Operation Nursery...complete!

It's definitely been a work in progress, but now we finally have what is probably the only "complete" room in our home.  Holden, I hope you like it!

He really does have an army of puppies in there!  Quilt by my wonderful mommy, crib skirt by me, puppy prints from Etsy, crib from Pottery Barn Kids, crazy wall camera to watch him sleep installed by Craig.

All ready for changing!  Dresser and mirror are from Ikea, and random assorted things are from random assorted places.

The giant alphabet wall!  Alphabet decals are from Etsy, chair from Buy Buy Baby, storage ottoman from Target.  Learn your letters, Holden.

The tiny clothes await!  Itty-bitty plaid shorts, I die at the cuteness.

Lots and lots and lots of tiny clothes...and diapers and toys and books.  Thank goodness for plenty of storage space.

Cute things on shelves, yeah yeah!

Alllllll ready for lots and lots of reading, courtesy of wonderful friends building his library at the baby shower.  Yes, we probably need an actual bookcase or something, but for now a basket on the floor works for me.

All ready for you, Holden!  Curtains by me

See, we at least appear to be ready for a baby...

I love the "little man" banners from the baby shower, so they're on the wall now!

Here's your cozy place, Holden.

The puppies are waiting!

A new addition

Faked you out, didn't I?  A new addition?  You thought the baby came!!  Nope, we just had a built-in wine bar installed between the kitchen and breakfast nook - a lovely new addition to our home.  I think this may qualify as the male version of nesting...we'd talked about doing it for a while, but then Craig kicked it into high gear and made this thing happen.  Do you know how many options are out there for wine fridges??  It's a little redonk.

Here's how things were looking about three months ago...

We committed to a wine fridge (this was actually the second one we bought...the first one didn't exactly run quietly...quite the opposite, which was causing me to go bonkers, which meant we definitely got a different wine fridge), and Craig did manly things like move electrical outlets and switches to make room for the new cabinets.  Electrical things scare me...Craig, not so much. He's very brave.

Fast forward a few weeks...

...and amazing things have happened!  We now have granite people and a cabinet guy and staining guys (yes, different people for each one...apparently this is not a one stop shopping endeavor), and the whole thing is really coming together.  They did an awesome job of matching the existing kitchen cabinets, but the process was a little scary - I actually spent two nights at a hotel while Craig held down the home fort and kept the animals alive while battling truly epic fumes from the varnish/staining/painting process.  We decided it was probably best if I didn't expose our unborn child to scary fumes...yeah, they were pretty bad.

And then we debated backsplash options and found yet another guy (the tile guy!) to come make it all happen and NOW...

All done!!  It's awesome.  And I told Craig I didn't care if the wine fridge matched the existing appliances, but now that it does, it makes the crazy person in me really happy.  Not that I'm enjoying wine these days, but soon enough.  Yay for successful home improvement adventures!! And it's alllll done before baby comes...which could really be any day now.  Yeeps.

Fifty shades of every paint color ever

Even though we now have some small idea of what our little one is going to be like, we know we don't want a blue sports crazytown room, so it's time to commence the preliminary rounds of Baby Nursery Decisions!, which I'm going to officially name and treat like the Olympics.  Also, the Olympics start in thirteen days, and we all know how I feel about the Olympics, so we better get some of this nursery stuff knocked out so I can focus on curling.

The walls were a perfectly fine neutral tan sort of color, but I really didn't want out baby to have brownish walls.  Commence the color debate!  And actually, we both liked the idea of doing a yellow nursery (agreement, huzzah!), so the dad-to-be was off to Home Depot to clean them out of pretty much every yellow-ish paint sample that exists.  And then the narrowing process began...

The contenders get a spot on the wall for further consideration...

...while the rejects sit sadly to the side.  Sorry, rejects.

After much debate and overanalyzing (I'll let you guess who did most of that) and moving paint samples from wall to wall, we committed to getting samples of four colors and slapping them on the wall to see how we felt about them.  Ok, let's pick a yellow!

And we kinda picked a yellow.  But then, because why would we keep anything simple, we decided it would maybe also be a fantastic idea to put up a chair rail and do a DIFFERENT color under the chair rail and also put up crown molding and definitely make sure we have the right color for the ceiling, too. Aaaaaand here we go.  Yeeps.

Fortunately we were a little more decisive on the grey (or is it gray? Apparently I skew British on that one) for the bottom portion of the wall.  I mean, yes, we still taped up paint chips and overanalyzed and narrowed it down to four and threw some paint on the wall, but it just went a lot faster than the Yellow Debate. Besides, Harrison was helping with this decision.

Allllll the colors.  And a ceiling fan with no blades.  And miles of tape and acres of dropcloth put into place.  We're doing this thing.

Zach really isn't sure if any of this is a good idea.

All decisions in place, finally, and let the painting begin!  We debated hiring someone to do this, and after each of us put about twenty strokes into painting the ceiling, we thought that might have been a really really REALLY good idea. Have you ever painted a ceiling?  It's a giant pain - fortunately Craig will not be defeated by something like paint, and he powered through and did a dang good job on it.  You go, honey!

I taped up a fake chair rail to guide us, and we kept painting.  And painting.  And painting.  Lightening walls isn't ideal, because often you need juuuust that extra coat of paint to make sure it really looks good.  Yeeps.

You're making excellent progress, husband.

But the painting is done!!  Well...mostly.  We'll have to do a few touch-ups here and there, and the chair rail and crown molding still have to be painted to match the trim in the room, but the giant swooshes of rollers are all taken are of.  Gallons of sweet chamomile, lemon souffle, and gentle rain later.  And here's where we stand at the moment...

The yellow looks way brighter at night - I'm hoping it all mellows out a bit once we have the room pulled together.  Although it really doesn't matter, because this yellow is what it is.  We're committed.

Looking good!  We were even making really good progress on the chair rail until we got halfway around the room and realized that, even with measuring and using a level along the way, we managed to drift up about an inch from where we started.  And for the OCD anal person in me, that is most definitely NOT ok.  So on tap for this weekend - perfecting the chair rail.  And the crown molding.  And getting them puttied and caulked and painted.  And getting all the supplies out of the room and babying it up a bit.  That's probably a little optimistic for just one weekend, so I'll let you know how it goes.

I hope you like your room, baby - Mom and Dad are putting some sweat into this one.  And I love it.

Working on my projects

I have a lot of "projects" going on...most of them house related in some form or fashion (and I just don't think I'll ever be DONE with house projects.  Ever.  There's always going to be something...).  Oh yeah, and we moved in well over a year ago, so some of these works in progress have been in progress for way too long, and Craig asks me when I'm ever going to finish anything, and I say "it hasn't been that long!" and then realize it HAS been that long that things have been sitting half-done and so now I'm trying to actually do them.  Plus Pinterest overwhelms me with a plethora of "ooohhh, I could do that!!" ideas, so I'm trying to narrow those down to the ones that are actually realistic.  Oh, interwebs, how you clog my brain with useless bits o' stuff.

In the interest of filling up empty space (the top of the kitchen cabinets, which would probably be just fine naked, but then the giant dust balls would get lonely up there) without spending a bazillion dollars, I went to Goodwill and picked up a bunch of vases...

shouldn't I be taking things to Goodwill to clear out our crap instead of buying things from Goodwill and bringing more crap into our home?  hmmmm.....

...and commandeered part of the garage to set up spray-paint central.  I have an unnatural obsession with painting things.

And along the way I did find the motivation to slap another coat of paint on the table and chairs that were cheaply acquired about eight years ago, hauled halfway across the country and back, and still manage to be functional...

Oh, and the curtains.  Curtains everywhere.  The dining room curtains are alllllllmost there, just need hems - although I think Harrison would prefer some extra hiding room at the bottom.

Time to go sew and actually finish things...

Carpet where you eat = silly

We have the most ginormous dining room ever, and even though we rarely eat in there (come on, two people at the giant table? or really one on most nights these days? that's what the living room is for), it drove me crazy that the floor was covered with CARPET.  Who puts CARPET in a dining room?!?  Every spill and dropped utensil and wayward food moment = carpet disaster.  So...we put in hardwoods.  And by "we" I mean Craig wrapped a flooring sample for me for Christmas, which was both extremely sweet and extremely confusing at the moment of unwrapping, and then we paid trained professionals to come put in beautiful handscraped hardwood floors.  I love it.

There's the floor before it became a floor - apparently the wood needs to acclimate to the temperature and humidity in the home.  This reassured me that these guys knew what they were doing.

Oh, stain decisions!  And trust me, the number of coats definitely makes a difference.  The smell makes a difference, too, in your ability to breathe - Kami and Carolyn can attest to that.

And there you have it!  Or the general idea of it, anyway - these are lazy phone pictures fo you. And yes, curtains in progress, which is really what the giant dining room table is most useful for - spreading out beast amounts of fabric.

Pretty.  Yay.  It's also really funny to watch Zach try to adjust - he's used to careening around the table while digging into the carpet for traction.  His traction is gone, so now he just skids around.  So pretty much he doesn't run circles around the table anymore.  Sorry, puppy.

Makeover!

For the blog, not for me.  Although I probably could use a haircut...

A little more streamlined, a little more functional, always a work in progress, but I think it's pretty darn cute now.  Still have some tweaks to work on, but I just like looking at it. =)

Happy weekend, y'all!  We're about to embark on an epic weed/clean/landscape fabric/mulch adventure in the flower beds, and if you'll recall past experience, I foresee some physical pain in my future.  Manual labor, ick.  At least we're tackling it in March instead of May...

Packing is for the birds

I've been truly spoiled with the amazing corporate move the last two times I've shuttled my stuff from home to home.  I just pack a bag for myself, handle the kitty (not a small feat, I might add, but still...), and let them do their thing.  It's SO amazing.  And SO expensive it would make your eyeballs pop out of your head if you ever wanted to actually pay for it.  Yeeps.

And yes, that's right - it's finally time to move into that beautiful house we bought a few months ago.  Hooray!!

So this time around, with a whole houseload of stuff that needs to move from one house to another, we're doing a lot of the heavy lifting.  Not the REALLY heavy lifting - that's what movers are for.  But I have to pack my own boxes now.  Oh, poor spoiled Erin.  And the dear animals are so confused - I think they're afraid they're going to be forgotten unless they jump into boxes as well.  It's ok, fur babies, we've got you!

But at least as of this afternoon, we have bare cabinets and a whole kitchen's worth of stuff allllll boxed up...

...and aren't friends wonderful??  Major, major props to Kami and Carolyn for a Saturday afternoon kitchen packing extravaganza.  I mean, I have a lot of stuff.  And Craig has a lot of stuff.  And so there's a lot of stuff.  And we both love to cook, so there is a LOT lot lot of kitchen stuff.  Much of it breakable and frah-gee-lay.  And these gals papered and wrapped and taped and organized and make it happen.  Love them.  Can't thank them enough.

We have an army of book boxes lining the living room.  Scattered packed things here and there.  And still quite a bit to go, which Craig delights in informing me is mostly mine.  I can handle it.  I have until Friday morning to make it all happen.  Yeeps again...

Can't wait to make you our own, lovely new home.  See you soon.

Giant big deal #1 - we totally went and bought a house

Can you believe it?!?  Normally I'm a huge overanalyzer and delayer of doing and major procrastinator...but we just DID this thing.  We'd spent a few weekends with our realtor checking out houses in various areas to get a really good idea of what we really wanted in a house and where we wanted to be geographically...and did you know there are about a million things to consider when you're buying a house?  Things like square footage (Craig won this battle - his belief is bigger is better) and number of bedrooms and school districts and size of backyard and age of home and how much do you really want to spend and dear HEAVENS the commute time and so on and so on and so forth.  And imagine two people who both like to have their way making this decision together.  We made it through this - good pre-marital test, methinks.

And while I wasn't 100% really ready and totally on board with buying a house RIGHT NOW - it just worked out.  We both fell in love with this place, and it has absolutely everything we want, and I want to live in this house for the next fifty years.  I love it.  And Craig loves it, too.  And when that actually happens, you dang well better just buy the place.  Especially when the sellers are more than happy to do a sale-leaseback so the buyers (ummm...us) aren't stuck with rent+mortgage for a few months.  It just all came together.

So I crunched spreadsheet numbers and panicked while Craig told me it would all be ok...and it was.  I'm such a worrier.

Yay for our own little slice of Carrollton!!

That day we celebrated with lunch at Abuelo's (extremely close to our new home AND site of many fond A-town memories AND delicious Mexican food!!), and then we also had giant steaks and a bottle of bubbly for dinner.  Because food is really the best way to celebrate, you know.  A little anticlimactic since we don't actually live in the house (and won't be there until December/January, btw), but still really, really exciting.  And really, really real when we make that first mortgage payment here in about ten days.  Yowza.

I grabbed the pictures from the realtor website and tossed them into a Picasa album if you'd like a better look.  It's all perfect and wonderful in those pictures (except for the color of the dining room - I'm dying to paint, and other than that it's pefect...and maybe some more painting, because I'm demented and actually really love to paint walls), so it might look a little more sad when we move in and have less furniture (fact of new home ownership, right??  there is a dining set in our near future...), but it will be our home.  For a very long while.  And I'm so, so happy about that.

Oh?  What was that you said?  We're totally insane for adding "home purchase" to the list of life events occuring over the last month or so, especially with the wedding coming up?  I totally agree.  Hoping my stress levels at least burned some calories.

Dandelions are devil spawn

A couple of weekends ago, my quads and hamstrings (are those the same thing??) and glutes and basically every muscle in that general area were screaming at me.  Not from some massive gym session, no, but it was definitely a workout.  Known as weeding.  Known as weeding flowerbeds that really needed to be weeded about two months ago.  Known as weeding "totally overgrown with every manner of evil plant not limited to but including massive amounts of dandelions which possess a remarkably stubborn root system" flowerbeds.  There are special tools out there, specifically crafted for those moments when you have to face down these Vicious Taproots.  I just wanted you to know what I was up against.

It took three hours.  I was very hot and sweaty.  The end.

I also went and bought MULCH.  Who am I??  Craig told me mulch would prevent weeds from cropping back up, and I didn't believe him, but then I Googled it and did believe him.  Thank you, magic Google machine.  And Craig.  I don't have much...or any...experience with this mulch business.  And by the way, sweetie, mulch doesn't exactly weigh the 20 pounds a bag you said it would...it's kinda heavy...

Pretty new red mulch = awesome.  Dead bits of worthless crap to the right = no good.  Time to buy more mulch.

...and it doesn't get quite the coverage I envisioned.  I knew two bags wasn't nearly enough, but now I'm planning on buying at least ten more.  Ick.  At least it's a good workout.  Oh, and I also added rosemary to the herb party while I was at it.  That was MUCH easier than the Flowerbed Taproot Extraction of 2011.

Shouldn't someone else take care of this while we're in a rental house?  My thoughts exactly.  But our landlord doesn't believe in hiring a lawn service; he believes in adding clauses to our lease that say things about watering the lawn and such silliness.  Hindsight.

Now that I have some space to work with that isn't overrun by every imaginable form of evil weed, I'd love to put in some pretty flowers...but I'm not going to go to the effort for this temporary house.  So you'll have to settle for the single pot of marigolds (in an inherited pot, I might add - I just pulled out whatever sad dead thing was in there and started over) greeting you at the front door.  Why marigolds?  Because they're so bright and cheery!  Also, they're practically impossible to kill - the things are basically like weeds with pretty flowers attached.  I figured if they could survive the Texas Panhandle's harsh conditions, they should do a-ok here.

Craig is in charge of grass while I'm in charge of everything else.  Which totally works.  For now.  Especially since our system for taking care of the leaves from the magnolia tree involves just mowing over them.  I love the magnolia flowers (did you know they kinda look like giant roses before they bloom?  It's so cool!)...all of those leaves, not quite so much.

Maybe we should just go live in a condo somewhere...except I do love our outdoor space.  And with Zachary running around, it's basically a necessity.

Time to go buy more mulch.

Home sweet home

Before actually moving into this rental house in February, I'd lived in apartments/dorms for the last...oh, ten and a half years or so.  So actually living in a HOUSE with SPACE and a BACKYARD is something of a revelation to me.

A few of these revelations and new experiences...

 - Constantly Swiffering hardwood floors.  Which was driving me crazy.  On a daily basis.  Sooooo...there's now this little robot roaming around our home on a daily basis around noon. Craig finally talked me into a Roomba.  We've named it Chalupa...you know, because it's round.  And we love Mexican food.  It seemed semi-logical at the time...plus I think Craig thought I might love it even more if we gave it a name.

Craig said I wasn't allowed to put this picture on the blog because he basically hates all pictures of himself, which he is DEFINITELY going to have to get over (hello, have you met me and my camera??)...so I just did some strategic editing.  I promise he's smiling really big.  Next time I just won't ask him and post it anyway.

 - So many rooms I didn't know what to do with them...especially while I was waiting for the rest of the furniture (you know, that whole roommate bit) to show up.  Now, though...we've done a fairly excellent job of filling every nook and cranny to the max.  And there are even things on the walls!

 - Buying things in bulk.  Like paper towels.  I actually have somewhere to put them.  Oh, and there's this thing called a garage.  It's so cool.

 - Outdoor space!!  And the option to do things like plant herbs (I have some exploding basil going on, which I'm very excited about)...

...and enjoy a patio/deck (especially now that it's shaded due to this cool canopy thing Craig and Dad put together - good work, boys!)...

...and use real flames to transform normal food into grilltastic meals.  Boys come with some cool stuff.

Now, please excuse me while I go do things like learn how to steam mop and pull 3 foot weeds (eeekk!) from our flowerbeds.