Not-So-Extreme Home Makeover: Completed Edition

Yes, that’s right - the guest bedroom project has finally been completed … mostly. The hard labor is done anyway. We still need to replace the blinds and ceiling fan/light and move the furniture back in, but other than that … done-zo.  It is so exciting to see the mostly finished product - it looks like it belongs in a different house.  Rather than babbling on, I’m just going to load this post with after pictures.  Enjoy!

*Warning:  These pictures are kind of redundant.  I tried to get every angle, so what you’ll see is the full room*













There you have it, the completed room.  I’m quite proud of this little transformation, and can’t wait to share my ideas and inspiration for the future of this room!

New Year's Resolutions

I do not usually make New Year’s resolutions.

Actually, I say I’m going to do something, and then I come up with excuses for why I didn’t follow through (remember this, it will be on the quiz).  Sometimes I even convince myself that instead of starting on January 1st, I should wait until my birthday in March.  I get 3 extra months to do as I please, and then when it’s time to start the next year of my life, I lose motivation and fail.  I’m a clever one.

This year, I am going to make more of an effort to change my ways.  I really want to follow through with my resolutions.  Here’s the list I’ve come up with so far:

*Be a Better Wife - B puts up with A LOT of crap from me.  This year, my goal is to do better at keeping up the house (Hubs is a neat freak, I am not), to stop being so negative (I bitch and moan to him all the time about work, and it drives him crazy), and to be more loving and less sarcastic.

*Follow Through [SURPRISE!] - This is the thing I get the most crap from B about.  I have a hard time actually finishing things - I write letters over and over, but never finish them or mail them. I start projects and then give up on them (with the exception of our bedroom makeover and such).  It took me nearly a year to write and send a letter to my cousin who lives in Arizona.  I think I wrote almost the same letter about 80 times before I finally sat down, wrote, and decided it was “good enough” to send.  Ridiculous.  Another thing I’m going to try to follow through on … this blog! (and the potential sister blog documenting my pregnancy and the baby and whatnot … you know, whenever that happens).

*Keep in Touch with Friends and Family - I do an awful job of keeping in touch with the people I care about most (as mentioned above, I’m not very good at following through).  Even if it’s only through Facebook or an email, I want to have regular conversations with my friends and family.

*Be More Mindful About my/our Spending - B is due for a promotion and a raise soon, and it sounds like I should be looking forward to my first raise in 2 years in the beginning of the year.  Instead of throwing this extra money away on frivolous things, I want to work on putting more money into savings.

*Read More Books - Probably the only resolution I will follow through on, thanks to our Kindle Fire and our subscription to Amazon Prime (it gives us access to the Kindle Lending Library, so I can “check out” one free book a month).

*Make a Decision about Grad School - I think it’s pretty self-explanatory.  I had been planning on going to graduate school for most of my high school and college careers, then lost the motivation to do it … and now I need to decide if that’s the path I want to follow or not.

I’m going to try my hardest to follow through on these resolutions - we’ll see how it goes.  Maybe I’ll even post about my failures.  Ha!

I am a Scrooge

Last weekend, I spent nearly 2 full days baking Christmas cookies and listening to Christmas songs and I was completely miserable.  (I have to admit, the sweets were a pretty nice trade off, even though I really should avoid them.)  I can’t stand shopping during the holiday season (which I guess starts after Halloween now?  Yeesh!  It gets earlier and earlier every year!) because of the relentless crowds and holiday muzak.  It’s the worst.

And then there’s the other problem.  Hubs and I are challenged when it comes to Christmas gifts.

We just don’t do it right.  We buy ourselves lots and lots and lots of gifts (because we love ourselves the most, obviously), but we wait until the absolute last minute to buy gifts for others, and they always lack creativity. This year:  $25 in cold hard cash for everyone!*  Kind of pathetic.  And cheap.  I’m pretty sure this makes us horrible people, but really, we can’t help it.  The youngest people we’re buying gifts for are 17 - basically, we’re all adults and we’re all over it.   Next year, I think the plan is to pick names and set a $50 limit.  It’s so much easier to buy for one person than it is to buy for 6.  Bah Humbug.

*Hubs was able to think of an awesome gift for one of my sisters - tickets to a wrestling Pay-per-View event.  That’s the only non-cash gift we’re giving this year.

Charting

At the beginning of the month (actually, a few days into December), I decided to start charting my temperatures with Fertility Friend so that I could better understand my cycle. It’s been an interesting experience, even though I don’t really have much data yet.  It can be a bit of a pain in the bum remembering to take my temp at the same time every day, but B has been helping me remember - such a good husband! :)

So far, it seems to indicate that O-day was on the 10th, meaning today is 10DPO. According to my free VIP access, I should test around the 29th.  A positive test would be the best (belated) Christmas gift EVER!

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was considering adding the use of a conception enhancing supplement to boost our chances of a successful cycle. I ordered Fertilaid by Fair Haven Health, and attempted to follow the dosing guidelines for one month.  A full daily dose is 3 pills, but some days I forgot (or didn’t have enough on me) and took 2, 1, or completely missed a day (missing a day only happened maybe twice - for the most part I took 2 or 3).  According to many reviews I read on the internet, women were becoming pregnant after only using one months worth of the supplement, although the manufacturer states that it could take 3 months to build up in a woman’s system, resulting in a success.  I am really hoping that we will be included in the one month successes, but I’m trying to be realistic.

If this isn’t our cycle, I do not intend to continue buying Fertilaid, mostly because it is so expensive (nearly $30 for a one month supply - that’s kind of crazy).  Instead, the plan is to take a daily multi-vitamin and vitex in an attempt to naturally regulate my system.  Like I said before, a positive test would be an excellent Christmas present … I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Murphy's Law

Today was supposed to be the day the bedroom project was finally completed. Of course, that was before we found an uneven spot way back on the side we started with. It couldn’t just be left alone either, because there was a significant gap. Not cool. So B and his dad attempted to fix the spot, but a piece of laminate broke and had to be replaced, and then the rest of the laminate wouldn’t lay flush … And I failed to mention that this happened when the entire floor was nearly finished.

So B and his dad had to take the floor apart, but they kept it in order so that reassembling it wouldn’t take as long.  Unfortunately, that fiasco meant that the guys ran out of time to finish the room (all that’s left is installing the trim), so we’re looking at another weekend of working on the room.  After that though, it should be done.  I hope.  Anyway, here’s how the room looks, sans trim:

The Funny Thing About Life

Is that things never go as planned.

According to B and his pops, ugly orange-rust carpet removal was super easy (I was in the kitchen washing a shitload of dishes and begging any deity who would listen for the means to purchase a dish washing appliance during that step).  But alas, it turned out the hardwoods beneath the ugly carpet were not so pretty after all.  Super disappointing.

After discussing our options with my Father-in-Law and Hubs, we all decided that it would be the best decision to just buy laminate floors instead of refinishing the existing floors (Option A:  put down laminate.  Option B: spend a fortune putting down new carpeting.  Option C:  spend a fortune refinishing the floor).  Father-in-Law broke it down like this:  it would take over a month to re-finish the floors (because he only comes over on Sundays to help us with our home improvements), there would be no guarantee that they would turn out nice, and the cost of renting the sander and dealing with staining and sealing the floors would all be a pain in the behind.  As much as I would have loved to preserve the original hardwood floors, it just didn’t make sense.  After very briefly mourning the hardwoods that would be no more, I went into research mode, looking up our laminate options at Home Depot and Menard’s.  Realizing that online prices can sometimes be too good to be true, we ventured out to the stores to see what we could find that would *hopefully* not break the budget.

We started at Home Depot in the clearance section, where we found a viable option in a medium finish, but it wasn’t perfect.  Our ideal flooring was a darker cherry finish, so we went into the full priced flooring section, which we quickly realized was a mistake.  To put down a full priced laminate floor in our 9’x13’ room, it would cost us over $300 for the flooring we liked.  Not going to happen.  For comparison’s sake, we decided it was time to head across the street to Menard’s to see what they had to offer, keeping our choice from Home Depot’s clearance section as the front runner.  Menard’s had several more reasonable options, and we all agreed pretty quickly on Tarkett Newport Laminate in Walnut Exotic Cherry.  At $25.99 a box (sale price), we only (ha!) spent $193 on the flooring, and it looks awesome (even in it’s partially finished state.  It will be completed next Sunday.  I will be very angry if it isn’t).

The addition of laminate floors moves the total spent on this project up to $260.  Over our budget of $250 and still not quite complete (we need to replace the blinds on both of the windows), but the room looks a million times better, so I think we’re okay with the overage.



Here’s a [blurry-ish] iPhone picture of a finished corner of the room as a reward for reading this saga.

Light at the End of the Tunnel

I can finally see it. Last Sunday, I spent a good portion of the day working on the bedroom project.  My father-in-law sanded because I’m useless at it, then we (even B!) touched up the primer, re-painted the ceiling, and got the first coat of paint on the walls.  So exciting! The second coat of paint went up Monday morning (all by myself), and then I worked on moving the books that were stashed on the bed into the scrap room, where the bookshelf was hidden away.   This Sunday, we will be removing the ugly orange-rust carpet.  I’m not sure how soon we will start refinishing the floor, but I’m hoping right away so that we can get this room moved to the finished column of my home improvements list. To be honest, I’m a little nervous about the floor underneath the ugly carpet. B’s dad has told me about a dozen times that when he owned this house, they were putting in new carpet, saw the hardwood underneath, and were going to refinish the floors in the master bedroom but couldn’t because the carpet was glued to the floor. During this project, I’ve been seeing some carpet fibers stuck to floor. I just hope that the wood is in good enough condition that refinishing will be an easy-ish process. My fingers are crossed. Now that the room is painted (and mostly complete), I have to say that I love the way the room is turning out. It would be nice if the room had better lighting (the only source of artificial light in the room comes from a ceiling fan that is not centered in the room), but I think I can live with what we have. Besides the floor, there are a few other finishing touches that are left to complete, but we’ll get to those later. The updated expenditure on this room is about $67 currently. I ended up having B buy more primer for about $15 (the stain in the ceiling leached through the color changing paint, so we painted the ceiling again with stain blocking primer), and we paid $7 for rollers because I was tired of washing the ones we had. They were old and nasty. The edges near the ceiling turned out looking pretty nice and finished so we will not be putting molding around the top of the walls, so we will be saving a bit of money and labor there (yay!). Hopefully this is a good omen.

Timing is Everything

Trying to have a baby is one of those things in life that cannot be planned.  But that doesn’t stop us from trying :).

When we first started having real discussions about starting our family, we started talking about when we’d like our child’s birthday to be (in an ideal situation). This turned out to be one of the few things that we completely agree on. We both said that we would like to have a summer baby. B’s reasoning was that if the kid has a birthday in the summer, we don’t have to send birthday treats to school. Not the most logical reasoning, but funny and it means less work for me, so I’m sold. My reasoning for wanting a summer baby is that there are fewer holidays in the summer. There’s nothing worse than having a Christmas birthday. At least that’s what I assume. Also, we’re hoping to be expecting in 2012, which means we have to avoid an October due date because that’s when my brother is getting married. It wouldn’t be very nice of us to steal their thunder. Plus I’m a bridesmaid and we ordered our dresses and I don’t want to deal with altering it to fit a giant belly (although they are pretty flow-y, so I’m not super worried). According to my lovely What To Expect Fertility Tracker app, if we are successful this month (actually next month, since it’s barely still November) the estimated due date would be the end of August, which would be perfect. I really would like this to work out - baby dust and happy thoughts are appreciated.

Update on Guest Room

So I’ve been working on this guest bedroom pretty regularly for the past week, and I haven’t made all that much progress.  After sanding some areas, we found more spots that needed to be mended with mud.  I actually did the mudding myself - I’m pretty proud.  While that was drying, I ended up priming 3 of the 4 walls (the fourth had wet mud on it), and on Sunday B’s dad came over again and did some sanding and found MORE PLACES THAT NEEDED MUD!! Ugh.  Of course.

Before my 2 hour shift at work this afternoon, I managed to get one area of the angled ceiling painted.  And then … I found another spot that needed to be mended with mud.  So frustrating.  B’s dad thinks that we should paint the ceiling before we paint the walls - I don’t want to wait!  I want to get my lovely Coventry Gray paint on the walls!  (Coventry Gray is a Benjamin Moore color, but we had it color matched to the in house brand at Ace to save money) My goal for the rest of the day is to get the final wall primed, and maybe I’ll do some more work on the ceiling … I really really really want to get paint on the walls by Thursday (or Wednesday night), but I don’t think it’s going to work out.

This weekend, we (who am I kidding, this is all me) decided to put white molding around by the ceiling like B’s dad put in the bathroom.  So that’s another thing to add some time and money onto this project.  Oh, and under the carpet we have some nice hardwood floors, so the carpet will come out, the floor will be refinished, and molding will go around the bottom of the wall.  I’m hoping to keep our budget limited to $200.  We’re doing pretty well so far - the primer and ceiling paint were leftovers from previous projects (aka free), the paint and one roll of painters tape cost us $29, the small container of mud was $8, and the sand texture to be added to the paint was about $8, putting the grand total so far at about $45 (I rounded totals up).  All of our materials have been bought from Ace Hardware.  It is possible that we will need to buy another can of ceiling paint (we’ve been using Glidden’s color changing ceiling paint - it’s pretty nice.  It starts out light pink when you first roll it on, and it changes to white as it dries) but I’m realllllllllllllly hoping we won’t have to shell out the cash for that …

I hope this project is over soon.

For funsies, here’s an in-progress picture!

Guest Room Facelift

This weekend was pretty monumental for our household.  Let me set the scene:

Hubs and I are in one of the spare bedrooms (Hubs is changing his clothes, I’m bothering him, as per usual)


Me:  Hey B, why don’t you try pulling on that Packer border to see how easily it comes down?

Hubs:  Okay.

Me: NO NO NO I was just kidding.  If you pulled it we’d have to do the whole room.

Hubs:  Okay (yank)


And so our next project began.  We removed the ugly and falling down Packer border and the equally ugly white with green stripes wallpaper.  By we removed, I mean we both started it, then we went to Menards to get supplies (after making a detour and getting dinner and picking up B’s dad), and then I rocked out to some jams and finished removing the rest of the wallpaper while Hubs watched “Breaking Bad” and hockey.  On Sunday, B’s dad came over and fixed up some of the cracks in the plaster with some mud, and that ended day 2.  He also loaned me his sanding attachment for the shop vac so I can sand the mudded areas and not have to deal with all of the dust.  I wanted to work on it today but I couldn’t figure out how to attach the sander to the vac - turns out you have to put another attachment on first.  Duh.  So now the plan is to sand everything tomorrow so that we’ll know if there are any areas that need more mud, and hopefully we’ll I’ll be priming and painting by this weekend.

At this point, you may be wondering - what color did we choose for this room?  I’m going with a light-medium gray.  I think it will look really clean and modern, and will be a great backdrop for some awesome punches of color.  Specifically, buttery yellow and aqua.  Oh, and this room?  It’s the future nursery.  I’m pretty excited to have this started.  We’re still working on the baby-making, but the room is going to be an awesome guest bedroom until the time comes.

For comparison’s sake, here’s a couple of before pictures.  Enjoy!



The ugly wallpaper and border



A [blurry] picture of another corner (you can see the plain white wall behind the dresser) - and a sneak peek at the beautiful rocking chair and the dresser that will be returning to the room in the future.

One Line

I ordered some HPTs earlier this week so that I could find out if the phantom symptoms I had been experiencing were not so phantom after all.  This morning was the best time to do the test, so at 6:30 am, when I couldn’t hold it anymore, I decided to test.  And the result?  One line.  As in just the control.  Boo!

Disappointing, but not surprising.  We would have to have very efficient reproductive systems for a positive result to be possible.  It’s not the end of the world though - it just means we get to keep doing the baby dance until it works.  I’m also thinking that I’m going to order a vitamin supplement that is designed to aid in conception (and to regulate the reproductive system).  I could go see a doctor and tell them that things have been pretty irregular, but I want to try natural remedies before going the clinical route.  Hopefully we will have good luck with the added boost - many of the reviews claim to have positive results after only one month instead of the 3 that the supplement claims to take.  Maybe we will find out … I just hope that we are successful sooner rather than later - I don’t want to upset my future sister-in-law by being due around the same time as her October wedding next year.

Luck and Baby Dust are appreciated.

A Fresh Start

I think I've finally done the impossible.  I have successfully warmed my lovely hubster up to the idea of starting our family.  What better way to celebrate than to blog about our adventure?

About Me:  Friends call me Ju, I'm 20-something years old,and I've been married to my best friend/sidekick/soul mate B since August 2010.  I'm a daycare teacher, but that doesn't stop me from swearing like a sailor.  I pretend to be creative and artsy, but I'm not really all that talented.  I love writing (especially with pen and paper, although blogging seems fun too), and I'm very particular about my writing instruments.  I enjoy building cheap-o particle board furniture, and at some point, I'd love to renovate our entire house.

Let the adventure begin ...