Slow Goodbyes: The Guest Room

Can you handle one more goodbye in our house-tour goodbyes?

Today I bid a fond farewell to our guest room. I was so excited to have a guest room...a PROPER guest room...when we moved to Kokomo. We had one at our Marion house, but the awkward layout of the house meant that it didn't always provide maximum privacy for the guests. Of course, we also very rarely had guests when we lived in Marion, so it all worked out. But in Kokomo, we had a wonderful, dedicated space for our guests, and they even had their very own bathroom right next to the bedroom. (And we did have guests several times!)

Both of these rooms received an update during quarantine, so they're shiny and new for the new owners!

* I'm pretty sure our first guest ever in this room was my sister, when she flew out to surprise Mom for her 80th birthday party!

* I'm also pretty sure if I start naming all the actual names, I'll end up forgetting key visitors who stayed in the room, and that would be bad. But we had many overnight guests in the four years we were here, and we loved fixing up the space for each of them!

* This was also the unofficial play and nap room whenever the kids came to visit. They thought it was great fun to hide out in there and pull all the books off the shelf and read - or all the blocks out to build!

And of course, this was Ryan's moms home base when she lived with us after surgery, and she LOVED living in that room. (This is a picture I took of her with her dad, when he came to visit her on his birthday that year. It's one of my favorite pictures of them both.)

In our 2020 makeover of the room, it became my beloved Anne of Green Gables hideaway, and Ryan surprised me with an Anne themed birthday party in there for my quarantine birthday this year!

I am absolutely recreating my Anne of Green Gables hideaway in our new home! It was the first room I packed up, so I haven't seen any of it for quite a while. It will be rather like Christmas when I get to unpacking those boxes! :)

I think it's extra special to have so many wonderful memories from a guest room. I'm actually really happy we took the time to be a guest in our own home before we moved. (If you have a guest room - you really should try it sometime!)

I'm so glad we had this dedicated space to share with friends and family, and I'm glad we have a dedicated space once again!

Thanks, too, for taking this little memory walk with me. I feel like I've given our house a proper farewell, so when it's time to actually say the last goodbye, I'll be ready!

Slow Goodbyes: The Sun Porch

In my tour of slow goodbyes to our Kokomo house, I'm spending today saying goodbye to the room where we spent the most time and least time - simultaneously.

How, you might ask?

Well, it's the newest room in our house, so we've spent less time there proportionately speaking, but once the room showed up on the back of our house, we spent a lot of time there. It made all the difference in the house, actually!

When we moved into the house, there was a slab outside the sliding glass door, and it had a privacy fence around two sides of it. When we bought the house, it felt really private. But it didn't take long for privacy to feel a bit prison-ish. The space was so unusable. With no shade back there, it was so hard to use the space on sunny days. It was never out of the sun, and in the heat of Indiana summers, it was downright unbearable.

So we saved and last summer, we were able to add the sun porch. We couldn't afford a four season room, so we got a three season one and tried to make it as livable as we could (year round) by adding a heater for the winter. We had plans to add a portable air-conditioner this summer, but you know - moving. :) 

Even though we only used the room less than a year, we loved it, and we think it was always meant to be part of the house. It definitely completes it.

See?

We made four years' worth of memories in this space in the few months we enjoyed it.

We started out with my mom's birthday lunch - when it was about a day old.

And then there was Christmas morning out there:

And just Christmas in general, when I decorated the place like a tree farm. (It was my favorite.)

We had our Easter lunch out there:

And Ryan's little quarantine birthday party!

And our indoor camping trip...

Not to mention all the daily life we enjoyed out here - especially in the mornings and evenings:

Yes, this little room was so good to us, and I'm so thankful we used it to the full while we were here. It was the first reaction of some, when they heard about our move, to say, "But you just added that room!" We did, and we will miss it. And we enjoyed it. And the new owners LOVE IT. This little square of space has just begun to live. 

We won't have a space like this in our new living area, and that will be strange and different. But it's also okay! We will enjoy the outdoor space beyond our walls and the chance to live small town life. I'm really excited about it already!

Meanwhile, thank you, little sun porch, for being a great space for us and holding close so many memories in such a short time!

Slow Goodbyes: The Master Bedroom

Well, after I started writing this post, I realized I don't have a ton to say on this one! (And yet you'll finish reading and say, Goodness she says a lot for a girl who has nothing to say.)

I feel like our master bedroom was this giant box of decorating potential that never saw its finest moment.

I find it fascinating that when I watch all the house shows on TV, the master bedroom is always this huge source of discussion for people. They have very specific master bedroom/bathroom needs, and if the place is too small or the bathroom doesn't have a car wash inside, they just can't even with the house. We basically just needed a place to park the bed and take a shower. I'm sure it was different for us because we don't have kids. We didn't need the master to be a place where we could also retreat for privacy or stash a home office or workout equipment.

So in our house, the master was a HUGE room that we didn't really have enough furniture to fill, even though we had a king sized bed and two end tables and a dresser and a bookcase...you get the idea. We did have a big walk-in closet, but we don't have a ton of clothes. And the bathroom was actually fairly small as master bathrooms go. It didn't even have a double sink!

But it worked splendidly for our needs. We were able to rest well in there every night, and that's really what matters most.

* One of my favorite things about our master was the huge window that ran along one wall. It had vertical blinds and white sheer curtains, so even though we never fully opened up everything (for privacy), the room was always flooded with amazing light. It had a wide ledge on it, so Braeya enjoyed crawling up in there and surveying the yard. (Or as you see in the photo below - sprawling out on the floor.)

* We really didn't do a ton to this room in the time we lived there. We did have to replace the carpet when we replaced it throughout the house. And we painted two of the walls a light blue, leaving the other two the tan they were when we moved in. It gave the room a cool, beachy feel, and that worked for us. We pretty much replicated the look we had in our Marion house - same bedding and pillows and all that.

* I did love my gallery wall over to the side. I don't know if I'll ever do a gallery wall again, but I am glad I can say I did it once in my life and I enjoyed it. It was filled with a hodge-podge of art and pictures that represented us.

* We did do one last project in here during quarantine: we took down the closet door (which swung inward and made it hard to open dresser drawers inside) and replaced it with a barn door. We LOVED the way it looked and had plans to do the same thing with the bathroom door when we redid that...except we never got to it.

We loved our master. It really was a wonderful retreat for us, and we appreciated the chance to have a whole suite on one side of the house where we could go if we had guests spending the night. They could have their side of the house and we could have ours, and everyone had privacy! (Blessings on the inventor of the split floor plan!)

We did a lot of talking and dreaming and praying in this room - as we fell asleep at night and woke up on lazy Saturday mornings.

But other than that, we honestly didn't spend a lot of time in this room! It wasn't a hangout spot for us. So that makes story time pretty short, doesn't it?

In fact, the only big story I can think of to tell you is that when Ryan's mom lived with us for that short time after her surgery, I used to hide in the closet to eat dessert. She wasn't supposed to have desserts because she had medication-induced blood sugar issues. But if she knew about the dessert, I couldn't keep her out of it. So I would hide all the bad/good stuff in our closet and sit in there to eat it!

But even that is a sweet memory (literally) from this house that I will always carry with me.

The new owners of the house are SO EXCITED about a big master retreat and will honestly probably get far more daily life out of this room than we did. I'm excited for them! Our new master will be much smaller - and that's okay, too! We actually decided to downsize to a Queen to make it a little less crowded. We'll still have plenty of room for the dreaming and talking and praying - and maybe even a little more sleep than we've had before? Maybe not?

Slow Goodbyes: The Office

I'm continuing my little tour through our house, saying goodbye one room at a time. Thanks for trucking along with me as I've gone through some memories and appreciated the house we're leaving behind.

Today I'm saying goodbye to our cute little home office. Because I'm a writer, I love having an office at home where I can go to be creative. I can store all my inspiration books in there and get away from the other parts of life to do my writing work. In our Marion house, our office was one of the upstairs spare bedrooms, and though it was small, it was plenty big enough for creativity!

Our Kokomo house has three bedrooms, so when we moved in, Ryan asked which bedroom I wanted for the office. I chose the one at the front of the house, because it looked out over the beautiful Bradford Pear tree that blossomed all white and lovely every spring.

I loved that view - even in the winter when the tree was bare and the ground white.

Though this room didn't undergo the most dramatic change of the whole house, we did change it up quite a bit from when we first saw it.

* We removed the wallpaper border, which was very nearly my undoing. I really, really, really hate removing wallpaper, and the previous owners did love their border!

* I painted the walls a bright yellow, because we'd had a yellow room in our old home, and I loved the cheeriness of it.

* We also painted the bookshelves Dad built for me at the Marion house. They had just been plain wood after he built them, but before we put them together for this room, I painted them white.

* Originally we left the carpet, but we eventually changed it out for laminate flooring, and that was much more office-chair friendly.

In our Marion house, we had a proper dining room, but we only had an eat-in kitchen here in Kokomo, so we moved the dining room table into the office and used that as a desk for two the whole time we lived here. It has worked splendidly!

Over the four years we've lived here, I have made a few more changes along the way - including color-coding all my nonfiction books to make for a pretty book wall.

But oh, what a delightful place this has been!

* In this space, I put together the second book I published - Be Still: Learning to Know He is God. I had actually written the bulk of the manuscript years ago, but I put it together as a published book shortly after we moved here!

* I wrote dozens of other things in this room, too - from more book material (not yet published) to talks that I've given at speaking events to curriculum and more! The room did not disappoint in being a place where I could retreat to create! Though I am also known to write in other rooms of the house, having an office dedicated just for that was such a blessing.

* Since I mentioned the curriculum, I will add that I wrote a series of lessons that I taught on public speaking - and a series I wrote about writing your own life story. I've been able to teach and share both, and I love it that they were born in this room!

* Of course the majority of our Spill the Beans episodes took place in this room. We had a little podcasting table over to the side where we created those podcasts every single week for over 200 weeks! (We've had a lot of you tell us you miss it, and we miss it too! We've also had a lot of you ask if we will ever do it again, and our answer is...we don't know! We did not get rid of our equipment, and we're open to doing it again, but right now the Lord has us putting our focus on other things instead!)  You can still listen to old episodes (link is on the left here) if you want!

* For a while, I also had a second podcast called The Conversation Cafe, and it focused more on interviewing others. I recorded all those in here as well!

* One summer, I taught some reading classes to one of my friends' daughters, and this room became my classroom. I was a total nerd about it, writing out lesson plans and the whole bit. I would be the classic homeschooling mom if we had kids, and I know it! I loved teaching those classes!

* I did hours of research, studying, dreaming, crafting, and planning in this room - far more than I probably even know I did! And I rehearsed talks in here. I joke that my office is the most evangelized room in our entire house, because I have passionately prepped some talks in there! Oh! And during quarantine, I also did a whole talk from this room - over Zoom!

* And speaking of Zoom (and quarantine), I also did quite a bit of work for the church from this space this year.

Yes, this room was the birthplace of many special things in the four years we lived here. I am so grateful for that for the majority of those years, I got to spend nearly all my daytime hours in this room. It was the perfect home office for me and was such a blessing.

It will go back to being a bedroom now, providing a birthplace of hopes, dreams, and memories for a couple of kids who have all of life looming in front of them. I'm excited for them. I'm excited for it to be a place they can look back on as a place of creativity and joy and life. I'm excited for the Lord to plant dreams in their hearts like He planted some in mine, and I know He will.

I'm also excited that this room is entirely moving-friendly for me. All the books have been packed away in order of shelving (nerd!!!) and Ryan has taken apart my beloved shelves so he can reinstall them in our next home. Our table will go back to being an actual eating table, but we've ordered the next version of our desk and when it arrives, we'll have a new spot to create!

Our new home will have enough bedrooms for me to designate one as a home office, and we'll put all these elements back together there. I'll be working full time with Ryan now, so days on end of writing may not happen in the same way, but I will still write. I can't not write. I'll still be crafting talks and studies and doing whatever God leads me to do!

And I'll always be grateful for the little yellow office where God allowed me to live, work, and create.

The Shafferland Shuffle

What a week it has been! More goodbyes, more packing, more planning...and in all of it, moving a step closer to...well...moving!

* Last Sunday we experienced our first pandemic communion. We used individually packed servings and while it wasn't the same as normal, it was nice to get to at least participate! I worked on some scrapbooking that afternoon, and the appraiser came to see the house in the late afternoon. (Our appraisal stories are mind-boggling. Maybe someday I'll tell you about it.) We celebrated the completion of that step by taking our last walk to the ice cream shop (here) for a treat!

* We got up super early Monday morning to unload the attic before it got too hot. (Indiana has been crazy hot and humid all week long.) We sorted through all the stuff we had in storage, got rid of some of it, and rehomed some of it into temporary storage until we can make more well-thought-out decisions. That evening, my parents took us to Cracker Barrel for dinner! Ryan was so excited about the dish he got. It's new on the menu, and he was a big fan.

* Tuesday, we worked together all. day. long. to pack our kitchen - or at least as much of it as we could. We kept out the things we'll need in the short term. It was quite an exhausting project. Together with the office, it probably tied for most time-consuming. After dinner that evening, our friends John and Sandee came over to hear more about our new adventure, pray for us, and say goodbye!

* Wednesday morning we got up early and drove down near Indianapolis to meet up with our friends Mark and Lynnette, who were passing through the area. We met at a coffee shop - and get this! Their coffee machine was broken! Poor them! We still had a great breakfast, though! When we came home, we tried to work on getting Braeya to be excited about her moving crate. (She played with it more than we thought she might.) And we kept packing, of course.

* We had to get physicals for our new job, so that was Thursday morning's project. Here's a funny for you! I was peeking at the doctor's notes after he was done and got rather offended that he wrote down that I had a soft abdomen. I mean there are some things that may be true, but you don't have to put them IN WRITING! Ryan had to explain to me that it wasn't a judgment on my recent lapse in working out, but in healthcare speak, it's a good thing. I'm glad for that, but come on. In other news, I picked my first tomato from our plants that day! (They're planted in pots, so they'll come with us.) And we said goodbye to Phoebe that night. That's a story for another day, but oh my GOODNESS. That has been my ugliest cry yet.

* It rained quite a bit here Friday morning, and Ryan had fun taking pictures of the tomato plants after that was over. He's so good. We did more packing, and Braeya did more napping. We had lunch with Ryan's family on his dad's side that day - saying our goodbyes to them. And while we were out and about, we filmed a short video at church! One last hurrah.

* Yesterday was a busy day in Shafferland. I'm sure it will shock you to know it involved more packing! :) It also involved hanging out with Braeya and doing some photos around the house - kind of an end-of-season photo shoot before we get too busy to do one!