The Waiting Game

Today is Friday, June 17, 2016.

By all accounts I am now overdue, and by some I am more than one week postdate. 

My instinct is to get anxious and erratically start using every labor tool imaginable.

But this baby will be most healthy if he's given the space to come on his own timetable.

So I wait.

Grant me patience to relax into this waiting game.

Give me the perspective to appreciate these last nights of uninterrupted sleep.

Help me remember that nobody stays pregnant forever.

He will come.

And I can't wait to meet him.

E-Haus: The Guest Room/ Nursery

Though much of our energy over the past 9-10 months has been devoted to the planning and building and putting together of E-Haus, I've been working on a separate project that has not only hit its estimated completion date, but passed it at this point. I am over 40 weeks pregnant with our third child, and though these first two weeks of maternity leave without a baby have been almost necessary in order to finish up a whole host of projects, our impatience to meet this newest little one is growing by the day. 

As I've mentioned before, we planned out our basement so that it will eventually host a nice-sized guest bedroom and bathroom, but before it's finished, we have a four bedroom house. We considered just setting up 3.0 in our bedroom for the first 6-9 months while we kept our guest bed upstairs and then did a rush job on the permanent guest room when it came time to move the babe, but practicality ended up winning out and so we have a half-guest/ half-nursery space. I actually think it'll be great, especially if this baby is anything like Everett, who didn't sleep through the night until 2 years old and still wakes up to join me and Nate on occasion. 

[It hopefully goes without saying, but the pillows and stuffed animals in the crib are all temporary.]

Because space became limited between the crib and the queen sized bed, I set up the closet as an additional nursery nook to hold not only clothes but 3.0's changing table and dresser. We're keeping the name a secret until birth, so I blurred it out, but I couldn't resist putting just a few decorative items in that space. They're all super lightweight and will only exist so long as baby's clothes don't overwhelm the closet. Luckily the closets in this house are all very long, so the rail space extends another few feet in each direction past the end of the doors-- there's lots of room for tiny outfits.

The guest bed and far end of the room. I tried to keep it neutral enough to work for grown ups but playful enough for a nursery. So far it's gotten two thumbs up from the few house guests we've already hosted, so I think we succeeded!

Eventually I have big plans to paint this room, but since time is of the essence and I wanted to avoid choking baby with paint fumes, that will be a project for another day. In the meantime, I continue to feel grateful that we chose such a neutral interior paint color that it can work with any color scheme.

Now come on, baby! We're so excited to hug and kiss you on the outside!

Small Things

So we've only been in this house for 2 months and 6 days, but this past weekend we revamped the great room, and I'm still trying to process my feelings about it. While we've got space that now works for the accent chairs, it also closes off the space so that we've got three distinctive areas for kitchen/ dining/ living. I'll post more details later, as well as fireplace surround progress, but at the very least, furniture rearranging is a pretty low risk investment so it's worth the effort.

I also got a fun print for the short wall next to our kitchen, and while this space still needs to be styled, I really love the pop of color and the scale of the canvas. It's funny how much appropriately-scaled art can impact the feel of a home.

A Long-Overdue Update

After nearly two full months in our new home, we have finally rejoined 2016. We got our internet services set up this weekend (at 8am on Sunday, no less) and I still don't quite believe it. We had a number of false starts and stops in the process of getting construction completed on the line, so it's actually surreal to have it all in working order. We even have cable for this first year (super low rate, no contract, and it's a Summer Olympics/ presidential election year) which is a strange luxury. But beyond that, with an internet connection, we're actually able to fully use our speakers and thermostat in the way that they were intended.

It's funny how two months can feel like an eternity but also pass in an instant. That being said, we're settling in nicely, probably in no small part due to the insane nesting urges that have overcome me. Today I am 39 weeks and 4 days pregnant, so life will soon get crazy again. In the meantime I'm actually enjoying maternity leave. Though it would get boring over time, I have loved these days of organizing and decorating and cooking and napping at my leisure. Probably more so because I know just how fleeting they are.

Someday I'll reorganize myself and start taking more photos of our progress, but in the meantime, here are some of our downstairs spaces as they're coming together.

The someday library/ play room has been awesome. Although clearly the french doors don't do much to conceal the messes that overwhelm this space, it's been great to have a designated area for most of the kids' toys. We have plans to eventually do wall-to-wall built ins in here, but in the meantime we have found that our two existing Ikea Expedit bookshelves hold more than we suspected. Next steps will be to hang some kind of art (gallery wall? photo rail?) on the wall and at some point to recover the amazingly comfortable chair in the corner that used to belong to my grandparents.

I have dubbed the adjacent room to the playroom "the Seaside space." It is the area that was initially designed as a dining room but that we have reclaimed as a den area. Now that we actually can use our television, we just need to finish setting up the other side of the room and also figure out a plan for some kind of window treatment that will get echoed in the bay window at the front of the play room.

Our loft area is as comfortable as we imagined, and actually feels more spacious. We had a huge gallery wall in E-Haus #1 that no longer works in our new space, but I put together a smaller version of it using some of the more meaningful pieces over the love seat upstairs, and it makes me smile every day. The basket on the right is actually huge and full of books. It has become a new pre-bedtime ritual for the kids to pull out a handful of their favorites and then we do reading time all together in the common space before they head off to their own rooms.

I love this view of our great room/ dining nook/ kitchen. The pillows aren't in order, but they never are given their daily alternative use as building blocks, so this is just real life (a few weeks ago). Since this shot we've actually finished the floating shelves that finish off the right side of the kitchen.

Art is so difficult, especially on a huge wall like the one behind the sectional. We decided to print some oversized pictures that have since gotten finished with simple black frames. Someday we'll do something more artistic, but for less than $100, these look great to me! I have also since banned the striped upholstered pouf to the basement. It was a screened-in porch addition in our first house and has certainly seen better days.

 A birds-eye view after we switched out the well-used pouf for the Ikea table that I have had for 12 years (downgraded?). We have a table that will work really well once we cut down the legs to coffee table height, but one project at a time, eh?

These tufted chairs are huge-- almost comically tall-- but perfect in our comically tall great room. This is my new favorite reading nook.

We've finally started  thinking about the fireplace surround! It's nothing but an outline of painter's tape at the moment, but our plans are coming together.

They still need styled (and since this picture have gotten sealed), but our walnut floating shelves are done! I have word from Nate that I can play with them after today, and I have big plans to display some of the special things that I've mostly been hoarding since we got married 7 years ago.

Our powder room has a mirror! We bought a total of six options over the course of a month, and go figure, the least expensive option-- from Target no less-- ended up working best.

Next up: new art, bedrooms, and thoughts on budget items that pack a billion dollar punch.