36 posts tagged “home”

Well, it took forever, but the nursery is finally painted and furniture is nearly in. Here's what we did:

We took this poster:

and made it the centerpiece of our design. The poster has gray (the color of our carpet), orange, cream, white, and light blue in it. So we painted the ceiling and trim of the room white and painted three walls (including the jump walls at the ceiling) blue. Then we did an orange accent wall onto which we'll hang the poster. Here's a taste of the final product:

is what you're thinking, I bet. But? I will go on a bit more about the painting because after the pronouncement in my previous post about how the painting would be finished by weekend's end...

the painting continued.

In fact, it's still unfinished.

You see, there are positives and negatives to marrying a man who absolutely cannot do anything half-assed (or what he considers to be half-assed). And so, what started out as painting merely two rooms turned into "Hey, I don't like it when the trim in the hallway doesn't match the trim in the bedrooms or the trim in the upstairs bathroom for that matter, so maybe I should also paint the hallway trim, bathroom ceiling, and bathroom trim while I'm at it."

And so, there we are: the bathroom was unexpectedly made part of this whole nursery/office thing, as was the hallway trim.

Last night, this crazy man stayed up until 3am working on the ceiling in the now-gonna-be office. The walls of which remain unpainted.

Painting. On a Tuesday. With an OB appt in the morning and then needing to go into work after it.

He's nuts.

now that I see my dear friend Lena has linked over here. I'm so glad to know more about her new business. When she merely confirmed for me that it wasn't Avon (yet provided no other details), I moved on to thinking it was Amway. So glad she's not peddling Amway.

(Although, if anyone could successfully peddle Amway, it's Lena. She'd approach clients with an armful of cleaning products, and they'd immediately buy whatever she suggested because she's so pretty.)

I've been up to so much over the past couple of months, I think the best way to give a sense of things is through pictures.

Okay, this is totally boring, but since the two of us agonize over every little house decision, it was big in our world: our half-bath's light fixture had to be replaced, and we went out and bought this:

Cute, huh? It's like little votive holders turned upside down. We prefer more modern home furnishings, and if you have ever tried to find a modern light fixture in the Home Despot or Lowe's, then you know that pickings are pretty slim in both stores. We found this one in the latter. We're pleased with the light: it's modern enough without breaking the bank, and my husband could install it himself in no time. So, score.

Speaking of him, he decided to grow a beard.

I'm not a fan of the facial hair, but I started to like his beard even though it was scratchy as hell. Anyway, during the Beard Phase, he decided that our hosta, Audrey II, had become a bit too overgrown, and he separated it into four pieces. They're replanted in the backyard now. We'll see if they come up again in the spring. The separation process was pretty intense.
 

The good news? The backyard is finally done.

Well, two weeks ago we had the baby shower, and we scored a bunch of loot. This isn't even all of it---I hung the outfits up in my closet.

So, yes, the baby shower was really nice. We had the best cake.
Yeah, it really was fifty pounds. It had devil's food cake with two different mousse layers (one chocolate, one vanilla). The frosting was divine. Sadly, I'd get a slice, need to walk away for a minute, and then SOMEONE WOULD THROW MY PLATE AWAY. Not cool. At the end of the shower, exactly half of the cake was left. You know how many slices I was sent home with? TWO. Not cool. I should've been able to take more than that considering my slices during the shower kept getting bussed away. Blah.

Oh, well. I probably didn''t need the cake anyway. Look how big I was three weeks before the shower.

I won't lie. I'm looking forward to delivering the baby and shedding this weight. I had lost a bunch before the pregnancy, and I'm eager to get back down to that size. Enough about weight, look at the state of my house right now.

So, now my husband has two rooms to paint. Yeah, he's thrilled about it.

But at least putting our combined offices into the larger room means we don't have to live like this anymore:

Oy vey, am I a pregnancy wimp these days. I'm tired, out of breath, *very easily annoyed,* ALWAYS IN THE BATHROOM, and having a hard time comprehending that: 1) I am actually going to get even bigger than I am because 2) I have 2.5 months of this left.

AND THEN I HAVE TO PUSH A BABY OUT.

[immediately banishes this thought, reaches for more candy corn]

Oh, and we just recently learned that my husband? WAS 9.9 LBS AT BIRTH. Funny how this tidbit never got mentioned before, when we just discussing kids and pregnancy and everything in the abstract. Hmmm...

How am I going to get Christmas shopping done when just tying my damn shoes has become an uncomfortable ritual?

(Side note: Throughout the week with my footwear I tend to go the slip-on route with office-appropriate, though highly butch, loafers. But on the weekends, I want comfy sneakers. And hey! Chuck Taylor makes a slip-on version of their classic shoe! Don't do it, people. I've done extensive research, and maybe it's my own weird feet or something, but these things do not measure up to their shoe-laced brethren. My biggest complaint? In order to get a snug-enough fit, you must get a shoe that is a half-size smaller than you normally wear---at least. But then? The way the shoe is designed still leaves part of your foot really snug and the other part flailing around all loosey-goosey. The snugness is not uniform in the least. HATE. Plus, aesthetically they're meh. Converse eliminated the signature black line that follows around the white rubber toe portion, and it seems like a small thing that shouldn't matter much, but it does. You look like you're wearing fake Chucks. And damn, couldn't I just buy fake Chucks? UGH. Anyway, moral of the story: uneven fit on a slightly less attractive shoe. And the price is still close to fifty bucks? NO THANKS. So on the weekends, I continue to wear my old standby, shoe-laced Chucks, but lately I've been forcing my husband to tie them for me.)

We've merged our offices, and NOT GOOD. There's junk everywhere, and I feel like I'm typing this in a carpeted storage container. We've got his desk next to mine; computers, piles of paper, and a pretty useless scanner on the floor; a 4.5 octave marimba directly behind me; you name it. Just stuff everywhere. No matter how much we throw out/give away/recycle, there's still more to sift through and make decisions about. I hate it. I want the team from Clean Sweep to descend on this room and do it up nice. Because, honestly? With the nursery needing our attention, when are we ever going to feel like tackling this mess? Blah.

So, not all of the sod took root and grew in. It's a little patchy.

That light colored stuff on the dead parts is a patch filler that uses grass seed mixed with paper mulch (to keep the birds from eating the seed, I guess) to help fill in the bald sections. That patch filler? Looks remarkably like puke.

Still not the oasis we have in mind, but the backyard is getting there. I'm going to be super annoyed if the puke doesn't fill in the dead parts.

Here are the photos of the Great Sod Laying of last weekend.

He actually got up at 6am this morning (temps are going to skyrocket over the day to triple digits) to finish prepping the yard. This meant the application of more layers of top soil. Tonight, after the temperature goes down a bit, he's going to roll out the sod and water it liberally. Apparently watering in the evening is supposed to be better for the sod anyway. Our two dead frontyard plants have been removed, but their replacements won't go in until tomorrow.

It figures that Home Despot FINALLY got fresh sod just as the temperatures were going back up again. I really hope the sod doesn't fry.

Pictures soon.

Occasionally, when the jackpot skyrockets, my office mate will offer to go buy us Powerball tickets, and I took her up on the offer yesterday. Of course, if I ever win, I plan to split the pot with her, since unlike me, she is not too lazy to go out and get the tickets for us. My involvement is simply handing her a dollar and telling her to let the machine pick my numbers. Even though I lose, I think I may start playing it regularly instead of just whenever the jackpot hits three digits. I've noticed that special-to-me numbers have popped up in the past. Maybe I should play them, hit the jackpot, pay off the house, buy a new one, quit my job, have my recently-developed varicose veins taken care of. They're awful, those veins.

Recently some stressful situations have caused me to reevaluate my previous stance on yoga. I think I'm going to start taking prenatal yoga on a drop-in basis. There is a local class that meets on Saturdays. I have all the equipment (mat, yoga pants, block, strap, etc.), but I don't want to commit to an entire semester's worth of classes ESPECIALLY since the semester wraps up uncomfortably close to my due date. Would hate to pay for classes that I could very well end up missing.

We purchased our first nursery decoration over the weekend, and it arrived yesterday. It's this adorable alphabet poster:

I was sold on this poster for so many reasons: the modern design elements, the fact that it isn't sickeningly twee, the inclusion of the xylophone (which my husband plays), the fact that there is gray in it (like the carpet in the nursery), and the orange. Who doesn't like orange? Also, this poster is gender neutral in both color palette and content. It will make a nice centerpiece for the rest of the room, which I believe will be painted white (not by me, I don't paint anymore) on three walls and then BAM! an accent wall of orange. Maybe chalkboard paint on the sliding closet doors. We'll see. LOTS OF IDEAS! (But absolutely no execution of them beyond buying this poster.)

In other news, Home Depot finally got some good-looking sod in stock and the weather here has been cool and wet, so I think we may actually finish our backyard. Husband is supposedly buying the sod tonight with the intention of laying it down this weekend. All the recent rain could not bring back a couple of plants we lost to drought, so we had to get two replacements last weekend. They are still in the pots and look great, so fingers crossed. I hate buying plants only to have them die. We've lost two small evergreen trees in our front yard, and I miss them and their little Charlie Brown branches. Sniff.

What else, what else...oh, my skin looks awful and I gained seven pounds last month. We are probably less than three weeks away from my innie becoming a full-fledged outie. Yikes.

So, there's a reason why I have been rather mum on the subject of the backyard transformation: there's been no progress on that front, really.

Well, no, actually. That's not entirely true.

After all the clover (there was never grass) was disposed of, we were left with a large expanse of bald dirt that my husband then covered with top soil at varying degrees of thickness in an attempt to level out the uneven-ness of our backyard. Lots and lots of top soil was put down in anticipation of laying about eighteen pieces of sod down on it.

And then we started into a serious drought around here, which left the local nurseries/home improvement garden shops with only dead rolls of sod (uh, no thanks).

Seriously, we cannot get eighteen rolls of sod that is not brown.

Oh, and our local area is under a weekend water restriction that may or may not allow us to properly water the sod, assuming we ever get our hands on it. The rules of the restriction are kind gray on the matter of lawns vs. gardens/plants & shrubs.

So, we wait. I can't bring myself to photograph the Dustbowl-like condition of our backyard, and with the exception of Audrey II, our freakish hosta,

pretty much everything out there is dead or very close to it. We got four little tomatoes to grow on our tomato plant, but they don't look very appetizing. So, basically the backyard is an embarrassing wasteland, and as the temps around here are staying well within the 90-100 degree range, we figure our time is better spent working indoors anyway.

Ugh. Maybe we should just cement over the entire backyard and be done with it...