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.

31 Weeks

Somehow, time keeps rushing by and we are getting closer and closer to baby arriving. Last Thursday marked 31 weeks and if baby actually makes their appearance on time, we'll be meeting our little bean in less than 10 weeks! 

According to our every 2 week check ups, baby is doing really well. Active, growing, doing all the things a baby is supposed to do. There is still a good amount of room in there for moving and lots of fluid so we've got a lot of position changes going on. The baby usually doesn't hang out in one spot for too long, not when there are somersaults to be turned and a bladder to bounce on.

I'd love to show you pictures of an in-progress nursery, sweetly painted with furniture being assembled, but the truth is our house is still in the electrical stage. We have made really good progress though and are at the point where things start happening really quickly. We passed our rough electrical inspection for all the rooms except the 3 that weren't ready to be inspected yet. Both the upstairs and downstairs bathrooms were patched AND painted, holy crap two mostly finished rooms, and the second round of inspections is this Thursday. Once the last 3 rooms get signed off on, low voltage stuff can be run, patching can be kicked into overdrive and the floor refinishing crew can do their thing. This month is going to be a flurry of activity and I think we have a really good shot at actually moving, with nursery furniture, in the early part of December.

Although we have a lot of stuff in storage, we've got a pretty big shopping list going of things we're going to need. The biggest is definitely the sectional for the living room, followed by nursery furniture (crib, two dressers, lamps, bookcase, rug, chair), side tables and lamps, a desk and filing cabinet, bookcases for the living room, possibly some chairs. We're going to have more space than we've ever had and while we don't have to furnish everything at once, I'm very aware that if I don't do it now, it's not likely to get done once the baby is here.

I've got another appointment coming up at the end of this week and will hopefully have photos of fully painted bathrooms to share!

House Progress

 

Progress on our new house has been pretty slow but we are making headway. We now have what we're affectionately calling swiss cheese with doors. All the rooms have been washed and primed and our new electrical has almost been roughed in completely. I think we only need new wiring in the guest room and nursery and after I took these shots, little plastic boxes were added to each new outlet and switch. 

 

Dining Room

Living Room

Once the electrical is fully roughed in and we have actual outlets and switches, we're going to use the same holes in the walls to run interconnected smoke detectors, ethernet cable for the internet and cable TV. That should conclude all the behind the walls work so we'll be able to patch the holes and prime over the new patches. I think we'll also replace the recessed cans with LED lights because the cans are pretty old.

Guest Room

Guest Bathroom and Entry Way

That scary hole in our entry way where you can see right outside was where the electrical was replaced for the outdoor porch lights. It was actually closed up pretty quickly but it was freaky to look out through what should be a solid wall.  We also picked some really cool vintage/industrial style light fixtures for the entry way and entry hallway that I'm excited to see up there once everything is painted.

Master Bedroom

The master closet looks about a million times better primed white. We went back and forth on leaving it stained cherry red or painting it a neutral color and I'm now 100% sure we made the right choice. The room is so much lighter and brighter, so much so that I think we might leave it white instead of painting it grey. 

Upstairs Hallway and Stairs

E and I have been toying with the idea of eventually adding a skylight to the stairway. It has a good spot for art with a little ledge but then there's all this ceiling space where a skylight would really lighten things. It's not high on the priority list so maybe we get to it sometime next year but I think a Solatube would look pretty awesome there.

Nursery

The nursery is probably the room I'm most excited about. Planning it out is fulfilling all the nesting instincts I can't indulge because we can't move in yet. Since the shape of our room is so different from the mock up we originally came up with, I've redesigned it to fit our actual space with all it's character filled nooks and slopes.

 

I can't wait to actually start decorating the nursery for baby :) It's such a tangible reminder that a real, healthy baby is actually on the way.