Tomorrow Is Another Day...

She's All That

I feel like this house is our own personal makeover project and we can totally get it elected Prom Queen if we just work hard enough.  It's got such great bones, an awesome layout, a charming personality and if we can just get it to take off its glasses and blowout its hair, we'll have a super "wow" moment on the stairs when all is said and done.  The unfortunate thing is that making over a house is about a frillion times more expensive (but probably less judgmental and condescending) than making over a human, so we're having to do it bits at a time.  

We've spent this last month ripping out carpets, painting rooms and scrubbing bathrooms in an attempt to save money where we can.  We hired out things like tearing down the wallpaper and the downstairs painting because we decided it was a priority to get that done as soon as possible for livability purposes, and a generous loan from our parents made it possible to not have to do everything ourselves.  We have engineered wood flooring scattered all around the house just waiting for Colby's dad to arrive to help get that installed this weekend.  And last week we made our last big purchase for this round of renovations, ordering new kitchen cabinets, quartz countertops and a refrigerator.

From here on out, we'll have to start taking a bit more time with the projects we have in mind.  The master bathroom has a leak that may have damaged the structure of the floor, so that will probably require more immediate attention.  The guest bathroom needs updating still and we have big dreams for turning the unfinished basement into a 5th bedroom with 3rd full bath, playroom, storage area, and less creepy laundry room.  But that will probably have to wait until the next tax refund comes through--bought a new house?  Had a new baby? Lost money on a rental property?  Check, check, check!  Give us our money back, thanks!

But we do have a fair amount of progress to show for our work over the last month.  So, without further ado, let's go to the photos!

Foyer Before:

Foyer Progress:

Stripped the wallpaper and painted in Benjamin Moore Revere Pewter with white trim (we stayed with this consistent color throughout the downstairs since it is all so open), pulled up the linoleum, and replaced the old wood and brass light fixture (not pictured in the before) with a brushed nickel fixture.  Just needs the floor and the baseboard and we'll call it done!

Powder Room Before:

Powder Room Progress:

Ha!  Not much to see here yet!  It's been gutted, and is currently awaiting installation of the wood floors, then the contractors will come back to do another coat of paint, install the new ceramic tile, vanity and toilet.

Kitchen Before:

Kitchen Progress:

We had the contractors remove the desk, patch the wall and paint.  We'll be moving the fridge to the center of this wall and surrounding it with floor to ceiling pantry cabinets.  Colby pulled up all the carpet, linoleum, and thousands upon thousands of nails from the subfloor.  You can also catch a glimpse of the fireplace in the background which is in the midst of a little makeover as well.  It got a coat of white paint on the dark wood surround, we're going to put a glass tile over the brick, a grey ceramic tile on the hearth and pull out the brass insert.  It's not currently functional, so at least for the summer, we'll just stick some candles in there for pretty factor.

Living Room/Dining Room Before:

Living Room/Dining Room Progress:

The contractors also stripped the wallpaper in here and painted the Revere Pewter on top and white on the bottom, as well as extending the chair rail into the second room through the doorway.  Still needs floor and baseboards, and we plan to add a faux wainscoting effect on the white part of the wall, switch out the light fixture and possible add crown molding.  We are taking down the small wall that separates this room from the kitchen and extending cabinets in here.  We will likely use it as a sort of transitional room between kitchen and dining room, with a bar and possibly an island, then use the longer room at the front of the house as the dining room.  This is the part of our plan we're least sure about and are waiting to get all of our furniture in the house to make a final decision.

Master Bedroom Before: 

Master Bedroom Progress:

It was with huge regret that I realized I never took a good before photo of the master bedroom, showcasing the white laminate vanity taking up a huge amount of space in the alcove where my suitcase currently resides.  However, the above photo (which is actually the future nursery) does at least show off the same dingy, yellow, beige color we covered up.  We had our contractor remove the vanity and patch up the wall, then did the painting ourselves (Benjamin Moore Wythe Blue).  I've done a fair amount of painting in my life, but never had to paint ceiling, trim AND walls, and if I ever have to paint another window, it will be too soon (spoiler alert: I will have to).  But whatever color the previous owners had chosen to paint a room, they stuck with it for walls, trim and ceiling.  So unless you want pink trim or a yellow ceiling, you just have to suck it up and repaint the whole thing.  And I am thrilled with how it turned out.  All it needs now is furniture and it's ready for showtime!  We would like to have an overhead fixture installed (none of the bedrooms have them), but we'll get to that down the road.

Master Closet Before:

Master Closet After:

All that happened here was a coat of white paint, but man, what a difference.  It looks so much cleaner, and my clothes are very happy to have such a bright, cheery backdrop.  I would eventually love to add some built-ins around the bottom so that it's not wasted space.

Guest Bathroom Before:

Guest Bathroom Progress:

I'm calling this one "For Now" done.  Ideally, I would like to get the bathtub reglazed, change out the toilet (that part will probably happen pretty soon since it's a water hog) and vanity, and retile the floor with the same tile we're using in the downstairs powder room.  I'd also like to do a DIY frame on the mirror to make it look more custom and less builder's grade.  But in the meantime, it's amazing what a fresh coat of paint (Benjamin Moore Antiguan Sky), a camouflaging shower curtain (that desperately needs to be ironed) and bath mat can do.  I also discovered these miraculous pumice sticks at Home Depot that shined up the bathtub so it looks almost new.  Still yellow, but at least not yellow buried beneath 40 years of grime.

So, that's where we are for now!  Last night Colby started pulling down cabinets and demo'ing the wall between the kitchen and dining room to prep for floor and cabinet installation.  Next week we will likely have a floor and maybe some baseboards, and all of our belongings finally arrived from Germany, so we'll be able to start unpacking and really moving in and making this a home.  It hasn't all moved along as quickly as I'd have liked in an idea world (like, one day would be better?), but it is really rewarding looking at how far we've come.  Fingers crossed my next update will have us that much closer to DONE!

Baby Bumping Round Two

So, suffice it to say, getting pregnant was a bit of a shocker.  If you've followed along here for any length of time, you probably already know that we got pregnant with the girls through a pretty intensive IVF protocol which included a special process in which the sperm was injected directly into the eggs, because we couldn't even trust our own genetic material to know what to do when placed in a 3 inch across petrie dish.  Special.  I have fertility problems.  Colby has fertility problems.  We definitely would have been the first ones voted off of caveman survival of the fittest island.

Still, we decided in the late summer to go ahead and stop preventing a pregnancy, but it was more of a lark than anything.  Neither one of us really thought that anything would come of it.  We thought we would try for a few months, then when we moved back to the States, either decide two was enough or talk about pursuing further fertility treatments.  Then, just about three months later, after a week of feeling totally run down, I decided to just go ahead and test.  Just to prove to myself that all those weird pains and twinges I'd been feeling were nothing.  And it was positive.  One dark line and one very, very faint, but definitely present, line.

The only complicating factor was that it was 11 PM on a Thursday night.  And we were leaving before the sun was up on Monday morning for the States, where I would be staying with family for the next five weeks.  The clinic on base was helpful for once, and let me do a walk-in blood test just to confirm the pregnancy then get me into the system so that we could temporarily switch our insurance over to the Stateside branch and I could see doctors in Louisiana.

I went in for my first appointment at what I thought was probably around 6 weeks, and while they couldn't see much yet, there was definitely a sac and they scheduled me to come back two weeks later to make sure their dating estimate was correct.  We'd been so busy, and I'd been paying so little attention to my cycles that I truly had no idea when we could have conceived.  It couldn't be a more opposite experience than our first pregnancy.

Two weeks later, we spotted this little bean, and I started feeling like I could actually celebrate.  We'd been awkwardly keeping things a secret from family up to the point that things were starting to resemble a British farce, with us sneaking around having secret phone calls while random family members popped out of the walls to ask us questions.  My sister actually thought that we were setting up a surprise puppy adoption for my mom's Christmas present, bahaha!

Everything had been so planned and clinical with our pregnancy for Charlotte and Annabelle, we never really had the exciting surprise announcement for our family.  This time we printed out a photo of the girls, and put it in a double-sided picture frame with a little note on the other side breaking the news, "Hey Annabelle, have you heard the news?  You're going to be a big sister too!"  It was really fun watching the jaws drop and seeing the shocked reactions from our families.  Not that there hadn't been a great deal of suspicion each evening I'd said no thank you to the offer of a glass of wine.

This pregnancy has been different in a few ways.  Morning sickness was a little worse, though fortunately still not terrible.  I've been much more tired throughout, probably more a function of having two 3-year-olds than gestating.  And my back has started hurting much earlier than last time.  It's crazy to me that I'm actually in more pain with one baby than I was with two.  I'm sure this has something to do with the fact that I'm four years older and also have the aforementioned toddlers who want me to cart them around 48% of the time.  Also, it was free.  That's a very good difference.

It's also been different in that we know exactly what we are getting into this time, and are having a little more anxiety about the introduction of a baby into our lives.  I wouldn't change anything, but I'd be lying if I said I never stressed about how we're all going to handle this huge upheaval in our lives.  I think back on that first year of motherhood and how unlike myself I felt.  It took me so long to feel like I had a handle on things, and like I could successfully leave the house without disaster befalling all of us.  I wonder how this third little one will throw off our center of gravity.  I wonder how the girls will handle it and how they'll all get along as they grow older.  

I worry about dealing with post partum depression again and how I'll handle the exhaustion if I can't just nap throughout the day because I have other kids now who need me.  I worry SO much that we'll have to deal with colic again and I'll have another 4-5 months of incessant screaming ahead of me.  And probably the most vain worry of all, what if all my hair falls out again???  Oh lord, that was so awful.

But perhaps most different is how little I actually find myself thinking about this pregnancy at all.  I guess things have been pretty busy, but in fairness we were moving to a brand new country, traveling the world, and keeping pretty busy the first time too, and I surely was obsessing over registries and diapering options and the perfect nursery theme (okay, maybe I've been obsessing over the nursery a little).  It's just this thing that I realize all of a sudden from time to time.  Oh yeah!  I'm pregnant!  There's an actual baby in there!  Which sends me into my panic spiral.

So... overall, things are good!  I'm hoping to get into a new doctor here soon, and find out whether this wee little fetus of ours is of the male or female persuasion.  I am hitting the halfway point, 20 weeks, tomorrow, and am a little bit in shock at how quickly this is flying by.  I'm so scared to meet this little human, and also so, so ready.  I've said before that I'm not really an infant person, my favorite age with the girls was 6-18 months (Two was also pretty great, three can die in a fire--can't we all just skip three??  Send them away to a Swiss boarding school that year or something.), but I've also really missed tiny baby cuddles.  Watching all of those incredible firsts.  Knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that you somehow managed to score the cutest baby on the planet.  I think it will be okay.  I know we'll get through it.

I'd feel a lot better about things though if I had a floor.  And a couch.  And a bed.  But that's another story...

Boy, Girl and Old Lady Meet

Our house hunting experience in NoVa was harrowing to say the least. The amount the Air Force allots us per month for housing (if you don't live on base, you receive a Basic Allowance for Housing to cover the cost of a home off base) in this area is more than we ever thought we'd be spending on a house, and yet, in this area, for Colby's rank, it gets us just barely above crack den living.  

We left the girls with my parents, and went to stay with my aunt and uncle in the area for a few days of hard core hunting and were beyond discouraged after the first couple of days.  It very quickly became clear that we were going to have to make a decision between updated finishes and appliances and square footage with a, um, charming (??) vintage 70s or 80s design scheme.  With two toddlers, two large dogs, a baby on the way and frequent visitors, we started trying to look beyond the immediate horror of many of the houses we were looking at to find the potential buried under layers of carpet, linoleum and wallpaper.

On our 3rd day, we decided to make an offer on a split level house in a great neighborhood.  It had most of what we were looking for--enough space, though still on the smaller side, had been updated here and there by the young family selling it, and a decently sized backyard.  We felt the price was a little high for the work that was still needed to bring the house up to date, so we offered lower than asking and received a counter that barely budged from the listing price.  This was a little discouraging, but it was the end of the day and we decided to sleep on it.  The next day, we continued looking at houses while we stewed over what our counter should be and found one bust after another.  Then, at the very end of the day, we decided to drive by just one more that had gone on the market that day.

At first glance, we were ready to turn around and run back out the door.  It had very clearly been a long, loooooong time since the house had seen any updating.  After talking to the owner who was present doing some clearing out, and sleuthing through documents down the road, we discovered that the house still belonged to the original owners who bought it in 1971 for $43,000.  Let's just all let that sink in.  $43,000.  Sigh.  Anyway, the husband and wife had died in the last decade and it seems that the son had continued to live there until evidently deciding the time had come to sell.

I could continue to describe the house, or I could let the photos do the talking...

   

So, you can probably understand our reservations.  Pink carpet.  Blue carpet.  Linoleum.  Cheap parquet.  Dated wallpaper and fixtures.  Poorly utilized kitchen space.  Tiny master bathroom. But then we looked out at the backyard.

 

Gorgeous well-maintained deck.  Plenty of grassy space for kids and dogs to roam.  A shed.  Trees for privacy and shade.  It was by far the nicest backyard we had seen.  And then the realtor reminded us of the price.  And the square footage.  A huge two car garage.  And the opportunity to increase it by a huge percent by finishing the basement.  And we began mulling over the possibilities that were currently hidden beneath all of the wallpaper and carpet.  And we decided to say goodbye to the split level and give this one a shot.

After an absolutely agonizing weekend during which we endured a back and forth bidding war, and waited on tenterhooks, terrified we were going to lose both houses and be back at square one when we moved.  Finally, we got the call for our realtor--thanks to the escalation clause we had included in our offer, we had won the war and gotten the house... by a mere $1000.  Had we set our escalation limit just $500 less, we would have lost it.  It was hard not to feel like it was meant to be.

We flew over from Germany on March 15 and closed on March 16.  Just a few days later, we had our painters in tearing down wallpaper, Colby was pulling up carpet, and my mom and I were coated in white paint giving the closets a makeover.  We've come a long way in the last few weeks, but we still have a long road ahead of us.  I'll save the progress shots for my next post, and for now leave you with this little glimpse into the "rustic" lifestyle we are currently living!