House to Home: Part 1

I've been absolutely horrible about updating, mostly because we've been so busy that I've been falling into bed without doing anything at the end of the night. We have made so much progress though that you wouldn't recognize our house, or my belly lol, and it's starting to look like a real home. 

Last we left off, the walls had been washed, primed, ripped full of holes, patched and then the floors had been sanded.

Since then, our living room has gone from: 

To this:

To this:

Unfortunately this lovely clean room only lasted a night, as we moved a full truckload of stuff over and most of it ended up stacked in that clear bit of floor space. We're missing all electrical plugs but we do have the new LED retrofits in and a temporary switch so we have light. And the progress is not just in the living room. It's all the rooms! Except maybe the garage. 

The master bedroom has gone from this:

To this:

To this:

While our master looks pretty much ready to go, it also has no LED retrofits, electrical plugs or switches, not even a temporary switch, and until the house is a little more animal ready, we can't actually move our brood over and sleep there. 

The baby's room has had similar treatment which helps ease some of the crazy need to nest. I'm actually so tied when I get home that even my hormones are zonked and only heartburn or the need to pee can pull me out of bed. 

The pay off is worth it though :) The nursery has gone from:

To this:

To this:

The rest of the house has gotten quite a facelift too. The second door to the guest room was closed, the stairs refinished, the risers painted red and the front door painted grey. 

More photos are soon to come, there's still so much we need to finish before the baby arrives!

Pediatricians and Floor Staining

In between running to the grocery store for last minute Thanksgiving supplies and spending time with friends from out of town, E and I squeezed in a meeting with a potential pediatrician and stopped in to check on the floors yesterday.

The meeting with our new pediatrician was first and we absolutely loved her. She was recommended by our midwife and honestly couldn't be a better fit. She actually went through IVF to conceive her baby so she really understands our journey and how the challenges shape your perspective on parenting. We were completely on the same page and it was really affirming to hear someone else vocalize exactly what we've been feeling. As a plus, she is supportive of cloth diapering and had no problem hunting down latex free vaccines for baby girl in case she inherited my allergy. We both feel really good about her and I don't think we need to interview anyone else. 

After the doctor, E and I stopped in and the house and I was so excited to see that the floor guys have started staining! They ended up needing an extra day to sand and prep so I wasn't sure if they'd be ready for the stain yet. Clearly, we were pleasantly surprised.

 

When we were there they were just starting on the top floor and I didn't stick around to watch them because the fumes are definitely not pregnancy safe. I snapped this quick shot of the master bedroom getting the first coat and this shot below of the nursery. From my quick peak, it looked like they had one person applying the stain by hand and another person following after them with a buffer. 

 

I'm not sure if the stain is applied in one coat or two but I know they're putting 3 layers of commercial grade satin finish polyurethane on top which I'm hoping will do a good job of hiding scratches and scuffs. The floors are in such beautiful shape after sanding, I cringe just thinking about our wonderful pet's claws digging in for traction and the wheels of baby's future tricycle tearing down the hallway. I'm also going to have to buy lots of those little felt pads to attach to all our furniture, refinishing would be such an incredible pain if we were actually occupying the house, I'll do just about anything to avoid having to do it again!

Hardwood Refinishing Progress!

As of November 18th, we have been officially kicked out of the house for floor refinishing! Our electrician R was trying really, really hard to get everything patched before the floor guys came in, but it just wasn't possible, even with an extra set of hands. They were able to get all the baseboards off though and got maybe 75% of the patching done before getting the boot.

 

This room is baby's soon to be nursery and you can see the patching out in the hallway and above the light switches that hasn't happened yet.  They did get everything wired for the smoke detector (above the door) and the new outlets (under the window) and the other side of the room is patched as well. You can also get a teensy peak at the sanded floors, I'm so thrilled that they're in good condition underneath all the scratches.

 

This is our master bedroom and you can really see how gorgeous the floors are. The original wood looks pristine after just the sanding and I think there's very little for them to repair or fill with wood putty. The two outer outlets under the window are for power and I believe the middle one is for internet, while the hole high up on the wall is stuffed with cat 5, coax and power for our TV.

Another shot of the master, I'm pretty sure we're almost entirely patched in that room. 

With all the sanding basically complete, E and I had to make the tough choice on the floor color. I was having a tough time picking based off tiny swatches of paper, since stain looks different on actual wood, so the floor guys made us a grid of all our top choices.

It's pretty hard to get an accurate sense of the color based on my crappy phone picture, but these were our final options. We nixed the lighter colors first, we definitely wanted a dark floor, and then nixed the red toned stains next. Our furniture has a lot of red tones in it and when you put red toned furniture on top of red toned floors, you get way more red than we wanted. In the end, we went with dark walnut which is the bottom, left corner. It's the color toughest to see in this particular photo but it has a really rich tone and E loved it right off the bat. I could probably have debated it for a few more days before ultimately making the same decision, but he expedited the process lol.

While the floor guys do their thing, R and his helpers have shifted their focus to the garage which we are attempting to turn into a finished space. That room is going to be a much bigger project than anticipated but in the end I think it will completely worth it. It's a 2 car garage with a gabled ceiling and R is going to loft 50% of it. This leaves an 8 foot 2 inch ceiling below, with recessed lighting, and a large loft above where we can store a ton of stuff or eventually turn into a little hang out space. The loft requires a massive engineered beam, which we have on order, and then drywall and insulation for the entire space, epoxying the floors, removing the garage door since the track takes up so much space, and building our own barn doors to replace them. It's really going to be a beast but the extra space will give us a laundry room, storage, and a work out/man cave space for E.  I can't wait to see what it looks like when the project is complete.

Baby's First Car Seat

If baby were somehow born tomorrow we'd have an actual car seat to take them home in! I had intended to wait until after our baby showers to start buying the big stuff but Babies R Us was having a killer sale and Target was willing to price match. I snagged our Chicco Keyfit 30 for almost $100 bucks of and got a $25 gift card on top of it which makes it more than worth it in my opinion.

Since I'm getting really big and my pelvic girdle pain is starting to slow me down a bit, I wanted to get the base installed while I can still get myself in the back seat of the car. The Keyfit 30 comes with a really awesome latch system but like most cars, my Highlander has the latch connectors on the two outer seats and leaves out the middle. You'd think that you could just use the two inner connectors from the outside seats but Chicco specifically says "Use of lower LATCH anchors in the center seating position with non-standard spacing between the bars (more or less than 280 mm) is prohibited." So much for the fancy, new installation!

Since latch was out, I installed the base using the middle seatbelt and the Chicco seatbelt lock off.  It was still really simple, leveled easily with the little bubble leveler and adjustable foot, and doesn't budge when you push on it. The lock off is a nice touch as well that really ensures you get no movement in the belt.  All in all, I think baby will be nice and safe in their car seat which is the one thing I was completely unwilling to compromise or cut corners on. Our kiddo will basically be rear facing for as long as I can physically fit them in a safe, rear facing seat and it looks like the Keyfit 30 will be a great start.

TWENTY WEEKS!

Oh my god, I know I haven't posted in forever! Between a huge work event, buying a house, and growing a human, I haven't had any time or energy to spare. Actually just buying a house could be considered a full time job, who knew it would take so much work and time?

With so much going on the time has flown by and this week marked the long awaited halfway point in our pregnancy. At our official 20 week mark, we finally went public and revealed our pregnancy to friends, family and facebook.

E and I had been anticipating this moment since we got our positive, had planned out the announcement photo and carefully selected the perfect pair of tiny vans. We probably looked at over a hundred pairs before we found these Crayola rainbow checkers on eBay and immediately fell in love. With so much planning and anticipation you'd think that the announcement would be full of excitement but I have to admit, it was more nerve-wrecking than anything. Going public can't be taken back, it makes everything so real that we sat there with our finger hovering over the post button for a good few minutes before we could bring ourselves to click.

The main condition for going public with this little bean was a clean bill of health via the anatomy scan. We had ours the morning of our 20 week prenatal appointment on Monday and little bean was anything but cooperative. They wiggled and turned and made it nearly impossible for the tech to take all the necessary measurements, so much so that our scan ran over almost 35-45 minutes. We ended up late for our prenatal appointment and with several people ahead of us to see the midwife, E was almost late to work. The tech of course couldn't tell me anything about the baby at the actual scan, but we got an email a couple days later giving us the all clear and my prenatal appointment with our midwife went really well too.

As of 20 weeks I am DOWN a pound in weight, don't ask me how that happened since I had Bob's Big Boy with a chocolate malt the day before, normal blood pressure and my urine was all clear for protein and glucose. Baby is growing right on time, they measured a few days ahead again, and their sex matches their chromosomes from our PGD/PGS testing. The one bummer thus far is that I still can't feel the baby move. I thought for sure I'd be feeling some kicks or little flutters but unless I'm mistaking them for something else, baby's acrobatics are still a mystery.

Hopefully in the next few days I'll have good house news to share too. It's been a beast but we're so close to having a place that's really ours to bring baby home to, a place for them to take their first steps and mark their height on the door frame. We're almost there!

17 Weeks - Home Offers!

Today E and I officially signed a sellers counter offer to accept our first house! This house and lot is a little smaller than the previous one we offered on (with less closets, boo) but it's got good bones and is very cute. It's far from a done deal though, there were counters sent to several people but I have a feeling they're going to pick ours. Then, we move into a whirlwind of inspections and contractors because the house we offered on needs some work before we can move in.

Another row of bumps!

Actually, some work might be an understatement. It needs a new kitchen, with walls knocked down, a small addition to add a bathroom, flooring replaced, laundry moved to the garage and the sliding doors moved to a different wall. It also needs some fencing, drywall and insulation in the garage, and floors refinished. So really, most of the house when you think about it. As long as the addition is done, we could probably wait to renovate the homes two existing bathrooms. One is kind of unusable but the other is in good shape despite being outdated. The floors could also probably wait to be refinished, but it would be so much easier to do that before all our furniture is all moved in.

In the meantime, our house hunt has started to merge with my pregnancy in my dreams. The other day I dreamt that I had to meet the contractor but I couldn't because I went into labor. I was trying to find someone else to meet the contractor while sitting in my hospital bed arguing with the nurses that I couldn't be in labor because I had a house to renovate. Clearly I've got a lot on the brain!

Mama Mobile

As part of everything falling into place for this little bean to become our take home baby, E and I have finally upgraded my Jetta, Sydney, to an absolutely fantabulous mama mobile! We're a bit crazy so we actually got her just before we transferred, in anticipation of our little bean sticking. Thank goodness they did! So, baby's first official gift is a safe ride home, a 2009 Toyota Highlander Hybrid Limited with three lovely rows. I usually name my cars but I'm still getting to know her and right now she's mostly being called "Shiny" as in "What a nice shiny!".

While we were originally looking at slightly newer Highlanders, as well as the Subaru Outback, Honda CRV and Pilot and the Mazda CX7 and CX9, Shiny sort of fell into our laps. One of our family friends, P, who had been ill for some time passed away and the person who was going to be buying Shiny had to back out. This left her up for grabs and when P's wife offered her to us, we jumped at the chance to try her out. A hybrid had definitely been outside our price range and although she's an older Hybrid and newer gas models get fairly comparable gas mileage, we both really liked the green factor and low emissions.

Our top priorities for a new car mostly focused around family friendliness. We wanted three rows so that I can transport people and Milou at the same time. A back seat large enough for rear facing car seats without having to move the front seats all the way up. When we're not using the third row, we wanted a nice big trunk to hold all the things I cart around on a daily basis as well as the occasional IKEA purchase and soon, a stroller. It had to get decent gas mileage, not be too big to park, preferably have leather for ease of cleaning and above all be safe and not too expensive. I'll admit that Sydney is quite the fancy, sporty girl and because of that I have gotten used to certain "standards." She's luxurious with lovely extras like butt warmers, steering wheel controls, automatic climate control and a fabulous sunroof. These things definitely weren't necessities, but they would be nice to have.

Shiny met and exceeded all of our expectations with ease, even if she's a little older and has more miles than we were originally looking for.  She has three rows with a very respectable trunk when the third is down. Her back seat is super spacious and roomy, it can easily accommodate tall people and car seats, and it has second row air conditioning to keep our passengers and soon to be baby comfortable. Since she has the Limited package, she has all leather interior and power everything including a gorgeous sun roof, back up camera, GPS, bluetooth, and just about every extra you could have added. The trunk even opens and closes automatically which is a cool trick that hasn't gotten old. After driving her for a month, I'm starting to get the hang of parking her and even in traffic conditioners not ideal for a hybrid, she's getting pretty good mileage for an SUV. All in all, I'm absolutely smitten with her and can't wait to bring home baby in her roomy, safe back seat.