Spring Parade of Homes

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Our Spring Parade of Homes is currently going on in Sioux Falls and man o man - am I glad we went, for a few reasons.  This is cheap entertainment for us.  The kids pretty much thought touring these homes was the best thing ever.  We only had an evening to spare so that gave us time to tour 6 houses and the kids were begging to go to more.  This doesn't surprise me as HGTV is Emma's new favorite network to watch and she just brought a piece of paper home from school that said she wanted to be a builder when she grows up.  My heart was literally in a puddle on the floor when I read that.

So here are a ton of photos of some of the amazing things we got to see.  Still can't believe that people get to actually live in these homes that look like they are straight from the pages of a magazine - or Pinterest.

House #1 built by C-Lemme Companies:

Brent works for the company that built these cabinets, so there's a pretty high likelihood that he helped build the cabinet doors.

House #2 also built by C-Lemme Companies.  

Love the finish they applied to the sliding barn door.

Can't decide what's to love more here - the backsplash or the gray cabinetry and corbels.

Ahhh....reclaimed wood mantel?  Yes, please.

House #3 built by Zome's Construction, Inc.  This next house stole my heart and a little of my soul.

This is the master bedroom CEILING!

I wish I would have recorded the kids' reaction when we walked into this bathroom that is the size of our living room and had a bathtub inside of the shower.  Priceless.

This is by far the most beautiful bed I have ever seen.

Look closely at the back wall of the stairwell - it is covered in white tongue & groove paneling.

This is the bathroom in one of the children's bedrooms upstairs.

Beautiful light fixtures were everywhere you turned.

That's a little kids playhouse built in under the stairs.

I couldn't take a great picture of the living room and kitchen because there were too many people milling around, but I did manage this one on the way out the door.  That's reclaimed wood up inside the coffered ceiling.

House #4 built by Mettler Construction:

How To Build Flower Boxes

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A year ago, when Brent and I began planning our workshop, I could already visualize sweet little flower boxes on it.  Knowing there were a ton of other details that needed to come first, we put off building them...until THIS WEEKEND!  We wanted something a little different than the standard white boxes with brackets you see everywhere, so here's what we came up with.

If you want to build some for yourself, you'll need about 3 1x4's per box, which should be about $15 worth of lumber.  Brent ripped the 1x4's down into strips.

Here's an important step, I used an orbital sander to round off the edges of all the front and side pieces to create grooves.

If I hadn't rounded off the edges (Brent says this is called "breaking the edge"), the fronts and sides would look flat.

 I'm not going to provide any exact measurements because all of the dimensions can be cut to accommodate whatever width you need, depending on your window size.

After attaching the fronts and sides to the inside support pieces, Brent cut a piece to act as the bottom of the flower box.  You can use a 1x8 cut to size or a couple 1x4 pieces next to each other.

Then cut a piece to size for the back and attach to the interior supports.

I wanted to add some additional detail to give the flower boxes a more substantial feel.  The piece around the top is some 1x4 ripped into about a 1 inch width.  The bottom piece is 1x4 cut at around 2 inches wide.  That's the nice part about designing these flower boxes, you can completely customize all of the measurements and details to suit your taste.

At this stage, I sanded everything again with the orbital sander, making sure to round off all of the hard edges.  I also used a sanding block to get into the tight areas.  

Deciding how to finish them was the tricky part.  I always assumed I would paint them white to match the flower boxes on the front of our house, but after seeing this picture on Pinterest, I definitely wanted to stain them!  I applied two coats of American Walnut stain (one didn't get them as dark as I wanted) and three coats of spar varnish.

I even brushed three coats of spar varnish on the insides of the flower boxes to protect the wood from all of the moisture.

Lucky for me, I got to get up at 7:15 on Mother's Day morning to start applying the coats of varnish!  The coats dry really quickly, so by noon, they were all done and ready for flowers.  We lined the boxes with landscape fabric to prevent dirt from seeping out the fronts and sides.

 To hang them on the workshop, we bought these galvanized L brackets.  Make sure you don't buy brackets made of zinc or they will rust out.

I'm so happy that we went with the stained flower boxes - I think the color of the boxes ties the mulch color (looks like we need to add more mulch!) and roof color all together.  

 The kids and I also had time to put down new mulch in the front gardens and plant the flower boxes under the two large windows.  Emma, Owen and I essentially spent the entire weekend digging in the dirt - which made for a PERFECT Mother's Day weekend!