The Nursery is Finished!

Yeah, not a lot of posting over here lately. Focus has definitely shifted from house to baby...

Still, it's worth noting here, too, that the nursery is finally finished! I finished the painting late Friday night, October 3. I put the furniture back between contractions in the wee hours of the morning, and Dexter was born at 12:03 PM on Saturday, October 4.

It's taken the rest of this time (almost 3 weeks) just to put the finishing touches on, like putting the rug down, arranging things on the bookshelves, and putting sheets on the crib.

Here it is, in all of its glory. I do love it, but I'm not sure I'd do the same thing again. It took about a month to do all of that painting. I think the next kid is getting peel & stick decals.

Shower enclosure, trees, and a new sofa!

Master Shower Enclosure

It's been brought to my attention that I have not yet posted a picture of the now-finished master shower enclosure. So, here it is. :) I'm really happy with it. The original design included a LOT more framing. (Why? I don't know. That was cheapest; I guess that was the appeal.) So far, it's a big pain to keep clean. We put Rain-X on the inside, but it's not really helping it stay clean. I'm trying to use the squeegee (sp?) after each shower, but there are still streaks and water spots on the inside, plus regular cleaning streaks on the outside. So, I'm not sure how this is going to work out long-term.

(Note also the beautiful temporary bath mat. I'm trying to decide what color to get. Also, thanks to some fine strategic placement of the floor vent, getting a good-sized bath mat is going to be quite the challenge. )


Trees

We always knew we wanted to put some trees along the front property line. Home Depot had fruit trees on sale, so we figured we'd just go for it. The best part was that Dennis got to dig 7 giant holes in the yard. (outside + digging + dirt = happy Dennis) We have 2 apple trees, 2 peach trees, 2 pear trees, and a crabapple tree. We think we did a pretty good job digging the holes, watering, fertilizing, mulching, and protecting them from all of the wildlife around here. To top it off, we had a big thunderstorm last night, so they got even more water. Here's hoping they all live and we end up with some great fruit in the years to come!


New Sofa

We knew long ago that we were in need of a new sofa. But we held off until the move for various reasons (get a good sense of the new space, avoid moving things twice, etc.). Over the last month or so, one or both of us has been to Room & Board, Rothman, Weekends Only, Macy's, La-Z-Boy, Ashley Furniture, Peerless Furniture, Peerless Leather, and Bassett. And that's on top of extensive online shopping. Everything we found was either too soft or too hard, too expensive or too big, etc.

I'd found a potential sofa online at Crate & Barrel, and we were going to go try to look at it on Sunday. But, at $1800, it was still pretty pricey, so we wanted to double-check a few inexpensive places first. Weekends Only rotates their stock often, and our "requirements" had changed quite a bit as we continued shopping and realized more and more that we were not going to find what we really wanted.

So, we went back to Weekends Only. We found this sofa (a floor model) for $825 and just jumped on it. It's not our "forever" sofa. We really wanted the chaise on the other side. We really wanted real leather (this is "durahide," which is a fancy word for "vinyl). We wanted a slightly more contemporary look. But hey, no one was willing to put up the extra $3200 for the one we really wanted at Bassett, so we got this one instead. Hey - it's easy to clean, the sections hook together, and there is plenty of room for people to sit down.

Next up: ottoman and side tables for the living room, desk for the office, dresser for the baby's room, barstools and breakfast table/chairs for the kitchen. I'm almost glad we can't buy rugs for a while - I'm quite furniture-shopped out!

A couple of paint changes

Well, I already posted about the Artichoke in the guest bedroom. But we picked a different color for the nursery today, too. It's a Behr color called "Sensible Hue." As much as I hate to put anything so named in the house ("Sensible?" Ugh.), and as cliche as it is to have a nursery with pale yellow walls, I think it will go well with the bedding we've chosen (we color-matched at Home Depot), and it does seem like a nice color for that room.

In other news today, we purchased lights for the office and nursery and bought all of the light switches and electrical outlets and their respective switchplate covers. Another $500+ from us to Home Depot. (And we still haven't bought the kitchen sink!)

I'm also beginning to have some doubts about a June 19 completion. I'm not yet ready to say it's not possible, but there is still a LOT of work left to do. All of the cabinets need considerable assembly. We're waiting on some replacement parts, too, as some of the cabinets were slightly damaged. There's a lot of tile work left in the master bath. The hardwood flooring needs to go in. The doors and trim need to go in everywhere. The electrician and plumber also both have quite a bit left to do. The plaster guy needs to come back and fix some things. And there is a ton of cleanup, too.

Oh well. We shall see.

Locked out again

So, we went to the house last night to ooh and aah at our new cabinets, some of which are actually installed, and we couldn't get in! The super-secret-side-door-key was nowhere to be found, so we came home to get the front door key that Terry had rather unceremoniously given us a couple of weeks ago. It, too, had mysteriously vanished.

I had put it on top of our key box right when we got it, so we'd be able to find it, etc. Dennis even said, "yeah, leave it there and we'll get copies made." Neither one of us had any reason to use, move, touch, or otherwise disturb the key since that day. yet, it is not there anymore.

We have a call out to Terry - hopefully he has the side door key in his pocket or has another key to the front door. I know we're not willing to pay weekend rates for a locksmith, but we'd *reallly* like to get in there and do some more painting this weekend, as the floors are not yet in.

In the meantime, Dennis is over there now digging a hole for the front steps. Don't need a key for that.

Anyway, during the many days before the lockout, we made some significant progress on paint, and other people made progress on the master bath. Over the Memorial Day weekend, we had lots of help in the form of Ruby, my friend Sarah, and our incredibly generous (current) neighbors Tom and Sue. I shudder to think how much painting we'd have left to do if we hadn't had so much help. Here are some photos:

May 23
Not too exciting. We got grout in the kitchen & 2nd bath, but it's hard to even tell because the grout haze is still on the tile in these pictures. I think you can at least tell that it looks better than the pre-grouted versions of these photos.




May 26
Significant progress on the painting during the 3-day weekend, thanks to a lot of work from a lot of people. Some rooms are done - with 2 coats of paint on them and everything. Other rooms still require a 2nd coat. Everything except the nursery and the closets have at least a first coat of paint. We're confident there will be a need for touch-ups anyway, but we're trying to do as much as we can before the floors go in. It is really nice not to have to worry about paint drips on the floor!



In the guest bedroom, we had originally decided to go with SW's "Clary Sage." At some times of the day it looked OK, but other times it was just awful, awful, awful! I kept staring at it and saying, "seafoam green! ugh!" So I went one shade darker - "Artichoke." It's still wet in that picture; it dries a little darker than that and is a huge improvement over the Clary Sage. That's what happens when you have to quickly pick paint colors for your new house when you're still in your old, dark house. (No, your eyes are not deceiving you - only one wall is Artichoke so far. I was afraid I wouldn't like it, either, and then we'd have 4 walls of a really dark color to paint over.)




May 27
The beginnings of the shower system being installed. Isn't that a nice orange? Hell, it can be fluorescent rainbow stripes as long as it maintains a water-tight seal. And the whirlpool tub is finally nestled in its little home. The bathroom seems much larger without a giant bathtub in the middle of it.



May 28
A little more progress here. The floor tile in the master bath is in (no grout, of course), and the cabinets were delivered. If anyone is wondering if this baby is eating my brain, here is more evidence - I walked through the garage to get into the house and completely missed the giant stack of boxes pictured. I was so focused on not tripping over the other stuff littering the floor of the garage - I guess I was just concentrating on my footing instead of looking up. At least, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Appliances & final paint selections

Moving forward...

We've spent a LOT of time and money at Home Depot lately. Just yesterday, I bought 11 gallons of paint. That's on top of the 20 or 30 we already bought. We also bought some lighting, 2 sinks for the 2nd bathroom, and appliances. Well, Sears got the appliance $, but you get my point.

We finally have paint colors for the entire house. Let's see if I can run them all down:
Entryway: Sands of Time
Dining Room Walls - Bracing Blue
Dining Room Ceiling - Upward
Office Walls - Connected Gray (which isn't really gray at all...)
Living Room Walls - Sands of Time
Living Room Accent Wall - Pennywise
Kitchen - Sands of Time
Breakfast - Sands of Time
Breakfast Accent Wall - Pennywise
Bedroom Hallway - Nice White
Laundry Room - Reticence
Half Bath Walls - Jonquil
Half Bath Ceiling - Pennywise
Guest Bedroom - Clary Sage
Nursery - shade of baby blue TBD (we have 5 shades of blue in the works throughout the house already - surely one of them will be OK for this room.)
2nd Bathroom (incl. both vanities) - Reticence
Master Bedroom - Sleepy Blue
Master Bedroom Hallway - Languid Blue
Master Bathroom - Meditative

None of the closets are painted yet. I'd like to paint them (just white) to help keep the plaster looking fresh, but I don't think that's going to happen unless we get a LOT of painting help in the next week or so.

I love almost all of it. I do think we had to make too many color decisions too quickly, and it does show. If I had it to do over (and I certainly do not), I would probably change (if only slightly) the guest bedroom, laundry room, dining room, and possibly the master bathroom. And I really hope the 2nd bathroom color goes with whatever we do in there, since we haven't actually chosen anything yet. Oh well.

Pics below - 2nd bath sinks (Kohler Archer), Microwave (Kenmore Elite 80829), and the dishwasher (Kenmore Elite 13159). Yeah, they pretty much just look like a standard sink, microwave, and dishwasher. But somehow the appliance purchases seem like a big deal since we researched them for what seems like an eternity.




Next up: Choosing & buying a kitchen sink!

Some new pictures

More progress = more pictures. As of last night (probably before then), we have tile in the laundry room and kitchen. Nothing is grouted, but that's surely coming soon. Kitchen will get gray grout; laundry room will get something beige-y to match the tile.

I really like how it came out. And we do have some leftover tile to return, so that's a little bit of money back in our pockets!

I can't believe *WE* get to live here!

Long time, no updates... mostly because we've been too busy doing stuff over there to actually post about it. But I've been taking pictures!

Terry has finally conceded that he won't be finished by May 28. Good thing we knew that a long time ago, or we'd be very disappointed. We're now shooting for final trim-out the week of June 16 and moving most of the big stuff the weekend of June 20. So, another month.

There's SO much to update... I'll just throw in a ton of pictures and (mostly) let them speak for themselves.


Photos from 5/10
Wow! What a world of difference some plaster makes! The rooms seemed incredibly small with the dark gray drywall. When it's all white, it seems much bigger.





Photos from 5/16
On this day, we began priming. It's so much easier to paint when there is no flooring or trim to mask off. Dennis painted from 6pm - 6am.




Photos from 5/18
Really, we worked all weekend in the house. Bud even came over and helped on both Saturday and Sunday. We managed to get everything primed except the hallway, half bath, 2nd bath, and closets, and we got one coat of "real" paint on the living room, kitchen, breakfast, entryway, and laundry room. Sadly, I am still investigating paint colors for the office, nursery, 2nd bath, master bath, and master bedroom. And I think I went too dark in the laundry room, so that might require a do-over. :(

Thankfully, the hardwood floors still won't be in next weekend, so we'll have a few more days to paint.