Home improvement on steroids

(Obnoxious amount of pictures here. Sorry.)

NESTING. Holy cow, the nesting with this pregnancy! It is OUT OF CONTROL. In pregnancies past, this faucet of baby prep consisted of some light dusting, maybe a bit of reorganizing and possibly an extensive day of laundry. THIS pregnancy though (!!!) - Home Depot has become our actual residence. In baby Grace's second trimester alone we've brought home a miter saw, this huge air compressor nail gun thing, a jig saw and several (SEVERAL) boards of various types of wood. From about 15 weeks until now, 28 weeks today, I've painted more walls than should be humanly allowed in such a short time frame and without the help of professional workers. IT HAS BEEN NUTS.

So what have we done????!!!!!! I shall start at the beginning of our extreme adventures in nesting, when the "Baby List" was fresh in my mind (and not driving me crazy). First up, Carter and Kota's room!

1. "Big kids'" room

^^^It went from depressing green and sickeningly light grey, to the shiplap whiteness and same-relaxing-grey-as-our-master-bedroom. I just love every bit of it! Sure the room is very short on space, but hey, what can ya do? At least it's an enjoyable area now! This was our first go at shiplap. Chad and I were both shocked on how much we liked the end result. You know - not all DIY's come out the way ya like! Glad this one did.

2. Fireplace/entertainment center

^^^The reason we even DID this project was kind of a funny story (not so funny at the time): When we went to get the shiplap for the kids' room project, Chad had told the Home Depot guy the wrong measurement - so that meant we had 14 boards that were 6"'s too short. We tried to make it work in the kids room by just nailing it all to the wall and smoothing the awkwardness over with wood filler, but after spending 1.5 hours on just the top board alone, we knew that we were just going to have to bite the bullet and go buy 14 MORE boards with the correct measurement. So anyhoo, the 14 wrongly-cut-boards were just lying in our garage, so Chad and I decided to tackle this "small" project one night when the kids went to spend the night at my parents' house for some summer fun. WELL. Duh, it took over our lives. Chad had to take off the weird molding that surrounded the original TV hole thing, then move all of the electrical. Next came building a frame of 2x4's in the TV hole (my idea! I felt so cool!), and then came the shiplap. Next it was filling in the nail holes, painting, mounting the TV, new lighting and Chad's "dad gift" to himself: a sound bar. All was GREAT until we went to test the finished product: If you flipped the switch Chad had wired for the lights, one lighting sconce went on, the other went off! Flip it again, THEY SWITCHED! At the end of a very long project, this was NOT what he wanted. Thank goodness though, because the next day at work Chad talked to an electrician friend who told him what was up and all was fixed. Bahahaha - DIY AMIRIGHT?!

3. Chad's side table

^^^This was a slightly unnecessary project, but in my nesting mind at the time, it was EVERYTHING. So when we redid the kids' room, I wanted to move Chad's side table/white dresser out of our room (never liked the look it brought to our room anyway) and into the kids room for more storage in preparation for their play room turning into a nursery. Chad was kind of like "so... why are we doing this again?" about the whole project, so I took it on solely while he was at work. I felt so great cutting all of the wood for it with the newest garage-team-member, the miter saw, all by myself in just 7 minutes! Life changer! Next I screwed all those wood pieces together, half-heartedly sanded it (I loathe that part of wood working), then painted/stained the whole thing - all in one day! Felt pretty cool 'bout it.

4. Grace's nursery

 ^^^THIS TOOK SO DAMN LONG TO DO! After the extensiveness of the kids' room, fireplace and table projects, I decided to mozy on into another undertaking, but this time I vowed to just do it "in my spare time." HA! Let me tell ya something: if there's no sense of urgency to get a project done, it will simply TAKE TOO LONG TO DO. I should have just gone balls to the wall and busted it out in a day or so, that would have saved me a lot of annoyance. Anyway, first I primed below the chair rail where there was a darker pink, then I got started measuring out the stripes. We knew we were going to be putting in curtains with a horizontal stripe pattern to match the kids' curtains, so that's what I went off of. Next I waited for my MIL to come help me out, where she did all of the fine-tuning (work with the brush), I then started in with the grey (same grey as kids' room and master) under the chair rail, and waited for my two coats of white stripes to dry above the chair rail. Next there was meticulous taping that went down, where I had to RE-PAINT over the tape with the white so that way when I went to paint the grey, it wouldn't bleed underneath the tape onto the perfect white line. IT - WAS - MADNESS. Anyhoo, I just had to get that damn room done. Now I love it, but truly, these projects "in my spare time" need to not happen ever again.

5. Our bathroom

^^^SO! We still had shiplap left over from that accidental cut situation, so in order to rid our garage's floor of it, we just plowed ahead and prettied-up our master bathroom's tiny toilet room. The kids were on a multi-night sleepover with family, so I just decided to DGAF and bring the miter saw IN THE HOUSE to get my cuts - bahahaha. Seriously with that decision? I'm still finding sawdust everywhere, even after an extensive cleaning. But honestly, there was no way this pregnant woman was going to spend time in that hot garage cutting - nope, no way. So it started out with shiplapping behind the toilet, painting that THE grey and then hanging those shelves. Once it was done though, I felt like the rest of the teensy room needed to be grey as well, something I'm glad I did but man. This REALLY tired me out - more than the other projects seemed to. It was becoming clear that I seriously needed to calm down on all of this home stuff. Like CLEAR. My body was/is sort of mad at me for all of it. So glad this got done, but seriously exhausted. 

5. Minor things done while those other projects were happening: curtains, fans, lighting and shelves

^^^One of the things we learned to seriously loathe while living here is the curtains the previous owner had up - it's not that they were ugly, it's that they seemed to all break within the first 6 months of us being there! I have no idea why - they were relatively heavy duty! I don't know. But anyway, we've replace all of those blinds with curtains which seem to be easier for us. We have the final room's curtain's hardware and panels sitting on the kitchen counter right now. I think Chad and I are just a bit shell shocked from the rest of these projects to actually install them hahahaha!

One of the main things we needed to do in our house was to improve the lighting situation in all of the rooms. EVERYTHING was lit by the one fan that hung over the dining area, so we've been slowly adding lighting in the forms of sconces, chandeliers, fan-moving-arounds and installation of lights on existing fans. The only two rooms left are the front "white room" and the baby's nursery. Go Chad!

Those shelves we put up in the kids' room went tandem with the master bathroom throne's room make over. It's part of the solution to the old play room becoming the nursery. As trophy collections and book selections evolve, I may throw 2 more up in between those three in years to come. We'll see. I literally can't even with thoughts like that. 

One of the major things left on our Baby List is outdoor furniture, which we intended to make ourselves. However, I just don't know if I can hack that! If we make it ourselves, it's going to require engineering, putting-together, sanding, painting and staining. Literally.... not sure about that. But at the same time, I want that to get done! But after all of these projects I've learned one thing: CHILL OUT! Bahahaha! Glad they're done though, and glad we love our little home that much more.