3/14/2019 1 Comment Where I've BeenHello friends! I've been kind of MIA for a while, let me tell you why! I GOT MARRIED! So many people gave me a hard time about building a house so young, saying, "You'll get this house finished and the perfect guy will come along to sweep you off your feet & you'll have to move!". Little did I know they were right! Haha! Right as we got the finishing touches done, I met Samuel. (God has some crazy timing!) We started dating in August, were engaged in May, and then married the following August! I was able to live there off and on for a few months before we got married but mostly spent my time there packing everything up that I felt I had just moved in. (Which is why I never posted "finished" pictures, before I could get all of my decor put in how I wanted, I was already taking it back down to box up!). I would've loved for us to move into my tiny house but between him working for his family & raising cattle, that was nearly impossible. Unfortunately, the dimensions of the house made it difficult to be moved too. I had to leave that behind after working on it for 3 years. I'm a little sad about it but now my parents have a neat guest house & I've got a place to stay when we go visit my parents. I'm trying to convince them to turn it into an Air B&B (how cool would that be?!). Even though I won't be able to live there like I had planned, what a great experience it was! I feel like I learned a lot from it & it was a great investment for a 17 year old! I was able to own my own home by 20! I got to spend a lot of time with my family working on it too & made a lot of great memories out there! With my home looking like church house, I wanted to incorporate it into my wedding. My parents also built a huge barn house (they are extremely talented and need to be on HGTV) which I thought looked amazing and would be PERFECT for a wedding venue for me & Samuel! I'm very lucky to have parents that are the best at DIY projects because most of my wedding decor we made ourselves! Here's a few pictures we have of our wedding day with the tiny house... Here's a few pictures featuring the barn house also... That being said, there will be no more tiny house updates on this site.
I appreciate everyone who has taken the time to read my posts. I do really enjoy writing, so I have made a separate blog for that. We recently decided to start a farm (cows, goats, chickens, ducks, a big garden, all of the works!) & we are turning an existing metal shop with a dirt floor into our next home. It will be modern farmhouse style too, so I will post a little about that as well. (Always got to have a project!) Here's the link to that: HerrmannHomestead.weebly.com If you have questions about the tiny house or barn house I'll still be happy to answer them, just visit the CONTACT ME section of the home page! :) I'm very happy to be blessed with such an amazing husband and to have a family who was willing to spend countless hours working on my tiny house, making it the perfect home for me! (Even if I only lived there for a few months lol sorry mom) Thanks again for all of your support! -Mikayla
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3/2/2018 0 Comments The Coffee Bar One of my favorite parts of the house is my coffee bar. I have seen many different ideas for DIY coffee bars on pinterest and I absolutely LOVE them! Being the coffee lover that I am, I decided to make my own! When our business moved, my boss asked if there was anything we would like to keep from the old office, I chose this antique cabinet. At the time, it looked pretty rough. It had a lot of stains and dents but I saw great potential for being a cute coffee bar for my house! So I took it home, took the glass off, and stained the top of it with Jacobean wood stain from Lowes. {LOVE THIS STUFF! Click HERE to check it out!} Then I painted the cabinet part white and distressed it. A while back, our neighbors were tearing down their old barn and they let me have a few pieces of wood which I ended up using to make my nightstand upstairs & this "Coffee" sign I painted. I wanted to keep the original color of the wood but liven it up a little without staining it. I applied coconut oil to the wood for the sign before painting it and it turned out really well! I found the perfect size hooks for it at an antique shop in Branson, Missouri. I love the end result! Click on the images below to shop what's on my coffee bar!
12/18/2017 2 Comments Oh, Christmas Tree!With Christmas quickly approching I wanted to share a few (more recent) pictures of my house. Even though I'm not fully finished with it, I still wanted to decorate it for the holidays! If you've read some of my earlier posts, you probably already know I love going to garage sales. Most of the decor in my house came from garage sales!
After much thought and violently shaking the tree, the lights came on! It was a Christmas miracle! haha! I got most of my tree decor from Target and bought my garland from Hobby Lobby. (I got 18ft. of garland for $5!!) I didn't realize how time consuming Christmas decorating was until I owned my own home but it was still a ton of fun! I look forward to decorating for many more holidays in my tiny home. I plan on posting more updates & pictures soon. I'm currently working on building a coffee bar, so if all goes well you'll be seeing pictures of that in the near future! I hope you all have a very Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year! -Mikayla 11/29/2017 0 Comments Texture, Tile, & Trim, OH MY!Once we finished putting up sheetrock, it was time to start texturing. Since Mom is the texturing pro, I wanted her to teach me how to do it too! It turns out texturing is pretty fun! Plus the more people you have doing it, the faster it gets done. I decided to find some flooring that was a little more water resistent for my bathroom instead of putting the wood flooring in there like the rest of my house. So I went to Lowes and found the perfect thing! It is porcelain tile that looks like old barn wood! Click HERE for details. I like the thick farmhouse style trim, so me and my sister spent some time outside painting and staining the boards, making our own version of farmhouse trim by using the boards left over from a previous project! I think the end result turned out really nice!
5/12/2017 3 Comments In the KitchenWe've finally finished painting my kitchen and we are currently working on installing and painting my kitchen cabinets. I really like the vintage farmhouse look, so I decided I wanted to paint them a light cream color, then use brown wax to make them look antiqued. We actually found the paint for my cabinets in the "oops" section of Home Depot for $9! Our neighbor had an old door out by the curb that we thought, after a little TLC, would look good. So we picked it up and ended up making it into my bar! We found some fancy corbels at a builders warehouse in town, painted it to look like my cabinets, and distressed it. I absolutely LOVE the way it turned out! I got all of my kitchen appliances on Black Friday at Lowes. Now I've got to pick out my countertops and knobs. I'm excited to see how everything is coming together and I'll be posting more updates soon! 3/21/2017 0 Comments My Dream FireplaceI've always wanted a big fireplace and a big closet, regardless of the size of my house. So when I started designing the layout, that was something that I planned to make room for. Unfortunately, for several reasons, I wouldn't be able to have a real fireplace but I could have a fireplace insert. I ended up finding a nice one on craigslist for $50 (such a great deal!!) and it was the perfect size for what I wanted! I tried finding pictures online of a fireplace similar to what I wanted but wasn't able to find anything close to what I had imagined. So I decided to wing it and try describing my dream fireplace design to Dad. We started building a plywood frame and stained wood for the top portion. I bought AirStone from Lowes because it's a lighter weight stone veneer made out of recycled materials. Every box of AirStone is made from 6 recycled glass bottles! I also thought the color of the stone would match well with my future wall and floor colors. Dad and Mom both thought my half wood, half stone idea was strange and didn't think it would look very well. But now we all really like the end result!!
Now we just have to build and stain the mantel and install the insert. 1/30/2017 0 Comments The Wall IncidentAfter we had built the foundation, we started building the walls. 12 foot tall, about 500 pounds, built out of left over 2x4's from my Uncle. Because they weren't regular full size boards we had to nail multiple odd sized boards together to make it the right length (making it heavier than your average wall). My family is the type that likes to do things themselves and not ask for help, so we decided the 4 of us (me, my sister, mom & dad) would be the ones to lift the walls up into place. Dad, Mom, and I were suppose to lift the wall into place while my sister stands on the opposite side to alert us if the wall tries to slide off the foundation. We started lifting the giant wall, arms stretched above my head, and my sister yells "Stop, it's slipping!" then I hear my Dad say, "Drop it!" They dropped the wall, not realizing that I was under it. For about 2 seconds I held that 500lb wall above my head! It was a pretty awesome hulk moment! Haha! But then things weren't so awesome...realizing I couldn't hold the wall for long, I threw myself backwards but the wall still managed to crush my foot. That was the worst pain I've ever felt. I had to use crutches for a while! Dad finally managed to get all the walls up and everything started coming together. It took almost a year for my foot to heal, but now it's doing great! No more walls have fallen and I'd like to keep it that way! I can truly say that we've put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into this house!! 12/3/2016 0 Comments God Gave Us A WellWhen we bought our land we were told there wasn't a well on it and that most of the people in our town can't get water. One day shortly after we bought the land, we were out cleaning up brush & limbs when Dad noticed an uncovered PVC pipe sticking out of the ground. We had a well! We put some rocks in a sock, tied it to a rope, and threw it down the hole. When we pulled it up, the sock was barely damp. Like everyone else, we didn't have water. Disappointed, we drove home and decided to start praying about it. If God wanted us to have water we'd have it, right? The next week we went back out to the land and decided to throw the sock back down the hole...but this time we heard a SPLASH!! We pulled the sock up and it was dripping wet! 40 feet of the rope was wet too! Later, we had the well checked and found out we have good water and get just enough to supply my tiny house. God has done many amazing things for us and I'm very thankful for it! 11/1/2016 0 Comments The Insulation DisasterIt was finally time to start putting insulation up before installing the sheet rock and we decided we would rent an insulating machine from Home Depot! It seemed fairly simple...put the insulation in the machine, it chops it up & sends it through the tube where we would then fill the walls. Apparently, when you blow insulation you have to nail netting up to the wall you're filling so it stays packed in & up against the wall. The store we bought the netting from suggested the wrong type of netting! It had wide holes in it! Because we had never done this before, we didn't notice the holes were wide enough for the insulation to escape and shoot ALL OVER my house!! The second we turned it on it was like an explosion, completely covering everything in my house, including us! It looked like we had just been through a blizzard! We finished the one wall and went straight to Home Depot to return the machine. We ended up using batting insulation for the rest of my house & I'm still finding pieces of insulation everywhere, haha! 8/24/2016 4 Comments ShiplapHello again! We've started putting our version of "shiplap" (which is actually just old fence boards) up on the walls. Turns out the shiplap look is a lot harder to accomplish than you'd think! Mom has been cutting and hanging them, and I've been painting them white once they're up on the wall. I think we will all be happy when this project is finished! Haha! Here's a few pictures of what we've done so far... I think it's coming together nicely!
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