Neighborhood Building

While working on our own house is very important to us and brings us a tremendous amount of joy and satisfaction, we believe it's even more important to be involved with our neighborhood as well. Over the past few years we've worked to bring neighbors together to discuss neighborhood issues, set goals and improve the area, and we recently got a big help from the city.

Over the summer we applied for a Neighborhood MiniGrant from Kansas City, and were awarded just over $1,600 to purchase and install neighborhood signs! Using a logo Chris created for a neighborhood welcome packet a while back, he pulled together specs for two-sided metal signs and brackets. Over the next few months we'll have 8 signs produced and installed throughout our little 4-block neighborhood.

Here are the details on the signs from our proposal, and we'll show you more once they are made.

To me, the best part about this whole process is the great friend we have made along the way. We have very cool neighbors - people of various ages and from different background - and we love to get together not just to talk about the neighborhood, but to spend time together and support one another. We've now had two block parties, with between 70 and 100 attendees at each, four neighborhood clean-up days where we have helped some of our elderly neighbors with yard work, and lots of great social times. Here are some highlights of our times together.

Neighborhood Clean-up/Dumpster Days:

(isn't that tall guy in the middle handsome?)

 
Block Parties:

 
(with some pretty sweet activities)

Neighborhood Garage Sales

Impromptu barbeques

Sometimes we have some pretty cute guests stop by for a hot dog - our nieces maintain an "honorary" resident status.

Second Chances

During our time in our house, there are certain areas that have gotten a lot of attention (ahem, kitchen), and others that have been a bit neglected. Ok, a lot neglected. As in, we walk through them with hardly a second glance.

I'm talking about our dining room. When we moved in we brought a table we had purchased at our old rental house, my old upright piano and a floor length mirror from Ikea. We purchased a new chandelier, small china cabinet and a cheap jute rug and called it good enough.

Dining room before.

And it was fine. But not great. And over the past few months, I've been working on how to improve it. My main issues are:

• The table is not the right size/shape for the room. We bought it in our rental home in a much more square dining room. It's fine when it's small (like above) but it expands widthwise, not lengthwise, and quickly becomes too wide for our room. 

• The general color palette is a bit blah. I love all the woodwork, and I love the soothing wall color (baguette from Sherwin Williams), but that all together with the brown rug was too much. 

And that is my first culprit - the brown rug. So I've been browsing lots of different patterned rugs - various dhurrie and kilim style pieces. And as I was doing that, my sister decided that she did not like the rug she had recently purchased from Ikea for her fireplace area.

Fate, right?

 
Dining room with new rug.

She offered me the rug, and I took it, never thinking it would work. The rugs I had been browsing had larger patterns, arranged in concentric rectangles rather than lines like this one. But as soon as I laid it out in the dining room, I was in love.

First, the shape. I thought I was doing a good thing when I purchased a round rug in this room, but the rectangle opens up the sides and ends of the room, and frames the table area perfectly.

But more importantly, the colors! Oh the colors. They bring so much more excitement to the room, and tie in really well with the rest of the main floor. 

By the way, did you notice the beautiful orchid on my table? A gift from my mother-in-law this Thanksgiving. Isn't it beautiful? I consider orchids a challenge - they are reluctant rebloomers but I won't give up. Fortunately this one came already covered with beautiful flowers.

 But that's enough about that. This rug, which cost me exactly $0 (plus a $15 rug pad that I just ordered on Amazon) has made me like our dining room again. Not to say that there won't be future changes - in fact, I may have been browsing a few items recently . . . .

I'm holding out though. I'd love for our "forever" dining furniture to be at least some antiques, so I'm enjoying watching Craigslist and browsing local flea markets and antique malls.

But that doesn't mean I can't have some fun in the meantime, right? In fact, I have another small upgrade coming in the next few weeks, but you'll have to wait to hear about it.

Kitchn Feature

What a fun week for our little blog - the cutting board Chris made to fit my farmhouse sink was featured on Kitchn, a great national blog that I very much enjoy! We have been a bit quiet this season, but have some big fun things coming up so stay tuned.