This photo was submitted to the I Heart Faces photo challenge – www.iheartfaces.com

Doesn’t the look on his face say happiness?  All I know is that Nathan could not stop talking about his visit to see my friend’s chickens, and he has asked just a “few” times to go back. 

So, even though Mark agreed that a big dog is not good for city and indoor living, here we are with a dog that will get big, will stay in the house, and will get to roam the little box of our city yard.  Ugh.  How did this happen?  :)

 I lost, but at least the kiddos and Mark are happy.  :)

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Our attic was one of the areas that totally convinced us to buy our house. In the house I grew up in, the attic could be reached through a pull down door in the ceiling. When my parents stored stuff in there, you knew it wasn’t coming out for a LOOOONG time because the access space was over our stairs. Not easy to get to. That’s why I thought it was so incredibly cool that our attic had stairs going up to it.

Mark and I have always thrown around the idea of trying to fix up the attic space, but we knew the cost of fixing it up might be more than it was worth. We started off by painting the area to make it seem cleaner and brighter. Eventually we moved the train table and Geo Trax up there. The kids loved it but could realistically only play up there during fall and spring. Summer…too hot. Winter…too cold. The more we thought about it, though, the more we realized that this area was the perfect hang-out spot for our family.

Mark put so much work into it, and we are happy to say that this is now our favorite spot in the house.

The train table used to be the first thing people saw when coming up the stairs.

Now, we have a Craigslist (awesome deal) table where we can play cards.  Mark also put in a larger window and HVAC unit.  The big window is what allowed us to get our furniture into the house!

Can’t forget a picture of Mark on the lift.  Hard to tell it’s 3 stories up!  Yikes!

Turn to the left, and it used to be an open space with a ventilation piece sticking up from the floor.

We first had foam insulation put in.

Now we have the TV (sitting on a low entertainment center that Mark made) and two queen-sized sleeper sofas.

Keep turning left, and there is a small area that I was hoping could be a newborn studio area. Before, it was the dollhouse and GeoTrax area.  (Aw, look how little my guys were!)

Since we couldn’t do wood floors up in the attic, I’m not so sure the studio idea will work out.  If not, we can have the race cars in this area eventually.

Keep turning left, and you’ll find what used to be more junk laying around.

Now, the kids have a proper train table.  We have to paint it before we set up the trains.  Fortunately, it works out great for race cars too.  :)

Keep turning left, and we’re back where we started.

Photo with the Mosers (our cousins).

Now, I just need to spice it up with a few decorations.  There are very few options for wall art since we don’t have many straight walls.  We kept the knee walls short to maximize space.  Anyway, we’re really happy with how it turned out and were surprised how much space there really was to work with.

What I really enjoyed about the video (other than getting to see myself skinny) was seeing and hearing Grandma June.

What makes me cringe is my talk about buying pink curtains. What in the world was I thinking?  Good thing Mark never let that happen.  And what was with the man coat I was wearing?  Hey, younger Andrea, wear something more flattering while you have that figure!

Oh, it’s also fun to see my brother Jon so young!

Hopefully soon, I can do a before-and-after video.  (Not that we’re done, but we sure are a whole lot closer!)

Messy face, bad lighting, cluttered background, adorable expression!

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It all started a couple years ago when Mark and I got to thinking about what could be behind these stairs:

Mark had heard before that sometimes when people built homes, they would attach a gold coin under the first stair for good luck.  We figured, if nothing else, that there was some unused space under those stairs so we might as well open them up to see.

No coin…but we gained storage space.  That is, until our kids got a little older and we started thinking…

Maybe we could sweep it out a bit.  Maybe a nice coat of paint.  Since we did that, we might as well add carpet.  Now it’s looking kind of cool….rope lights, strobe light, black light, t.v., dvd player….Okay, things got a bit out of hand.  :)

To make it even cooler, we wanted to make sure that the entrance (in the dining room closet) wasn’t instantly obvious. Mark set about designing a door that looked like a regular part of the back of the closet.

Not long after this, Mark’s wheels started turning again.  In one of the bedrooms we had a “little door”.  It looked really out of place and was basically an access to a small space under our attic stairs.  Mark became determined to disguise this door and came up with the “bookcase plan”:

We threw some carpet and a light in there and called it a day.  Soon we’ll fix up the walls.  On some we’ll put chalkboard paint, and the others will have dry erase.  There’s enough space in there for Ben to set up his trains and keep the mess out of his bedroom.

So, that was it, UNTIL….

the-balcony-turned-into-a-bathroom remodeling project.  Mark had to tear out quite a bit of lathe and plaster only to discover an opening that was above our front porch.  We kind of shrugged it off at first figuring the shower would block that space anyway.  After observing how roomy it was, we did a little more assessment of the space and realized that part of the space went up against the back of Nathan’s closet.  Secret room #3 was born:

This room will house Nathan’s lego table and will hopefully contain the Lego pieces out of site.

By this time, we were hooked.  We had already planned a secret room for the attic specially made for Jordyn.  (Because, alas, the poor girl was the only child without a secret room attached to her bedroom.)  We had a space that was cut off from the rest of the attic by the stairs.  Since it was awkward to reach anyway, we came up with plans for secret room #4:

So, what do our kids think about these playrooms?  They don’t think much about it at all!  They are so used to them that it doesn’t seem like anything unusual.  In fact, with our first secret room, we forgot to tell our babysitter about it.  She went into the kitchen to fix dinner for the kids.  When she went to call them to eat, she could hear them but couldn’t find them.  Oops!  Need to add that little tidbit to the babysitter notes.  :)

We may be a bit quirky, but I would have thought this was the most AWESOME thing ever if I had something like this as a child.