangers, just friends we haven’t yet met.

With love,

4 Moms, 35 Kids

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When Kimberly, over at Life in a Shoe mentioned that they were hosting a linky today to show how big families live, I thought “this would be fun!”….and I was hoping that some of you ladies might have some suggestions on decorating/organizing things here.

We’re a family of twelve (my husband Paul and I have six sons and four daughters).

We’ve actually just moved from here (want to buy a mobile home?):


Being a family of twelve in a single-wide mobile home was another story by itself!

to here:

We live in a small, rural town in Alabama.

My favorite spot at this house:

The front porch is 80 ft long. I’ve placed some of our existing furniture on the porch, but honestly, it looks odd because the porch is so long. Anyone have any ideas for pulling it together??

I do love our ferns, and I love that porch swing…it’s the other places where I’m needing assistance.

The story of how we bought this house is actually amazing, but, I’ll save that for another time. For now, just know that we thought we would never find a house that could hold all of us, much less afford one. God is so much bigger than we expect, you know?


This is a swing frame that was left in the front yard…I’m going to place some swings for our younger children here.

In any case, we still have A LOT of work to do here. We’ve been here about six months.

These are remnants of a recent craft project (I still want to try coloring onesies for the baby….but again, another post for another time!):

This is a lake house, but for now, the lake has been drained to make it deeper.

When we moved here, there were beautiful bulbs, pear trees, and this lovely fig tree:

Chickens, chickens and more chickens!! (Mental note to self, DON’T wear flip-flops while taking pics of the chickens!! They will NOT leave my toes alone!) :


Our baby rooster!

Sunflowers in the garden:

Another square foot box:

I’m sparing you the in-ground garden. It’s a shame. Hopefully, we can show it some much needed attention this week.

We have about five acres. When we purchased this house, it was left FULL of more random stuff that I can even describe. In June alone, we LITERALLY removed 2 tons of trash from the basement alone.

Back yard swing that I hope to paint and restore. It would be nice to have a larger seating area here!

We are thankful for God’s wonderful provision. Each day, we find something new about this house that we love!

That said, this house is a work in progress, and probably will be for months to come!

If you have ideas, I would love to hear them!!

Black Bear

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We were *shocked* when a friend wrote to tell me her son saw a black bear sitting in the road that leads past our home.

I didn’t know we had bear here!

I found this great website and phoned to ask questions. The gentleman told me there have been black bear here for years. Depending on the person you ask, some have never seen a bear and don’t know they are here and others say “oh yeah, there are bear”.

They generally have a report filed every 4-5 years.

Black bear in Alabama are generally shy and stay off, away from humans.

It’s true, you learn something new everyday…today is no exception for me!

Pics of the Garden

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So much of our time has been spent inside, but we have managed a minute here or there to begin establishing our garden.

We had a few existing fruit trees when we moved in, but since, we’ve planted 14 more, 4 blueberries and have started the task of building and planting square foot beds.


random chick (well, not quite a chick anymore!)


Eggplant- obviously being munched by some little critter..but growing, just the same!



My favorite this year- acorn squash.


Another random chick…


The turkeys are much fun to watch…they are like little pets.


New square foot beds Joshua and Paul built


The arbor Joshua has been building along with our raspberry and blackberry trellis


Muscadines growing up the arbor walls- we transplanted them from other parts of the yard where they grow wild.

June 19, 2010

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Warmer days mean we can finally make some of the various things left in this house work for us!

We decided to set up a yard sale (our first ever!). A few friends brought their children over to help and this is the result:

Believe it or not, almost everything here came from just three rooms.

Needless to say, we’re glad to see it go!

I think my favorite is this:

It still has all it’s original feet and the soap dish- so beautiful!

I keep mentioning that we’re busy just cleaning out. After five months of just trying to empty what was left here, this is still our basement:

At some point, I’ll have to post the “before” pics. There were literally paths cut through so many things just stacked and stacked.

We have taken literally tons of trash to the county dump and to the recycling center. We have had almost weekly visits from the thrift store- the smallest load having been 22 boxes.

It’s unbelievable what has been removed from this house- and we only have the basement and the backyard left.

This morning, this is the trash stack:

This is the metal recycling stack: