Finally, a fireplace!

Okay. Almost a fireplace.

Most people come home from the hospital with a new baby and immediately fall into a kind of new baby twilight zone, where time no longer exists in the way that it previously did, sleep shifts roles from necessity to luxury, and the definition of a successful day includes hinges on everyone surviving it mostly intact. 

When we came home from the hospital with our daughter 5.5 years ago, my husband immediately ripped out our [floral bordered, old, linoleum] kitchen floor and began tiling. Our first son's arrival home coincided with a major basement flood, and so it was only natural that our newest addition inspired yet another home project. 

We intended to finalize a fireplace plan when the house was being built, but nothing felt right. We considered a traditional fireplace and immediately dismissed it, but a huge heavy stone wall didn't feel like the right thing either. It wasn't until June that inspiration finally hit, and we've gone from a big blank wall to a painter's tape outline of the bottom part to a fully designed plan that we're excited to put into action shortly.

The big blank wall as is, and also-- three cheers for no longer being pregnant! Baby Elias finally arrived early in the morning on June 20th after a thankfully quick and smooth labor.

A drawing in progress:

Getting closer:

And set! This is obviously a little oversimplified, but all of the proportions are right and so we're bringing our mantel home this weekend and will begin construction on the larger wall shortly. First order of business will be to see how sleek an 1800s barn beam can really get... I have my doubts!

We're also using this opportunity to finish our backsplash. While we originally had a very different idea in mind, we've decided to keep our low quartz backsplash for the time being and just tile behind our range up to the hood. We almost pulled the trigger on marble tiles, but as with every traditional finish we considered in this house, we ultimately have chosen a simpler but also very cool white glass tile that will set off but not compete with our pure white quartz counters.

Our sample:

Tile is on order and ready for installation:

Here we go! In the meantime, we're getting started on some outdoors projects. Those, unlike these fun interior plans, will go on forever. Good thing we have no plans to leave this place! 

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.

Honey, We're Home!

I can hardly believe it. After a whirlwind of a week where our date, plan, and format for moving got entirely flipped around not once but multiple times-- we are 100 percent out of our apartment and our home is nowhere near complete, but it's [mostly] functional! I was so filled with adrenaline after the first day of furniture delivery that I ended up almost entirely on my feet for an 18 hour marathon of unpacking. That amount of strain on my 31 week pregnant body also meant that I was almost entirely incapacitated for the next day or two-- but it provided the right momentum for sure!

One of the perks of the move that I did not expect has been the complete honeymoon ambiance of our first week in-- not necessarily between me and my husband, but between us and our house. We are so in awe of its brand-new appliances and shiny surfaces that for the moment, we are equally thrilled to do a load of laundry or load/ unload our (working!!!) dishwasher or do a twice-daily sweep of our hardwoods. Someday we'll need to re-implement our weekly cleaning schedule, but for the moment, our beds are made and our floors are spotless. Even if our garage IS filled with boxes and half of our closets have yet to be built out. The honeymoon phase is real.

In equally wonderful news, though some of our punch-list items are yet to be completed-- sigh-- the weather has finally started to cooperate with us now that we've hit the second half of April and we were able to have the property graded on Friday. Game-changer. Now we can actually visualize living outdoors as well as inside our home, and we've been able to determine that A) our driveway is functional as is, and should be good at least through the early part of next year and B) we can start planning out things like top soil and grass, and a tiny little deck off the back door that will eventually step down onto a sweet patio. I've never been more grateful for farmer relatives who have every single tool we could ever need to aid us in our rudimentary landscaping endeavors.

Our pendant lighting in the kitchen was finished just in time for us to move in. Our floating walnut shelves on the sink side have yet to be completed, but the wood is in our garage and ready to go at the next free moment.

Two pieces of furniture were delivered the day before move-in day, and we wasted no time getting them up and running. First order of business: a "princess bed" for Norah!

Both kids thought that they were pretty helpful. I think they just like the scenery.

And voila! A mattress-less but sturdy bed for my girl!

Our couch ended up getting delivered a full two weeks early, which worked out perfectly with our schedule. It also ended up providing an unfortunately comfortable place for people to rest mid-move. We were happy that the deliverymen left us with several moving blankets to keep it mostly covered until after the dust had settled. Bonus: Everett found that the moving blankets made for a super cozy place to him to hide. Thankfully this monster of a couch is even better in person than we imagined. The velvety texture of the fabric in contrast to the cleaner modern lines of the couch is lovely, and it's more comfortable every time we use it. Win-win!

More to come soon, perhaps a little slower than I would like. As it turns out,  there is one more drawback of new construction in the country that we did not fully anticipate. 60 days without internet is going to be an adventure, but between permits and running new lines down our over-600 foot driveway, that's apparently the timeline that we're looking at for service!

At least we've got more than enough projects to keep us busy in the meantime. Now back to work!

Rain, Rain, Go Away...

I want to move in

to my house today.

Yup. Feeling impatient with this spring weather, which though beautiful has been obnoxiously rainy these last few weeks. All I need is a short dry period so that we can get our final concrete laid and then we should be good to go! Our certificate of occupancy is pending and our temporary apartment is filling up with boxes, so we're ready when the house is... hopefully soon! This moving delay, as it happens, also means that the time between occupancy and the end of our lease will be short. So we're back to the idea of hiring movers to make it happen without us losing our sanity. 

Did I mention that I am also supposed to be traveling abroad in just over a week? And that I'm almost 30 weeks pregnant? There's not that much sanity to spare.

That being said, the silver lining to our delayed move has meant more time working on some of the smaller details that we would have had to otherwise tackle after our move such as shelving in some of our closets, cabinet hardware, and hanging mirrors in our bathrooms. It's kind of nice to know that at least a few elements in our home will be ready-ready and all we will have to do in the kitchen, for example, is decide how to organize our stuff. 

In the meantime, we've been able to start working on a few of the details that will take our house from lovely to, you know, functional.

Perks of carpet = no bedrooms or beds required for these guys! One of their new "we're visiting the house!" routines involves taking lots of pretend naps on the stairs. Also it's another reason why I'm grateful for the landing halfway up/ down.

 A semi-functional laundry room! We will be adding some shelving and pizzazz to this space shortly, but in the meantime we've got a working washer and dryer! Side note: these are the first new appliances we have ever owned. Our previous home came with a set circa late 1980s/ early 1990s and we replaced the washer at one point with my grandmother's mid-90s model when she no longer needed it. So needless to say, I'm thrilled!

Pro/ con of being budget conscious means that we took charge of our own closet and pantry, which also meant a multi-hour long trip to Ikea to grab a whole lot of materials. And a whole lot of man hours to come getting it all assembled and installed!

I love our cabinet hardware a little too much, especially in the way that it mimics the handles on our hardware. Hardware is one of those details that you don't consider when you don't get to choose it, but seems to transform the look of a space when it changes.

Our little bunnies loved hopping around the house on Easter weekend.

A more pulled-back shot of our kitchen (sans peninsula and additional pendants). I'm caring a lot less about our non-ceiling height cabinets at this point. We've since finished the hardware on the island since this shot was taken, but the wall ovens that will be installed next to the fridge are still on their way. The originals were delivered with broken glass, so we are eagerly anticipating the working version!

Though not all details have been completed at E-Haus, our certificate of occupancy was issued and so we get to start moving stuff in a few days! In the meantime, we're surrounded by moving boxes once again for the third time in less than a year. Can't wait to be done with these for decades to come, and the kids concur.

Now, on to the logistics of a three-part move.