Photo Ops

I know, this post has nothing to do with our house at all. But I thought some people might like it anyway.

In the midst of getting our house ready for a baby, we decided to take a quick afternoon for a maternity photo shoot. A friend who happens to play a photographer sometimes captured the shoot for us. And we're (well at least I'm) obsessed with the photos. Here's a few of my favorites:

A Peek[-A-Boo] Into The Nursery

Since the end of construction, we've started on the project of decorating the nursery. It's still got a ways to go, but here's a quick preview of it.

We have all the major furniture pieces now: crib, dresser and rocker. The dresser still needs to be stained/painted as it's an unfinished hand-me-down (it was part of a bedroom set I had years back), but we haven't 100% figured out what we want to do with it yet. We also have a nice, soft high pile rug to anchor the room, a towel holder that we plan to use to hold baby blankets, some baskets for toys, a changing pad for atop the dresser, and some heavy curtains to block out any light. Since the picture was taken we also received the crib mattress, curtain rods, and a pouf ottoman for near the rocker.

We do have a few things left to be delivered. Our mobile is on its way from California as I type (well probably not since it's coming USPS and it's 9:00pm, so it's probably sitting in post office storage), and a few pillows and a changing pad cover should come early October. Then we get to sit back and arrange, rearrange, and figure out what we forgot. The goal is to have the nursery mostly complete by Halloween, and fully complete (minus any toys or clothes and such) for our baby shower.

Then this weekend, after a quick trip to Bloomington for a wedding, I'll be having a girls day with a couple friends to paint.

And yes, I've heard that some of the Jewish women that read this blog may be having a small heart attack right now over the idea of the nursery being set up, but I really like to have a say in things that affect me when I can and to have things like this done my way, so to relinquish control was just out of the question (call me a control freak, I don't mind). Also, I may be superstitious, but plenty of babies do just fine with having the nursery set up ahead of time, so I'm just going to go with that. :)

Of course I'll have updates as things come together more!

Three Rooms Become Two

Sorry folks for the lack of a post recently (or basically forever). Life has gotten the best of us and unfortunately the blog suffered. I'll have two posts for you tonight to hopefully make up for the hiatus.

After 3 weeks of construction, the bedrooms were finally "done." I use the word done loosely because there was still an abundance of staining that needed to be tended to.

Here's a little photo timeline of the construction project.

Center window all closed up. Ready for the new wall.

Framing out the new closets (sorry it's a tad blurry...)

Closet framing on the other side of the window.

Doorway opened up, header in.

Shot of the closet framing and opened doorway with header.

So much wider area to walk from the front to the back of the room.

So much wider area to walk from the front to the back of the room.

Framed in window bench (with storage!)

New wall separating the back room.

Drywall begins!

Dry wall on the new closets and window bench.

Dry wall on the new closets and window bench.

Dry wall on the new closets and window bench.

And a lid for the window bench!

No longer able to get between rooms without going into the hall.

Closet doors.

Closet doors hung. Window bench and baseboards stained. 

Kevin took a couple weekends and stained all the baseboards and the window benches in the two rooms. He even did the trim and other staining projects throughout the rest of the house that we had been seriously slacking on getting to (most had only been there for two years...).

So now it's on to decorating!

A Not-So-Baby Sized Project

I know I haven't posted any updates in a while. That's mostly because we haven't really done much around the house lately. But we do have a fun new project we're planning, a nursery!

We still have to tackle the big construction of the upstairs bedrooms, so that's our first step. Once the construction is done, we will have two larger bedrooms, instead of two small rooms and an awkward adjoining room. Each room will have proper lighting and closets too. Then we have the fun task of decorating. New light fixtures, paint, furniture, area rugs, curtains, etc etc.

We'll also be working a bit in the basement and setting up a guest room down there as well. Because, you know, a giant upstairs project wasn't enough to do at one time.

We don't have a whole lot to share about either project quite yet, as we don't even have a time frame of when we're going to start the construction yet. But we'll definitely keep everyone updated when we start. And one of these years we'll update on our exterior projects and how they're coming along too (hint: slowly thanks to mother nature).

A Weekend Outdoors

To go with the theme from the last post, we wanted to give an update of the outdoor projects we've been tackling. We didn't get everything we wanted done, but this weekend we did a TON.

We'll start with the patio area. We rented a manual sod cutter which Kevin and my dad used to pull up the grass in the area we want the patio to go. We laid down some weed block to act as a tarp and mud barrier for now. We'll pull that back up when it comes time to actually build the patio. The ground still needs to be dug down deeper and leveled before any pavers can be laid. But hey at least its a start.

Sadie had a need to be in as many pictures as she could on Saturday

While they were at the fun, they pulled up the grass in the area of our vegetable garden too. Then Sunday, I got all the fruits and veggies planted. I still need some more mulch, though. We have tomatoes, green and orange peppers, zucchini, squash, cucumbers, eggplant, watermelon, cantaloupe, strawberries, blueberries, two types of lettuce, and chives.

I also got some flowers for pots and the front garden.

And last but not least, Kevin and his dad did some work on the deck. They popped off the top rail and the spindles, then replaced the top rail. The spindles still need to be put back on and the stair rails finished, but it was a great day's progress. Also, another day I'll finish staining the rest of the deck and all the new pieces.

Hopefully some nights this week and this coming weekend we can finish some of these projects up. We still have to finish up the front landscaping and the rock garden too.

The Great Outdoors

We wanted to give everyone a quick preview of some upcoming outdoor projects we have planned for the next month-ish.

We'll start with the parkway rock garden. Weather permitting, this weekend we plan to tackle creating a rock garden in the area between the street and sidewalk in front of our house. We decided a rock garden would be a good idea for the space to keep it low maintenance and also allow for a good place for people to get out of their cars and not kill any grass/plants by walking on them.

We also plan to create a vegetable garden in the backyard. There is an area on the side of the deck near our hoses and rain barrel (and a/c) that we feel would be perfect for our first vegetable garden. It should actually be a pretty decent size, so we're hoping to be able to plant enough to carry us through most of our summer fruits/veggies. Some quick measurements and calculations say we should be looking at just under 100 sqft of garden. For a city garden, we think thats pretty good.

Next weekend (again weather permitting-come on mother nature, work with us here...), we plan to makeover our deck a bit. The previous owners decided to not do the rail and spindles quite properly, not to mention the delightful squirrels have eaten the rail, so we're looking to fix it. Our lofty future goal would be to eventually redo the entire deck (redesign and rebuild) with composite materials, but for the time being this fix will do.

And our final plan is to build a patio. We bought new furniture and fire pit, and we're going to build a patio for it to all go on. It will be right at the bottom of the deck stairs under the big tree in our yard.

Hopefully things will go to plan (and mother nature will cooperate and let us get these projects done as scheduled). I'll try to keep everyone up to date on each project as we complete them!

Oh The Places We'll Go

A new trend that we love is travel pinboards, essentially a corkboard map (whether just one country or the world). Then you put pins in all the places you visit.

We decided we loved the idea of documenting our travels together, but wanted to put our own little spin on things. Instead of buying a board or print, we decided to paint a map of the work onto the wall.

The project was tackled by myself and my mom (I tend to rely on her skills for any artsy projects, though she comes in handy for some construction type projects too). We started by projecting the image on the wall and tracing it with a pencil. Note: pencils work great because if/when you mess up, you can just erase and fix it.

Then we watered down a few different shades of wall paint to get a watercolor effect (three different greens so it tied in with the adjoining living room). Then we just went to town filling in all of the land area. I tackled the islands (there are a lot of islands on this planet, fyi) and my mom started with the larger landmasses.

After the mural was complete, I made little flag thumb tacks. I printed out small country flags from each of the place we had traveled to and mod podged them onto the heads of the thumb tacks. Here's what the markers for our most recent trip look like:

And as we continue to travel more in the future, we will be able to add more tacks to the map.