Our House

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Miscellany

I have a random number of little house updates, so here is a quick rundown!

I have definitely been in nesting mode the last couple of weeks. Redoing the office felt like something I needed to do, and another thing I've been pretty insistent on is getting old stuff cleared out of our house. I am definitely feeling the impulse to clear out the old to make way for the new! In addition to clearing out the old desks and papers and books in our office, we got rid of a bunch of things in our basement (and got it reorganized), I did a major shoe purge, and we took an entire trunkload of stuff to Goodwill along with dropping off other things to be recycled. I always enjoy purging (it feels so great to finally get rid of unwanted things),and of course I feel better now that we have more room for Baby and all of her things!

And speaking of new things, we were very fortunate to have our friends Natalie and Steve pass along this changing table to us! Though I'm not planning to have a changing table in the nursery (we are just going to put the changing pad on top of the dresser), I realized that the changing table would be perfect in our bedroom for those first few months. We can use it as a place to store all of her things in our bedroom, and of course, it will come in very handy for those middle of the night diaper changes! I'm so thankful that our friends passed it along to us.

Dan has been working on some pre-baby projects, including taking out old brass hinges in the nursery and replacing them with new ones. Not only do they look a lot better, but we also won't have to worry about old paint flaking off the old ones!

In other news, we found pillows at IKEA to finish off the office. Sometimes Dan and I have a hard time agreeing on textiles, but we both loved these dot pillows right away! They add a nice little bit of color and will be great for lounging on while we read!

And in the last piece of miscellaneous news, just a few weeks ago I made the last payment to pay off our upstairs hardwood floors! We were able to get 18-month financing at 0% interest when we had the floors installed, and we've been submitting monthly payments since that time. It feels awesome to finally have them paid off for good, and of course the timing couldn't be better since we could definitely use a little more wiggle room in our budget once the baby arrives!

Of course, the big project that is still awaiting our attention is the nursery. As much as I would love to be working on that now, we've decided to focus our energies on other things like making sure we have all the things we need for the baby for the first few weeks, installing the car seat, getting our bags packed for the trip to The Birth Center, etc. I'm still hoping to get some work done on the nursery before the baby arrives, but the truth is that she probably won't be in there for the first few months, and I know that we'll get it done eventually, so it's fallen lower on the list of things to do. Still, I'm hoping to make some progress on it if I have the energy for it, and at the very least we'll be adding my grandmother's rocking chair and some window shades in the next week, so stay tuned!

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Office Makeover

Sorry that I have been away so long! Though I haven't mentioned it yet, Dan and I have been working here and there for weeks on an office makeover. Our upstairs office is a room that just sort of got thrown together with every desk we have (plus a bookcase added in) without any real thought, and to be perfectly honest, I've never been happy with it. Though Dan did an awesome job repainting it, the whole room has felt pretty cluttered and thrown together (we had three desks in there!), and we've been wanting to make some changes to it, especially since Dan works from home now. As much as I want to get the nursery done, this room was a project that I was worried would never get done if we didn't do it now, so Dan and I have been hard at work! Here are some before photos.

Not exactly the most inspiring room. Not only is it not too attractive, it was a mess--the wooden secretary became a dumping ground for all sorts of papers, and everything felt like it was out of place. Plus I knew that I really needed to go through things and recycle/shred a lot of unneeded papers and documents, get rid of some books, and just pare things down in general. Since we got our laptop, we haven't really been using the old desktop that I had, so we realized that could go. We also realized that, now that we have the laptop, Dan and I are rarely in the office at the same time, so it didn't really make sense to have two chairs and so many separate work spaces.

I spent a day or two just sorting through everything. Here's a picture of the room mid-purge, as well as a picture of the huge bag of papers that we sent to the recycling bin!

Dan and I decided a while ago that we probably just needed to get rid of all the desks and start over with something more streamlined. The desks were just too clunky and/or impractical to make them work in such a small room. I was also hoping that we could create work space along just one wall so we could create some space to put our futon in there. Once the guest room was converted to the baby's room, we moved the futon to the basement. I would never ask my guests to sleep down there, so I secretly hoped that we could make this a dual purpose room if we played our cards right!

Keeping our streamlined theme in mind, we bought some inexpensive desks and shelving at IKEA (aka my favorite place for all things house). Dan put the desks together a few weeks ago and put up the shelving, we found new homes for the old desks using Freecycle, brought up the futon, added some of our artwork that's been collecting dust, moved some things into the closet to store, and voila! A whole new office!

This room feels so different now. It actually feels put together and cozy, things are nice and streamlined, and our artwork (which includes photos that we've taken) adds a nice personal touch. And I love that we have a place for the futon now so our guests have a place to sleep! The futon also gives us a nice space to sit in the office if we'd like to read, and I suspect it may also come in handy if one of us needs resting/napping space away from a crying baby! I am planning to get some throw pillows for the futon to help cheer things up a bit more. Ideally, I'd also like to put the items in storage on the shelves above our desk into something prettier/more streamlined (like matching storage boxes), but for now the containers that we were already using seem to be working just fine while we keep our budget in mind.

Most importantly, Dan has a nice space to work in now, with a nice open space, a plant nearby, and cheery artwork surrounding him. I'm so happy that we took the time to get this done so he has a nice place to work!

Friday, February 8, 2013

New Caulk!

Despite my lack of posting,we have been busy with a couple of house projects. A couple weekends ago, Dan decided to tackle something we've been avoiding for quite some time--recaulking the upstairs bath. As some of you might recall, when we first moved into our house, the upstairs bathroom was so disgusting that I declared I would never actually be able to use it. Dan did some MAGICAL work cleaning the bathroom and we were able to spruce things up a lot with some paint and a new toilet seat, but I will admit (rather embarassingly) that our tub caulk has continued to be a scary mess. At some point Dan put new caulk over the old caulk, but a couple weeks ago he actually tackled the task of removing all the old caulk and putting fresh new caulk in.

To spare ourselves embarrassment, we did not take any "before" pictures of the tub, but here's a little view of some of the old caulk in the trashcan if that gives you any sense of how gross it was.

Here's a pic after Dan removed the old caulking. . . .

And here's the tub newly caulked! Honestly, sometimes I forget how much little things in our house can make such a big difference. Our tub looks so different with this shiny new caulk in place, and it stays so much cleaner! And I'll definitely feel much better about giving our child a bath in this newly improved tub instead of the icky-looking old one. Hooray Dan!

Sunday, January 27, 2013

Nursery Update

Sorry for the long delay. Here are a few nursery updates!

First, a little insight into our nursery "theme," which is all based upon a fabric I picked up at IKEA. I just fell in love with this print right away and decided to design the nursery around it. I love the colors and the little roly poly hedgehogs! At some point, I'll be making curtains from this fabric (if I can manage to stand long enough to get all the fabric pressed and sewn!).

I also bought this coordinating blanket to match. Right now it's perched on the rocking chair I had when I was a little girl which will hopefully be enjoyed by our girl one day!

We also picked up our crib and dresser at IKEA (in case you haven't learned so far from this blog, I am quite the fan of IKEA). Just purchasing them was a little bit of an adventure. We couldn't fit them both into our car, so we picked up the dresser first, then went back for the crib a day or two later. Then we couldn't get the crib box to fit into our car at all, so we had to take the pieces out of the box in the parking lot so we could manipulate everything in! Thankfully we were victorious! And then, of course, once we got it home, we had the fun of putting it together. We ran into a couple minor snafus, but I'm happy to report that it's all ready to go, complete with the crib mattress we picked up at a local store this weekend.

Now that we've got some of the furniture in place, we can hopefully start moving some baby things out of our bedroom and into the baby's room! I decided to start with the teddy bear we made for her during our trip to Vermont and our furry hedgehog friend named Fred.

There's still lots to do in the room--purchase a chair/rocker, make the curtains, figure out the furniture arrangement in the slightly awkward space, get baby's things organized, decorate, order and put up wall decals--whew! I'll post updates when I can, but just keep in mind that I'm pretty slow-moving these days so I may be slow to make progress. Hopefully there will be more to share soon!

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Green!

Dan, my painting hero, took a day out of his holiday break to get the nursery done. It definitely makes me antsy when I want to get so much painting done myself and have to stay away, but he did such an awesome job!

The nursery theme started with some fabric that I found and purchased about a month before I was even pregnant. (What can I say? Sometimes I know what I want and don't want to waste any time!) I'm sure there will be many postings of that fabric soon. In the meantime, the paint color that we chose goes perfectly with the fabric, and I love the cheery green for our baby girl!

In addition to purchasing paint, we also purchased our baby's crib and dresser! In fact, you can see some pieces of the crib on the floor in the last photo. I'm not sure yet when we'll actually get those put together, but hopefully there will be another nursery post soon! I'm so excited that our baby's room is starting to come together. It makes it all seem that much more real!

Sunday, December 30, 2012

Nursery Light

Before we could get started on any additional work in the nursery, we decided we first needed to take care of one problem: the fact that the room only had one outlet and, instead of a light switch, had this horrible lamp-like monstrosity attached to the wall.

After three bids, we finally found a contractor we felt comfortable with and had him go to work. He had to use a raceway to add the outlets due to the brick wall, but now the room has an outlet on each wall, a light switch, and an adorable overhead light fixture that I picked up at IKEA!

Saturday, December 29, 2012

Christmas 2012

Oh. my. goodness. It has been such a crazy couple of weeks! I had hoped to post a few photos of our house decked out for Christmas a while ago but just didn't get the chance (and I've been sick, which hasn't helped). As it happens, posting late will give me the opportunity to include some photos of Christmas Eve (when we got snow!) and our Christmas brunch at home!

And in further good news, I have two more posts coming in the next few days. We finally got the nursery electrical work done and Dan also got the nursery painted, so there will be photos coming soon! Yay!

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy some of these photos of the Christmas magic that happened at our house. I hope your holiday was beautiful and bright!