Sorry Bubba.
But seriously. It's an idea I've had for a while. When the time was right and we were in the right place and feeling settled, it was time to make it official. Permanent.
And I feel like I'm finally there. So I went ahead and bought myself the best present I've gotten in a while. It's so amazing and I can't stop smiling when I look at it.
Bet you didn't expect one of those fora while...
We have a long list of projects on our wishlist of things we'd like to do to our house. Years and years worth of projects. I wish I could be working on all of them right now, but with current circumstances, that's just not possible. In fact I'd pretty much come to terms with the fact that we wouldn't get anything done ever again. (Okay that's dramatic, but maybe for the next few years).
One of Tom and my guilty pleasures, is watching Shark Tank. Usually it's because I like to laugh at the stupid products, but every once in a while we find something amazing. Like Wicked Good Cupcakes, the cupcake in a jar company that despite being in my backyard, I didn't find out until I watched the show.
Or Spring. Pretty much anything as long as there's no snow on the ground.
The weather was super nice this weekend, so I suggested that we pull out our newly acquired outdoor furniture. It's not a lot at this point, and will likely be upgraded over the years (especially if we rebuild our deck at some point), but for now it's enough to get us outside.
Okay, maybe this is an odd thing to get excited about, but here I am.
We recently bought a dresser for the nursery when we realized the piece of furniture we had originally planned to use wasn't going to work. The dresser was pretty, and fit the room, but I kept coming back to one thing that was bothering me - the knobs on the drawers.
It always seems to happen this way. Whenever I get too confident in how easy something is going to be, it turns into something way more complicated. (Hello diabetes test!) So of course when the basement was supposed to take 3 weeks, but after the first week it looked like it would be done in a week and a half, that meant that OF COURSE it was going to take 5 weeks. Not because there was that much work, but because that's just what happens. People disappear, problems pop up and the electrician needs to come back THREE times.
Even once it was done, it took almost a full week for the team to come back and pick up their extra supplies that they'd left all over our garage. In my parking space. Which this ever-expanding pregnant lady got to maneuver around every day. Yay!
So far I've shared bits and pieces of a nursery in progress: the painting, and the almost crib. Since then, we received the crib piece we needed to finish putting that together, and we've made progress in other areas of the room too. We've been tackling things in small chunks, which makes it much more manageable. Some days we might only have energy to take tags off of baby clothes, or to throw in a load of laundry, but piece by piece, things have been getting done.
Confession: I have never once unlocked a door to our house with a key, and entered that way.
Every single time I've come home, I've entered through the garage. My car has a built in button to open the door from inside the car. And if that were ever to fail, I have the actual garage door opener in my glove box. This week my car happens to be getting some minor work done, so I've been driving a rental, and using that spare garage door opener. Tom does the same thing.
Remember when I shared some pictures of our dining room chairs? And at the end of the post, if you had been paying attention, you would have realized I had no idea what to do with the wall behind the table. At the time I was hanging cards on it, utilizing three screws that were already in the wall when we moved in. It kind of worked, for then anyway, but it definitely wasn't meant as a permanent solution.
Slowly but surely, it's happening. We're moving in a bit more, decorating and making things feel like home. For a while now, I've had a stack of picture frames littering the office floor. Waiting to be put somewhere or hung up.
Finally I found myself with a free day, and decided to start hanging them on the wall by our stairs. Originally I had a plan to map out where everything was going to go, but I realized that was causing me to delay starting the project since I wasn't sure how to do it. In the end I just grabbed the drill and started hanging things.
I wish I had a better 'before' picture of this room for you. Something more than a half painted wall to show you what it looked like. I don't even have one from the walk through I don't think - it was the previous owner's daughter's room, and they didn't post any pictures of it on the listing, and I never took any. Once we moved in, it was always just an empty room, so we never went in there. The walls were a dusty rose (or as I call it, dirty pink) and the only room of the entire house where I hated the paint color.
I think in the back of our mind we always knew it would be a future baby's room, whenever that happened to be. In fact I often referred to it as the baby's room. It was better than "the extra bedroom that isn't the guest room, and isn't the craft room, you know the ugly one with the gross pink walls?"
There's a reason you're always supposed to get multiple quotes when you're having anyone do work on your house. One of those reasons is, you never know when the first company you talk to is insane, even if they seem like the most well know and popular choice.
Two weeks ago we had Brian from Total Basement Finishing/Black Dog Builders come by to look at our basement. Brian's was a contractor, not just some creepy sales guy there to make us spend the most possible. I told him from the beginning that Tom and I were numbers people, and that was what was going to be important to us.
Does your house have a basement? How much time do you spend thinking about it? I guarantee it's not as much time as Tom and I have spent on our basement since moving into this house. It's not very big, or very useful (yet), but boy does it take up a lot of our time.
If you were to eavesdrop on us randomly, there's a pretty good chance you'd here us debating basement flooring options, or radon levels, or something else basement related. Mostly, we just want to get it to a point where we can put our shoes and coats there. It doesn't seem like much, but boy is it taking us a while!
If you've been to our house recently, you've already seen the end result of this project, but I figured it was about time I shared the journey of how we got here. After all, I only started this project back in July!
As I said before, we needed a lot of new furniture to fill up our house, including a dining room table and chairs. I spent a day shopping with Nicole and found a table I liked (as did Tom when I brought him back later to look at it) but no one really liked the chairs that went with it. So we bought the tables and started the search for chairs. At some point I got the idea that I wanted the chairs to be blue. Of course I couldn't find what I was looking for anywhere, so shortly after, I decided that I'd paint the chairs myself.
I'm not going to lie, there are still a lot of unopened boxes in our house. There are entire rooms that are either empty or just full of things waiting to be unpacked. It's not easy to furnish and decorate a whole house!
Lately we've decided to turn our focus on our office. At some point we decided that if only our office was set up, we'd be able to unpack a majority of our boxes. All of the books could come out, computer equipment, important papers... they could all find a spot.