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A Pretty Happy Home

Life, DIY and Random Things That Make Me Smile

  • Home
  • About
    • About
    • Contact
  • Shop
    • Apparel and Shoes
    • Books
    • Crafts and Sewing
    • Decor
    • Furniture
    • Home Improvement
    • Kid Favorites
    • Kitchen
  • Projects
    • Cleaning
    • Clothing
    • Colonial Farmhouse
    • Crafts
    • Decorating
    • DIY Projects
    • Holidays
  • Adventure
    • Moving to Ireland
    • Living in Ireland
    • Visiting Ireland
    • Travel
    • Family and Parenting
    • Humor
    • Learning
  • Privacy Policy
  • Home
  • About
    • About
    • Contact
  • Shop
    • Apparel and Shoes
    • Books
    • Crafts and Sewing
    • Decor
    • Furniture
    • Home Improvement
    • Kid Favorites
    • Kitchen
  • Projects
    • Cleaning
    • Clothing
    • Colonial Farmhouse
    • Crafts
    • Decorating
    • DIY Projects
    • Holidays
  • Adventure
    • Moving to Ireland
    • Living in Ireland
    • Visiting Ireland
    • Travel
    • Family and Parenting
    • Humor
    • Learning
  • Privacy Policy

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  • time capsule installed in a 250 year old carriage house
    DIY

    Stone Carriage House: Part 8, Time Capsule

    June 25, 2025 /

    I’m too excited to bury the lead. We hid a time capsule in our stone Carriage House! *In my best Oprah voice, “You get a time capsule, and YOU get a time capsule, but only if you find it!* It is not a secret that I am unabashedly on the hunt for buried treasure on our 250-year-old property. Surely, surely, there must be some cash, gold coins, or Prohibition-era liquor hidden somewhere, right? Unless someone already found it. Hmmm…nope! I refuse to believe it. Hope springs eternal around here. Plus, my treasure hunt is just good, silly fun. Renovating and restoring a property as old as ours is no easy…

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    annisa 0 Comments

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  • stone carriage house gym expansion removing a stone wall and repairing the floor underneath
    DIY

    Stone Carriage House Gym: Part 7, The Floor Problem

    June 18, 2025 /

    The adventure continues on our stone Carriage House gym project. Today, we’re talking about the concrete floor problem. Or shall we call it an opportunity? Hmm. I’m not feeling that generous yet. It really was an issue. The worst part is we should have seen it coming. Here’s how we got in this predicament. We took down a non load-bearing stone wall in a very old building. I’m not casually or disrespectfully throwing out the old adjective. This building was originally a garage for a horse-drawn carriage and dates back to the late 1700s. Old is a compliment. We use it for a home gym now. I’m sure our forefathers…

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  • farmhouse style plywood side table stained with paint dipped legs in black
    decorating,  DIY,  gardening and landscape

    Plywood Side Table Makeover

    June 11, 2025 /

    Some life lessons need reminders. Today’s plywood side table makeover is one of those reminders. (Yes, I can find a life lesson in almost anything.) I found what was clearly a DIY plywood side table at my favorite thrift store. It was $10. Do you think I overpaid? I never regret buying wood tables for $10 (maybe more depending on the table) because I know the lumber it took to make it, not to mention the time, costs more than ten bucks these days. Plus, side tables are one thing we are short on around here. I knew I was going to knock off the orange-y finish of the table,…

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  • hot to take down a stone wall how to demo a stone wall how to remove a stone wall
    DIY

    Stone Carriage House Gym: Part 6, How To Remove A Stone Wall

    June 9, 2025 /

    How do you remove a stone wall? The same way you build one. One stone at a time. That was not intended to be a glib response. That’s the short answer. If you want to know the specifics of taking down a stone wall, including how fun the process is, you came to the right place. The fun part is easy to answer. It’s not. I’m sure there are worse tasks though. It’s best not to think about it or wonder how long it will take. Find that happy place in your mind and get to work. As to the specifics of how we took down a stone wall, I…

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    annisa 2 Comments

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  • stone carriage house gym expansion how to install a window in a stone wall
    DIY

    Stone Carriage House Gym: Part 5, Adding A Window to a Stone Wall

    June 2, 2025 /

    Welcome back to the series on our Stone Carriage House Gym expansion. Today, I’m going to show you how we added a window to a stone wall. My speciality is very niche topics that less than 1% of you will ever need to know. Below is the stone wall in question. As you can see, aside from the window headers, the entire window opening is fieldstone and brick. The bricks will be removed partly for aesthetic reasons and partly because we need to remove that window grate. We don’t know why there is an iron grate instead of a glass-paned window in this wall, but it made the building drafty.…

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  • fieldstone porch made with fieldstone and lime mortar skimmed over concrete
    DIY

    One Thing That Will Wreck Lime Mortar

    May 21, 2025 /

    One thing that will wreck lime mortar on a fieldstone wall are ice melt products, specifically salt. Learn from our mistake this winter. We have a concrete porch wrapped on two sides in fieldstone. The fieldstone is adhered with lime mortar. Not a classic application of fieldstone and lime mortar, I know. Everything was fine until that concrete porch got icy during a winter storm. It was so treacherous. We didn’t even think about it and scattered some deicing salt on the concrete. I know, I know. You don’t have to tell me that stuff is not great for the environment. I’ve vowed to do better, especially after this debacle. …

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  • repointing a stone wall with old pipes embedded in the wall
    DIY

    Stone Carriage House Gym: Part 4, Pipes In Stone Walls

    May 14, 2025 /

    Our stone Carriage House was built in the late 1700s before indoor electricity and plumbing existed. Just think about that for a minute. If you had to do your business outside, that building is old. If you want to do your business inside this old building, some retrofitting is going to have to happen. Today, we are going to talk about the pipes in our Carriage House and how they clogged up the flow of our restoration progress as we’ve been repointing this building’s stone foundation. To plumb an all stone building, you’re going to have to bust through the 18-inch thick stone foundation or walls in order to insert…

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  • carriage house stone building with metal grate for a window
    DIY

    Stone Carriage House Gym: Part 3, Old Windows

    May 7, 2025 /

    Work on our stone Carriage House gym continues and today we’re going to discuss old windows. It is hard to explain the window situation on this half of the building. I think the short answer is someone thought windows were overrated. Natural light? Who needs it? Glass panes? Metal grates are stronger. The longer answer is that on the end of the building we are currently restoring, there are two small window openings with cast iron grates instead of glass panes. Were glass panes ever there? Maybe. There is no longer evidence of them if they were there. Poof. History erased. One of the grates on the west facing side…

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  • buried treasure searching for treasure on a 250 year old property but mainly finding old trash in the ground like tin tiles from vikon tile company in washington new jersey
    colonial farmhouse,  DIY

    Did We Finally Find Buried Treasure?

    April 30, 2025 /

    If you’ve been reading this blog for five minutes, you’ll know that I am unabashedly on the hunt for buried treasure on our 250-year-old property. Surely, surely, there must be something hidden around here somewhere. Preferably, this something would be valuable enough to pay off our mortgage, but I’m not picky. We recently dug a trench alongside our Carriage House and that trench was full and I do mean FULL of buried treasure. I don’t mean the valuable sort of treasure. More like this was someone’s garbage pile. An actual garbage pile that had been buried over time, and now I’m donning my proverbial Indiana Jones hat and saying under…

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  • carriage house gym expansion demo a fieldstone wall to prepare for repointing removing concrete from a stone foundation with a chisel attachment on a hammer drill
    colonial farmhouse,  DIY

    Stone Carriage House Gym: Part 2, Demo

    April 28, 2025 /

    If you missed it, we are expanding our home gym. This space, that I affectionately refer to as the ‘little torture chamber,’ is located in our stone Carriage House. The part of the home gym we completed in 2024 looks like this now. The other half of the building, where we want to expand the home gym, looked like this (see photo below) last month. It was a tad bit creepy. When I say creepy, I mean that’s where the cave crickets lived. I think they are gone now. *fingers crossed* You can catch up on why we are doing this expansion and feast your eyes on all the creepy…

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Hi! I'm Annisa.

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  • 4th of July 2025 Break
  • Happy List: #395
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