Baby's Room

When Carter was born, we lived in a two room apartment in Manhattan, so his "room" was a nook for his crib in our bedroom. By comparison, this new kid is going to get... a half a room! While our third bedroom will still function at times as a guest bedroom, the office portion of that room has been moved to either the basement or the dining room in order to give this kid some space. It's been fun to have a half a room to prepare for baby!









However, this kid doesn't have it too much better... Initially he'll sleep (we hope) in our bedroom, but when he's ready for his room, he'll sleep (we hope) in the little closet nook pictured below.  Crib in a nook, just like his brother!

(So, yeah, he's not here yet. And before you ask, no, I have no idea when he's arriving. I'm feeling fine - just as fine and normal as a girl this pregnant can feel.)

Bathroom Renovation

I'm just getting around to posting pictures of our bathroom renovation, which we finished up about a month ago. In the end, we decided not to raise the ceiling height, so it was mostly a cosmetic makeover (though we were able to get more height in the shower which makes it a lot easier for Thomas to take a Thomas-height shower). Also, the new plumbing fixtures we got make it easy for Carter to take a Carter-height shower. 

Here are some before and after shots.

For our reference:

Floor Grout - North American Adhesives #577 Monterey Surf

One Room Down...

We've been living in various states of mess and upheaval in our house for the last month or so, but tonight we put the kitchen back together with a fresh coat of paint on the walls and new hardware on the cabinets. Very small changes, but it makes a big difference, in my opinion. At the very least, it makes me feel like it's finally OUR kitchen, as we hadn't previously done anything to that room since we moved in. Two more rooms to put back together after this: our bedroom (can't wait to sleep there again!), which will probably happen this weekend, and our bathroom (really, really can't wait to use that again!), which will be another week or two. And then, of course, we have to START the baby's room. But at least 1 room is done!

Bedroom Improvements

We finally, finally got a king-sized bed. It's just as life changing as I thought it would be! I no longer mind having Carter pile in with us (except when he sleeps perpendicular to us; the bed is still too small for that). There's room for all three of us - and my expanding belly. It's a dream!

We constructed a new upholstered headboard for our new bed. The only hiccup was when we discovered that the headboard wouldn't fit up our stairs. It took Thomas, Park and Lance to heft it up through the top of our garage and into our master closet via a large access panel. I was really glad that worked so we didn't have to cut it in half after we built it!

It was the first time we tried tufting. It worked out great - and was much more cost effective than buying a headboard.

We have also transformed the nook in our bedroom. We didn't use it much before, so we put in a couch and installed a TV so we now have a secondary lounging area in the house.

King size bed, secondary lounging space... Trying to create space for our new family member. We'll eventually start working on his room, too!

Carter's New Room

In addition to the new desk that Santa brought for Christmas, Santa also left a few additional pieces of furniture for Carter. While Carter was in Arkansas with Mama Helen and Daddy Phil for a few days this week, we did a re-do on Carter's room. At this point, all the baby furniture is gone!

Carter and Anna had a big time playing in his "new room" this morning, after their New Year's Eve sleepover last night!

For those of you that are keeping track, this is not the first, not the second, not the third, but the FOURTH major operation in Carter's room since we moved here four years ago...

Project 3

I'm blessed to have a husband with a similarly high tolerance for mess, and a similar love of organization.

We both hit our limits with the basement mess recently, which inspired Project 3: the great basement reorg.

I'm also blessed to have a brother-in-law and sister-in-law that are equal parts helpful, hard-working, good-natured, easy-going and practical. They are a lot if other stuff, too, but those characteristics best describe what they brought to our basement project yesterday. They also brought a few more things to store in said basement.

I'm not sure the photos really read, but trust that our basement looks 1000 times better absent the 8 bags of trash and donation haul we got out of there. Not to mention the stellar furniture and box origami that we all did.
 

Oh, and it's with mentioning that there was one other really critical factor in our success: a good babysitter!

2 Projects Down

Several of you asked what kind of projects we have underway as a result of our recent home improvement prioritization. We've knocked out 2: fixing our kitchen cart (which I had nearly rendered unusable due to the force exerted by my hand-crank pasta maker) and converting our WBFP to gas (for those of you who haven't spent hours scouring classified ads for apartments with a WBFP, that means "or wood-burning-fireplace"). We love wood, but, due to some poor design, the smoke from our WBFP went straight into the intake for the heat upstairs, where it blew into our closet, right on my hanging clothes. So, gas will mean more frequent fires and a less stinky me.

This weekend, we undertake project #3 (cleaning out the basement). Project 4 may involve a Christmas gift for Carter, so I won't speak of it here until then, lest he learn to read or one of you let it slip! AND we're getting estimates for our largest (and most highly desired) project, which may or may not happen, depending on the size of the estimates... We'll keep you posted!

Home Consulting

With most of our urgent home projects taken care of (big knock on wood), stable jobs (finally! and also knocking on wood) and no major life changes on the horizon, we've been feeling ready to tackle a new project on our house. But what to do? We've been tossing around ideas for a while, but were having trouble getting anything started.

So, last week, I ran us through a little home version of a prioritization workshop I like to do (usually at work). We brainstormed on post-its, consolidated our ideas, voted on our highest priorities, and then organized our ideas on a matrix by number of votes (on the X axis) and cost/effort (on the y axis). Our french doors came in handy for this part of the exercise!

We decided to ignore all high cost, low desire items. Then, we made a plan to do the highest desire, low cost items and to research the high desire, high cost items. At the end of one hour, we had a clear action plan with tasks for each of us. More on our progress soon!

Finishing Touches

We've been putting the finishing touches on our front yard landscaping, including this new spot for sittin'. It's a great spot for (not so patiently) waiting for friends to come over.



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Housekeeping

Carter spent last week in Arkansas with Mama Helen and Daddy Phil. Here's a story that Mama Helen shared from their time together:

I was cleaning the bathrooms (specifically the toilets) on Friday and Carter was very curious, following me and watching the process. I explained the bowl brush, and he said his mom and dad don't clean the toilets. I suggested that the house cleaners do that at his home, but he insisted that his bathroom has never been cleaned.

Might want to let him watch sometime, so he won't be too shocked someday when he has his own place, that toilets do indeed have to be cleaned sometimes.

So, yes, we do have someone clean our house because, honestly, if we didn't, the toilets probably never would have ever been cleaned. But maybe we need to explain a little more to him about cleaning (I thought he knew why every other Tuesday is my very favorite day)...

In other areas, Carter is hyper-informed about how things get done. Just today, I told him that we were out of bread, and he informed me, "That's okay, we can just make some bread." And then he proceeded to start telling me what ingredients we would need to do that!

Sunday Project

Thomas got motivated this morning to build the workbench he's been planning for the garage. Carter's enthusiasm for the project came and went throughout the day. First, he was wow-ing us with his ability to use a drill; then he was painting his own woodwork (and then he was sneaking back in the house to watch PBS Kids).

Thomas, Carter, Matthew and I all had a hand in completing the workbench today. And we wrapped up the project just before we had friends over for dinner!

Thomas gets Carter ready to "help" with the circular saw

Carter takes a break from the workbench project to paint his wood sculpture

What Carter and Thomas had completed by themselves by the time I got out of bed:

The finished product at the end of the day! (Notice how Thomas and Matthew decided to re-use scrap wood instead of buying shelf brackets? I'm so proud!)

Your Opinion?

So, now that we've painted our house and have removed the tree so that you can actually see our front door, we need your help. Should we paint the door wine (to match the shutters) or shoudl we leave it white? Leave your answer in the comments!

Garden Transformation

From this

To this

Thanks to a little of this

And a LOT of this

First, let me clarify that the camellia bush/tree was very, very sad looking when we cut it down (I don't have a picture of just how sad it was). The snow this winter didn't treat it well. Plus, I didn't like it. So I refuse to feel guilty for cutting it down. So...there.

Donna is my gardening guru! You may remember the smaller scale garden transformation she executed when we lived in Brooklyn. She's teaching me a few of her tricks, and she pitched in a lot of labour to put in our new flower bed and bushes in front of Carter's window. she and I had fun, and the front of the house looks much better (you can actually see our front door now!)

Thank you, Donna!

And... thanks to Thomas for wielding the chain saw!

Updated Office

In preparation for my new job (more on that later), I've been engaged in an overhaul of our home office. LOTS of cleaning out, rearranging and two coats of paint later, here it is! The biggest change we made (other than the color of the walls) was moving our personal computer to share a desk with my work computer, since they are rarely used simultaneously. Our computer was previously on our little leaning desk, but we wanted more space for spreading out--and now the little desk is freed up for our new baby netbook!

Painted

The paint job on our house is complete! Thanks to our readers for all your great suggestions. I can guarantee you that we seriously considered all options, which is why we were still sneaking up people's lawns holding swatches up to their houses the day we had to hand the paint chips over. Here's where we landed on the colors.

And, since this blog replaces my memory, I'll list the colors we used, in case we need to get more paint later (Sherwin Williams - Herbal Wash (SW7739), Sommelier (SW7595), Pure White(SW7005)).

Help, Please!!

Our house desperately needs to be painted. We have hired painters and they start on Monday. That's the easy part. But we don't know what color to paint it! Surely some of our loyal blog readers are better at this than us?! Help?!

Here's what we know:

• Everything white is staying white.
• We have cherry wood blinds that you can see through the windows, so the colors need to coordinate with the white trim and cherry blinds.
• Our house looks really small from the front, and is set pretty far back from the street.
• There's a house painted a terrible yellow color two doors down, so I think we can't do yellow or we'll clash.

A little help for your home-design challenged friends? Please?

Here are some pics of our house (from before we bought it and when it didn't need a paint job so badly!)