House changes 2013

2013 has been the year of making updates to our house, but all of the them actually occurred well before any nesting urge kicked in, and nearly all of the bigger projects have involved exporting out our work rather than DIYing anything like we may have done in ye olden days before kids. (See the weekend we spent making our kitchen backsplash for evidence of our previous lives.)

Although we still have a couple small-ish household tasks to accomplish before baby boy arrives, such as getting our carpets cleaned, we had a lot of projects completed primarily in May and June that have made our lives a lot easier lately.

Painting
This is probably the single biggest change in our house. We decided to paint practically every open area in our house the same Dolphin Fin Behr paint color that we chose two years ago for the nursery. We love the color's soothing and versatile nature. Because the downstairs level of our house really needed to be painted after making a renovation, we decided to go ahead and bite the bullet and get all non-bedroom and non-bathroom spaces professionally painted, which meant the foyer, downstairs living space, stairwell, upstairs living room, kitchen, and upstairs hallway. The fresh paint gives our house a more streamlined look and is a major upgrade because it's so much easier to clean. After almost seven years of our own wear and tear on the walls, mostly thanks to the dogs, plus the previous owners' five years of use, the hallway and stairwell were looking particularly beat up.

Exporting out this work was a major coup. Figuring it would take us at least a month to paint all these spaces in between work and childcare, we got several estimates and settled on the cheapest bid. At $1,800, it may not have been cheap, but it was most certainly worth it. Plus, there would have been no way we -- read: Matt -- would have been able to paint our insanely tall stairwell without breaking a limb. To my amazement, the contractor rolled into our house eight men deep at 8 a.m. one day in May, and by 6 p.m. they had not only painted all the open spaces and all the trim and doors in the house, but they'd also put all our furniture and accessories back exactly where they'd found them. I am converted. 

Sofas
This year also brought us some sofa changes. We decided it was time to invest in a mid-sized sectional for our main living space. We spend about 80 percent of our waking time at home on this level, so having a sofa big enough for our expanding family and for entertaining guests -- and, let's be real, to accommodate my husband's tendency to want to take an afternoon snooze without taking up the entire couch -- led us to decide it was time to invest in a real, adult sofa that we hope will last us several decades.

We really did our homework on this purchase, visiting Crate and Barrel and Arhaus and Pottery Barn, only to discover that for the same price we could get superior quality at our favorite local furniture store/megalith: Belfort Furniture outside Ashburn, Va. We chose the Drexel Heritage line that allows customers to customize nearly every aspect of the sofa from layout to arm design, seat cushions, base, and of course upholstery. Our favorite style was, fittingly, called the Natalie, and our sofa layout is ultimately a four-seat sofa with an attached two-seat love seat. We also upgraded to the eight-way hand-tied seating, which through our sofa research we discovered to be the old-fashioned way of creating the sofa base that helps ensure longevity. All in we spent close to $4,000 on this purchase, but again, I think it is very much worth it as I treat our sofa like our (soon-to-be) third child.

We also opted for the Guardsman protection plan. I'm so glad we made this decision because within one month of getting our sofa delivered, there was a chocolate mishap and a blue crayon mishap. We learned our lesson on both, though we were thrilled to see how skillfully and efficiently the Guardsman service provider worked in about 30 minutes to remove all the stains on the sofa. Thankfully, we haven't had any more incidents since then, but I am sure we have some in our future, so I'm glad we have this insurance policy on our sofa. Using it once, it was has already paid for itself.

Getting this major sofa upgrade meant that our old, much cheaper Broyhill sofa with a chaise extension got relegated to the downstairs living space. After living with the sofa downstairs for about a month, we realized that the chaise was just getting in our way, and because it was no longer really needed and it had gotten rather destroyed by dog toe nail scratches, we found a local upholsterer who was able to cut down the chaise and resew it for $150. He did an excellent job, and now the old sofa already looks a lot better and it's better suited to its new home -- though it's not nearly as comfortable as our lovely new sectional.

Rearranging middle level
The new sofa purchase helped to divide our large main-level living space into two -- or maybe even three -- sections: the sofa/TV watching area, the play area, and, depending on how you look at it, the computer area.

Although it may look a little awkward,we opted to keep the leather chair and ottoman on our main level in the play area because it offers practical seating for when adults don't want to (or can't) sit on the floor with Natalie during play time. It's functional, and while it's not my favorite design choice, it's a reality of life.

 

 

Our bookcase has also sacrificed two of its five shelves for Natalie's books and toys that don't fit in her toy box, but again, this is a reality of our new life. (Her toys have expanded since I took this photo.)

 

To help the computer area feel lighter, we bought a clear Tobias chair from IKEA as our new desk chair. I absolutely love the way this simple change helped open up the space.

Downstairs addition
We wanted to enclose our downstairs living space so that we could have a more private office area in our house. We love our house because it's so open, but the open floor plan can present some logistical problems when babies, toddlers and dogs are involved. Besides a bedroom (or bathroom!) there is no place to escape to for getting quiet work done.

So, we hired a contractor/designer who lives in our neighborhood to build a wall and door frame with a French door to enclose our downstairs living space as a new office area. This area still serves as a living space (and it still houses our giant TV that we use for movie nights) but 95 percent of its use is as a home office. As an added bonus, because the room includes a closet plus a window (and a door to the backyard and even a full bathroom) it counts as a fourth bedroom in our house, which will be great for resale value. We can use the space as a guestroom, provided we have guests willing to sleep on a sofa or air mattress. The new addition added tons of functionality to our house and was well worth the nearly $2,000 investment and three days of workers in our house.

To round out the space, and to account for the loss of our guestroom storage space, since that room is now becoming Natalie's new room, we purchased our very first IKEA Expedit bookcase. I totally get why people love those things -- they can hold a ton.

Not-exciting changes
Of course, home ownership means having to perform maintenance and make upgrades you can't avoid. Unfortunately, such maintenance still costs a decent amount and no one else even notices the change. This spring and fall we had to complete two such upgrades: repairing wood rot on the door frame leading to our deck, and repairing water damage from a pipe not firmly caulked on the roof.

The wood rot was painfully obvious, and I'm glad we fixed it when we did because it was not only an eye sore, but if we'd allowed it to go on much longer we might have needed to replace the entire door and frame, which would have been a major expense. I wasn't thrilled to pay about $350 to replace many pieces of wood and get the frame sanded, caulked and painted, but it was a necessity.

The roof problem I would not have noticed if I didn't have a toddler who likes to play with shoes and scarves in our master closet. One day I happened to be lying on the floor with her inside the closet when I looked up and noticed that there was noticeable water damage on the ceiling. So, we called up our favorite contractor who, upon inspection, gave us the welcome news that we would not need a new roof, as I feared, but instead told us we needed to perform a simple fix on some caulking around a pipe on the roof and then repair the damaged dry wall, which it turned out affected not only the master closet but also master bath. Again, not another $400 I wanted to drop, but absolutely necessary.

We have been busy improving our house this year, but it has been pretty stress-free because we have performed very little of the work ourselves. The reality of life with children is just that there is not enough time to DIY like we used to, and we do not have the technical expertise to perform many of these tasks anyway. Saving us headaches and giving us time together as a family is the real benefit of hiring out nearly all our work this year.

Breaking even

The Craigslist plan for selling the old desk and chair worked! This afternoon a mother and son stopped by to pick up the two items, and they handed over $100 in exchange. We spent $100 on the new Target desk, and we are using a different chair we already owned as our current desk chair, so call us Even Stevens. It's awesome when things work out so easily. I'm thrilled about the fact that we can view the new desk as "free," especially because this is apparently the Summer of Spending Money.

You served me well from 2003-2011, old friends.

Selling the desk and chair was just one more task to check off my summer bucket list. Here's an update on the summer's progress thus far, with about two and a half weeks to go before I have to report back to work full time. You may recall our list was divided into two parts: stuff professionals are doing for us, and stuff we can do ourselves.

Stuff professionals are doing for us:
1) Add lighting and mirrors to master bathroom. (You can see the finished product here.)
2) Add a backyard patio. (This post is a work in progress -- check back soon!)
3) Fix the toilet in the lower level. (This got taken care of the day our master bathroom overhaul was completed.)
4) Fix wobbly ceiling fans. (Yay, I figured it out! And I did it when our AC was shut off for three days during patio installation, so perhaps I just needed some motivation.)
5) Get carpets cleaned throughout the house. (Found a reputable company with a good deal, so this is happening next week.)

Stuff we can do ourselves:
1) Empty backyard shed and transfer contents to garage. (And I learned a little bit about hazardous waste disposal in the process.)
2) Buy actual bed frame for master bedroom. (We have a contender, but we still need to check out some more stores. We may hold off on making the purchase until the fall [see: Summer of Spending Money].)
3) Buy/make dark curtains for master bedroom. (I think I want red curtains, but I'm going to see how making nursery curtains goes first before taking this plunge. This may be a fall activity.)
4) Buy smaller desk and sell old desk. (YES!)
5) Move bookcase from office to lower level. (We may be calling on some assistance from a family member of perhaps a neighbor....Paul??? :)
6) Move table and chairs in living room to garage. (Actually, we fit the four chairs and table into our crawl space, thus saving precious garage real estate.)
7) Move contents of office closet to guest room closet. (I wrote about this here and here, and I am glad it is over. It really tested my ability to downsize even further and find new storage solutions.)
8) Complete steps 4-7 before taking the additional steps to convert the office to the nursery. [Start by coming up with a general color scheme/style.] (I decided on gray walls with red, orange and yellow accent colors.)
             
And here are a few more I didn't mention in June:
1) Recaulk bathrooms. (It's that time again, not so much to redo the bathtubs and showers as much as the caulk around the bottom of the floors.)
2) Repot indoor plants. (They're looking a little cramped.)
3) Figure out a new filing system. (Done!)
4) Contact my human resources department with really specific maternity leave questions.
5) Reorganize crawl space. (A little bit on that here. This mostly involved taking everything out, throwing out/recycling a lot, and learning how to pack everything back in well.)
6) Buy patio furniture. (This I'll share with you once I get that patio post up.)
7) Register for hospital tour. (I have two hospital options. I think we've established which one is the better choice, now we just need to see it in person. We're scheduled for a tour in early October.)
8) Register for baby-ready pet class. (My neighbor alerted me to this free class that we'll be attending, and I'll tell you about that more soon.)
9) Organize scrapbook memorabilia. (I have a couple bags of stuff I need to sift through.)
10) Nursery: make no-sew curtains. (At least I have the fabric, and today I bought the rest of the supplies.)
11) Nursery: Paint.
12) Nursery: Add shelf/patch holes in closet.
13) Nursery: Buy dresser. (It may still be sitting in our garage, but at least we have it!)
14) Nursery: Refinish dresser.
15) Nursery: Buy crib. (We know which one we want, we just need to get it. But I think we'll hold off until this credit card billing cycle is complete so that my head does not explode...yikes.)
16) Buy maternity jeans. (So far I have held out on making much in the way of maternity clothing purchases, but I think that now as I am almost at the halfway point I could use one nice pair of jeans to get me through the upcoming 20 plus weeks. I'm not planning to buy anything else for the time being.)


Wow, that was therapeutic! We've made some great progress this summer, and we still have some time to tick a few more items off the list.

Master bath mini-remodel: Complete!

As we move through our boring-adult summer bucket list, it's time to share our first accomplishments. The master bathroom mini-remodel falls into the category of "complicated tasks real professionals will be doing for us." We are glad we went this route. There was no way we could have run the wires for the two new light fixtures, learned to patch drywall, or installed a recessed light. Money well spent!

You may recall that our master bathroom updating involved two main lighting fixes. The first and most obvious is the installation of two new light fixtures above the vanity. We went from this old look to this more modern look:

The light fixtures are from the Quoizel Empire Silver Demetri Collection with one light, which matches the four-light Quoizel Demetri fixture we installed in our hallway bathroom last summer. Each fixture has a 100-watt lightbulb in it. At first I was worried the room would be too dark as we went from one six-light fixture to two single-light fixtures, but these 100-watt CFL lights are really powerful and the two give off just as much light as the six previous bulbs.

The mirrors are from Home Goods, which we snagged a couple months ago for $30 each. They have dark brown frames, which is really ideal because we were debating between black and brown frames and ultimately settled on brown.

The professional electricians installed the fixtures, which had to be somewhat intensely rewired, and they patched the drywall holes left behind by both the old fixture and the old giant mirror. They also primed the area where the old fixture and mirror stood, so all we had to do was paint and hang the mirrors. Painting was the easy part. As I was reminded of last September while I was hanging our dining room wall photo gallery, I really hate hanging things. Measuring, spacing and leveling require such precision that it drives me insane, and try as I might I cannot hang something without making at least one needless hole in the wall. I measure and remeasure and still wind up getting something wrong. But it got fixed, and visitors to our home will be none the wiser about the little mistake I made along the way.

Lighting fix number two involved installing a new recessed light directly above the otherwise dark shower space. We did not do any work for this little project, and I am pleased to have paid someone else to make the shower I use daily about three times as bright as it was before.

I don't know how well the pictures reveal the transformation, I am pleased to be able to see in there now.

While we were at it, we asked our electrician if he could take a look at our downstairs toilet, and he obliged. At least the first time he looked at it he took approximately five seconds and "fixed" it. I went to check it a few minutes later to see if it would flush, and it would not, so we felt a little less pathetic than we did initially. Then he told us a part had gone bad, so Matt went out and bought a replacement kit for $25 at Home Depot and then had the electrician install that, simply because we've installed a couple kits unsuccessfully in that toilet in the past four and a half years. After 30 minutes he got it working, and we hope (knock on wood) this one is the keeper.

While we had electricians in our house for two days, we got some other work crossed off our summer bucket list, and I'll share that with you in my next post!

Summer bucket list

For the last two years it seems that some of my high school students have become obsessed with the concept of the bucket list, devising senior year bucket lists and summer bucket lists like there's no tomorrow. Today marks the end of week 1 of summer vacation, and we just got back from six days at the beach. I can cross two items off my summer bucket list:

1) See wild horses.
These were spotted while driving on the beach in Carova, North Carolina. I guess that's actually two things I've never done: driven on a beach and seen wild horses.

2) Get Maxwell to swim/overcome his fear of the water.
It all started when Max was about six months old and Matt threw him into his parents' beach house pool. Since then, Max has been terrified of water, and he especially shows it when he runs around the pool, furiously panting and generally acting like a maniac. Something snapped this week, though, and Max just jumped right in and started swimming laps. He still hasn't achieved a calm attitude about water, but he is voluntarily swimming, so that's a start. For your viewing pleasure, here's an 18-second clip of Max swimming with me, complete with me weirdly cackling at the end.

This is all well and good, but to keep the organizational focus of this blog, you've probably guessed that the 20+ list of items Matt and I compiled that we plan to complete this summer really involve boring adult things, like home improvement and furniture purchasing/rearranging. I've divided our list into things we need to hire someone else to do and things we can do on our own.

Let's start with the complicated tasks real professionals will be doing for us:

1) Add lighting and mirrors to master bathroom.
Last summer's addition of nicer lighting to the upstairs hallway bathroom made us realize that we needed to upgrade the master bathroom, too. We will be using a similar style light fixture as the one we installed last summer, but this time it won't be as easy. We purchased two smaller fixtures that we plan to hang over two new mirrors we bought. The only problem is that this requires cutting holes, patching holes, and rewiring, things we cannot accomplish on our own (we can, however, paint over the holes left behind).

Additionally, the shower in our master bath is painfully dark thanks to the angle of the ceiling and placement of the one recessed light, so while the electrician is here (ideally tomorrow) he will also install a second recessed light directly above the shower.

2) Add a backyard patio.
Although the grass we planted in the fall is thriving, the space underneath our back deck is a glorified mud pit. The soil is uneven and eroding, the dirt bounces onto the house every time it rains, the dogs track all kinds of dirt into the house, and the 250 or so square feet is generally wasted space.

After getting four estimates and weighing the pros and cons of a paver patio versus a stamped concrete patio, we chose the stamped concrete patio option. Our deposit is in. Now we're just waiting on HOA approval, and we hope this task can get accomplished sometime during July.

3) Fix the toilet in the lower level.
This is one of those items that has never worked correctly the whole time we've lived in our house. One plumber looked at it; Matt and various male friends looked at it many times; we need to finally get this settled.

4) Fix wobbly ceiling fans.
There are three in our house (dining room, guest room, master bedroom) and all of them wiggle if set on anything higher than the lowest setting. This obviously defeats the purpose of a ceiling fan.

5) Get carpets cleaned throughout the house.
We've done this a few times ourselves, but we found a reputable company and a good enough deal that the cost of having someone else clean the carpet is almost the same as what it would cost us to rent a cleaner and soap ourselves. While we're at it, we'll have them clean the downstairs sofa and loveseat where Max and Doc spend about nine to ten hours each day we're at work.

Then there are the items we can handle ourselves:

1) Empty backyard shed and transfer contents to garage.
This shed we inherited from the previous owners takes up a lot of space, blocks the window in our lower level, and isn't really something we need. Once we Craiglist/throw out/consolidate items, everything we actually need will fit in a corner of our otherwise underutilized garage. We've already agreed to give the shed to the owner of the stamped concrete company that will be installing our patio. We're just happy for him to take it off our hands.

2) Buy actual bed frame for master bedroom.
Seriously people. We have been living with an el-cheapo metal backless frame for years. Time to upgrade to something with a soft headboard.

3) Buy/make dark curtains for master bedroom.
Something to match the new duvet cover would be ideal. The window treatments we have now are not blocking out that summer light (and we would like to sleep past 6 a.m.).

4) Buy smaller desk and sell old desk.
It's big. We need something smaller (and we generally don't need a big desk). Move new desk to main level.

5) Move bookcase from office to lower level.

6) Move table and chairs in living room to garage.
We never use this seating and we could use the added floor space.

7) Move contents of office closet to guest room closet.

8) Complete steps 4-7 before taking the additional steps to convert the office to the nursery.
That's right, people, we are procreating! I am happy to report that I am 13 (and a half) weeks pregnant, just having excitedly exited the first trimester. Baby Awesome-rod is growing up a storm and I am feeling great. We are absolutely thrilled by this otherwise unreal event taking shape. This is without a doubt the happiest time of our lives. We are hoping baby Awesome-rod will enter the world sometime around his/her due date of January 2, 2012. We'll find out the sex on August 15, the day before my 30th birthday.

Over the next several posts I will share pregnancy-related news before resuming the summer bucket list progress posts. I do not intend to turn this into a baby blog, but with a little addition to our family we will no doubt be making lifestyle adjustments, taking on new organizational projects, experimenting with new products and the like that I will have to report on here. I'll be back tomorrow to share what I did for an organized pre-conception.