Big House, Big Belly, Big Changes

Tomorrow marks one week since we moved into our new house.  With C still recovering from her head cold, and my big pregnant body feeling more cumbersome by the day, we are moving fairly slowly with the unpacking.  I just keep telling myself – As long as we can get it together before The Baby comes…

I’m hoping that this weekend we’ll be able to get the kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom all unpacked and organized.  We’re partially there on all fronts, and I it would really feel terrific to get each one settled before we start another work week.

Thankfully, I am now only working four days and I am starting a little later to accommodate my new super-long commute from the ‘burbs.  Even my shortened day feels long now.  Carrying myself up the stairs from the subway and walking on my swelling feet from the station are getting to be pretty unpleasant!  I think I have officially entered So. Frickin’. Pregnant. territory.  I am reaching the limits of my maternity clothes.  I can’t get my wedding band on anymore, and my ankles are sadly…nonexistant.  But back to the house…

We have a painter coming by this weekend to give us an estimate.  We’ve painted three rooms ourselves with help from family, and we are just about ready to hire a pro to finish the rest – with so much on our plates, it will be worth every penny.  I’m so ready to see that (as of yet, empty) nursery painted!

So that’s the news for now – settling into the new house, adjusting to the new commute and trials of the third trimester, preparing for The Baby’s arrival…

One step at a time.

10. 2. 2.

The Baby is due in 10 weeks.
We close on our new house in 2 days.
The movers are coming in 2 weeks.

10 + 2 + 2 = WOAH.

Did I mention that we are also buying a car?  Moving out to the ‘burbs means a need for  a second car, so add car shopping to the To-Do list.  And what a To-Do list it is!!  List making is keeping me sane.  There’s too much going on to not write things down, and there’s nothing that stresses me out more than disorder.  So I have lists.  The list of things left to pack.  The list of things to bring to the house after closing.  The list of calls to make – gas, electric, etc.  The list of things we need to be ready for the The Baby if he comes early. The list of cars for sale in the area to check out.  The lists, the lists, the lists.

My favorite list is the one of the bare essential things we want to get done before the movers come.  Why?  Because it’s short.  Being 7.5 months pregnant and a tad on the hormonal side, I’m working hard to remember my “Enjoy it” axiom and keep myself from getting too stressed.  So I remind myself that there really are only a couple of things we absolutely positively want to be donedonedone by the time the big move happens.  Anything else can wait, and the world as we know it will not end.

10.  2.  2.

Let’s move into a house and have a baby!

For our next trick: A house

First of all, I’m a little behind on news – we found out a couple of weeks ago that we are having a boy!  It was wonderful to see him on the screen at the ultrasound and walk away with lots of pictures of our handsome boy.  It’s fun now to be able to refer to The Baby by his name, and to know “who’s in there.”

At five and a half months along (22 weeks), I am definitely feeling the itch of wanting to get things ready for The Baby’s arrival!  Unfortunately, there’s only so much I can do, as we plan to move before he comes.  That’s right, The House is a-comin’!  I have talked before about C and I saving for a house, and now, the time to buy is near.  After much research, we have decided on a townhouse (rather than a single family home) in a suburb that isn’t too terribly far from Boston.  There are a couple of townhouses on the market we are very interested in, so we’ll be going to viewings of them very soon.  We’ve been approved by the bank, so now we just need to pick our favorite, make an offer, and cross our fingers!

The idea of moving so close to The Baby’s due date (making an offer in January, we likely won’t be moving until March…The Baby is due May 5th) is certainly daunting, but we really feel it will be worth it to get settled into our new home before he arrives, rather than trying to make room in our apartment for the time being and then house-hunting with an infant.  Plus, we are fortunate to have caring family close by who have already offered their help with the move – the more hands, the better when it  comes to cleaning and painting!

And speaking of painting…  You know I’ve been thinking about The Baby’s room!  Yes, with the townhouse, The Baby will have his very own room, and I will finally get to put all of my nursery decor daydreaming into action! I know you’ll be shocked to hear that I have yet another new idea for the nursery…  Just look at these lovely green nurseries, both from the always fabulous ohdeedoh (click each to go to ohdeedoh and see more pics):

As soon as I showed the second picture to C, it was decided.  That is out paint color.  The Baby’s room will be green.

Now, if we could just get through this whole “buying” and “moving” business…

Project: Second Bedroom Redux – Results!

Ta da!

 

Problem 1: Depressing wall color – solved!  Due to my sub-par digital camera and the unfortunate lack of natural light on a cloudy Boston afternoon, the wall color proved  very difficult to photograph.  The color we chose is a light, bright green - Celery Sprig by Behr:

 

Problem 2: Less than thrilling Ikea curtain panels – solved!  This is really more like what I originally had in mind for this room.  The panels we had were just too chopped up.  I love the soft, clean feel of this curtain wall:

Problem 3: The positioning of the bed – solved!  The bed is now against the wall opposite the windows, with room to get in and out on either side, so no one has to crawl to get into bed.  Lesson learned: when you put a queen size bed in a roughly 11′x11′ room, don’t try to hide it – embrace it.

This area needs some finishing touches:

The wall looks very yellow above, though the bedding color is accurate – go figure.  I am currently at a loss on throw pillow colors…waiting for inspiration.

Here’s the view from the bed in its new spot:

I’ll be covering the open back of the bookshelf (same one we had – just laid on its side!) with some cute fabric, so you won’t be able to see through it (example of a similar idea here).

Bookshelf detail:

 

Problem 4: Giant-ass desk – solved! As you may recall, our old desk was a table top and legs from Ikea’s Vika line. For $20, I was able to get the same table top in a smaller size. We stashed the old, big top in the basement of our apartment house in case we ever find use for it again. The smaller desk provided more flexibility for the floor plan, making the new furniture arrangement possible!

Thus concludes my Second Bedroom Birthday Makeover project!  I will of course delight you with photos of the finishing details as they come together.

I’m overall really pleased with the final effect for the amount of effort and money C and I put into this project.  We spent less than $200 (and our incredible landlord actually reimbursed us for paint), and I feel like we have a whole new room.

Project: Second Bedroom Redux

My birthday was just about a month ago, and for my present, I requested my wife’s participation in some home improvement:  We did a little makeover of our filled-to-the-max second bedroom!

Our second bedroom serves multiple purposes.  It is an office, a guest room, C’s closet, the place we hang-dry our laundry, and the place where we iron and get ready for work in the morning.  In addition, we store lots of things there, like the extension leaf for our dining room table, my various craft supplies, excess luggage, our off-season coats, and our books.  All this, in less than 121 square feet.  It is nothing short of a triumph that we fit everything in there when we moved into our apartment in June 2008.

After living with the room for a year, I had lots of ideas about how to improve it.  The purpose of the makeover was to solve a few problems…

1. The wall color was depressing me.

You can see it there above the closet door on the left – a rather unimpressive off-white.  Blah.

2. The Ikea curtain panels were no longer thrilling me.

The picture above was taken not long after the panels were installed.  Sadly, after a year of wear and tear, they were looking a little sad, and perhaps, were never that great in the first place.  They served the purpose (hiding C’s clothes storage), but fell a little flat.

3. The positioning of the bed was less than ideal.

The queen size guest bed was shoved against a wall. This was because I originally planned to treat it like a daybed, with pillows along the wall, making it serve as a big couch when not in use by guests.  But, we ended up with this Ikea bed (a bargain craigslist find after we discovered the bed frame we really wanted was discontinued), which, due to the headboard, doesn’t exactly work as a daybed.  Plus, we had overestimated the size of the room from the start – a queen size bed in a room so small can’t really be “tucked aside.”  The positioning of the bed was fine for friends  of ours who used it, but for, say, my in-laws…?  Neither of them should have to crawl in and out of bed.

4. The big ol’ desk…

Okay, it may not look that big in this picture, but that is a 29.5″x59″ desk in a roughly 11′x11′ room.  Too big!  Of course, I had my reasons for getting a desk that large.  When we moved into this apartment (our first two bedroom place!), I had visions of C and I each having our own small desk in the office.  Even with our overestimation of the size of the room, it became clear that two desks weren’t feasible, so we opted for one large one (Ikea Vika- mix and match legs and table top), thinking we could work side by side.  Well, the reality is that C prefers to work sitting on her recliner or at the dining room table, otherwise she’ll sit at the desk, and I’ll use her laptop or my ipod on the guest bed.  So we ended up with this large desk in this little room for no reason whatsoever.

With my list of grievances in mind, I browsed paint samples, created an account on floorplanner.com (which is fabulous and free, by the way), and got to planning!

The project is now just about complete, and pictures are soon to come!  Stay tuned!

Decorating on a Dime I Don’t Have

Wouldn’t this:

 

Look lovely on either side of my bed?

Excuse the poor photo quality

I thought so.

 

Think I can find $200 in loose change between the couch cushions?

Blog Block, Be Gone

As of late, I’ve been experiencing a phenomenon which is well-known to me, and will henceforth be known as ”Blog Block.” Blog Block occurs when I get wrapped up in my life, feelings, stuff, to-do lists, daydreams, gripes, etc, in such a way that I feel stranded on my own mental carousel o’ crap and can’t seem to stop spinning around long enough to assemble a blog post on one or two of the many things banging around in my mind. It gets annoying, and so I am breaking the cycle today…

The summer is here (finally, Boston, with your torrential June downpours and fog clouds of doom!), and as always, my wife and I have found ourselves to be very busy. Each year, we swear it won’t happen, and then it does. If you would like to see us sometime soon, it’s too late. We’re booked. See you in mid-August (hopefully).

Now before we break out the tiny violins, I will say that most of the things we are “booked” with are wonderful, fun, summer activities. For example, for the 4th of July, we spent the weekend with some of my family in Newport, RI, which is a long standing family tradition that I love and enjoy whole-heartedly; this coming weekend, we are visiting C’s family, who we both love dearly and miss. So clearly, things could be worse. It’s just that having somewhere to be each and every weekend can get a little tiring, what with all the packing and unpacking, and trying to maintain some semblance of order in our home in between.

Some time ago, with our whirlwind summer schedule laid out in front of us, C and I vowed to take the coming weeks one engagement at a time, and remember to take time to breathe and sit on the back porch together, basking in our love and staring longingly into one another’s eyes (a favorite pasttime of ours, which I highly recommend).

Our porch view. Not bad, huh?

Even with the back porch breathing/sitting/basking, the mental carousel o’crap persists. I am packing and unpacking, I am planning and plotting and confirming times and squeezing in. I am checking check marks off of our Pre-Baby Making and Home Buying checklists (which look something like: 1. Deposit money into savings account 2. Deposit money into savings account 3. Deposit money into savings account – you get the idea).  C and I are trailing each other around the apartment, picking up one another’s mess. I am budgeting. I am waiting (im)patiently for word from my employer on my status being changed from temp to regular employee. I am looking around the apartment seeing all the things that we are missing – We need new lamps for the bedroom! I wish I had something fabulous to put there!  I am daydreaming about flea market shopping, but all of our Sundays are booked until August 16.  I am just now realizing that we may not get to a beach before mid-August…unacceptable.  Etc, etc. Bla, bla, bla.

So that’s what’s going on with me.

Oh, just one final note – it appears that my wife and I missed running into none other than object of my crush and New Gay Hero Rachel Maddow in Provincetown by mere days.

Life isn’t fair.

I’ll be back soon with more.  I promise. It’s on my to-do list.

Project: Back Porch – Update

Sorry to leave you hanging on the back porch project!  We hit a road block, then had some bad weather, and the porch kind of fell out of mind.  But we have made progress, which I am pleased to share:

Note the layer of what appears to be dust on the bistro set table – that is pollen, and it is the reason for my regular sneezing fits and bouts of lightheadedness.  Thanks, spring!

Anyway…  The rugs are in place (a second one starts at the end of the one shown, to cover the remainder of the porch), and we finally tried out our paper lanterns over the weekend.

For the lanterns, I just strung up some jute from preexisting hooks (sometimes renting comes with freebies!), which we’ll leave up all the time.  The lanterns are on little plastic hooks, so are collapsed and stowed away in the back hall when not in use.  We actually do have a bright, overhead electric light out there, but the lanterns are much more fun, don’t you think?  Plus, I think the dimmer light will attract less bugs.

Now, about that road block…  The shade I picked out from the Home Depot website apparantly does not exist on this planet.  You cannot order it from the website, and in store…  Well, we went to our local store (which, according to the website, had the shade we wanted in stock) every Saturday for three or four weeks, being told “Come back next week” each time, and every time it wasn’t there.  We were finally told by a surly high school student, who clearly cared that we’d been back three or four times about as much as I would care about a monster truck rally being in town, that they don’t carry the shade at all, and basically won’t ever have it.  After all that, I’m feeling pretty burnt out on the shade.  We’ll find something, I’m sure, it was just very annoying.

So what do you think of the rug and lanterns?  Not bad, huh?

Rainy day nursery love

The weather in Boston this week has been less than stellar.  In fact, it has been downright unacceptable.  Temperatures below 60 degrees, accompanied by rain and clouds, when it’s going to be June in a few days are just about beyond my limit of what’s okay.  I’ve been sulking around, feeling cold and grumpy.  But I’m tired of being a grouch, so let’s do something fun – like talking about my imaginary baby’s nursery! Hooray!

I bring up the nursery because, well, who am I kidding, you know how much I think about it…  Specifically, though, I’ve been considering something new for my imaginaryfuturebaby’s nursery as of late.  You may recall my current favorite, perfect, gender-neutral bedding set by Skip Hop:

Pretty darn nice

Well, it is possible that I am turning!  See, the thing about crib bedding sets is that they are lovely and cute and coordinated, but you will not/can not really use all the pieces – bumpers are said to be SIDS hazards (that can later be used as stepping stools to climb out of the crib), and the quilt/blanket isn’t safe for infants to sleep with (though, admittedly, you could use it as a floor mat for baby to roll and play on).  As time has passed, many parents have wised up to this fact, and started shunning the coordinated crib bedding set in favor of something more practical, and sometimes more economical (those sets can get pricey).  I’ve been noticing a lot of examples on my baby-stuffs site of choice, ohdeedoh.

Exhibit A:

Cute polka dot crib sheet, white crib skirt and…done!  A clean, simple look, but made stylish by the other details, like that darling homemade mobile and the art on the wall.

Exhibit B

I’m not into the old-school quilt look, but I love this color palette!  And again, with the adorable mobile!

Exhibit C

I’m not nuts about the style on this one, but I like the use of the patterened crib skirt.  In a traditional set, the bumper is where the most color/style is really displayed, but a groovy crib skirt is an equally great way to display color and style, and unlike a bumper, can remain on the crib now matter how old baby is.

And finally:

Exhibit D

I just love this.  I don’t know why.  It’s just a simple crib with a plain orange blanket, but I love it.  The perfect powder blue color on the wall complementing the orange blanket is probably a big part of it, too.  So simple, so adorable.  It’s hard to tell, but that just might be a polka dot crib sheet hiding under that blanket!

How cute would this crib sheet be…

…with an orange crib skirt?  So cute, that’s how cute.

Project: Back Porch – to be continued

The back porch project is at a standstill.  We decided to do a roll-up shade instead of lattice.  The shade will give more privacy and cost less than the lattice, plus it will be easier to deal with - the lattice comes in preset sizes, all of which would require some cutting to fit our space.  I found this very affordable little number online at Ho.me De.Pot:

White roll-up shade from Ho.me De.pot

Of course the website claims the shade is available at my local store, but it actually isn’t.  It will supposedly arrive in a couple of weeks – which I’m hoping will coincide with the arrival of my back-ordered rugs.

No longer available in this color from World Market

I ordered two to cover the entire length of the porch, and found a coupon code for 25% off my total (score!).  Now I just need to wait patiently for their arrival, and hope my shade comes in at the De.pot (not available for order online of course), and then we’ll be ready to finish up our little makeover.

The back porch project will continue…