A room to call his/her own ...

Yay!  The major work has been completed on the nursery and now it's just a matter of finishing the room's color scheme by adding wall decor, accessories, bedding and window treatments.  Unfortunately, we won't have a truly "finished" product until the occupant itself is "finished" growing!  But for now, you get the idea with these pictures.  The picture to the left is a "before" shot.  The rest are pics of the semi-finished result. 

 

The room was painted with two different shades of brown/tan and all moldings were painted in a creamy white.  

I constructed and hung a book bin below the chair rail on the wall in which the closet door swings into (and will add one more above the chair rail on the same wall).  The idea with this was that since the room's size prohibits a lot of furniture (including a book shelf), I wanted the baby to have some place to put his/her favorite books.  

I made french message boards (2 boy, 2 girl) to hang

 over the changing table as a place to put notes & clippings and to add a touch of the accent color to the wall.  I'll use the extra fabric from that project to make accent pillows to put on the glider rocker.  I've hung a nice ledge shelf above the crib to place a few frames and keepsakes and to add a focal point to the wall.  In a few weeks, I'll add a phrase in vinyl lettering above the shelf and  a monogram of the baby's initial's below the shelf after he/she is born.  I have a few other ideas for bringing the accent color of either pink or blue into the room but for now, the room must be as it is.  I really think once it's all "put together" it'll be the perfect place for our little one to spend time!  :-)

Simply, an update ...

Our house and calendar have been bustling with activities over the last couple of weeks and a quick glance at the near future indicates that it will be more of the same!  On Friday, I had my monthly check-up with my midwife and although things went well, he indicated that I'm "measuring small" for how far along I am in my pregnancy so he's ordered another ultrasound in a couple of weeks just to be sure that the baby's growth is okay.  I seem to remember this sort of occurrence when I was pregnant with Alex..... (any indication that it's a boy? hmmm... well, my gut has always "told" me girl but that's off the topic!).  So I'll go for my ultrasound and another appointment with the midwife in about 3 weeks.  From there, I'll  meet with the midwife every 2 weeks.

I've been diligently working on readying the nursery.  With Tim's portion of the work done, it was time for painting and it's seems that the painting hasn't stopped in the last 2 days.  Today my task was to complete painting of the crown and chair rail moldings.  I also began a project a few days ago of constructing wall mount book bins to hang on the wall behind the closet door, which I was able to get painted today as well.  I'm hoping to have the moldings in place and the room somewhat put together by this weekend so that Tim can see an almost finished room when he arrives home from Virginia.

On Sunday we attended the Cub scout Blue & Gold Banquet where Alex received his Tiger Cub badge and 1 year pin.  We were very proud of how well behaved both Alex and Emily were during, what turned out to be a long banquet.  Of course, it helped that they ended the banquet with a 30 min. presentation by a magician!

That's all for now... check back again soon!

Check and check...

Two things "checked" off our summer to-do list.... 

I finally finished staining the children's wooden swing set.  We purchased the Rainbow play-system 2 years ago and I knew that it would require biannual maintenance in order to keep it in good shape.  At first glance I thought, "this should be easy; I can get this done in an afternoon".  WRONG!  When you look at it, it doesn't look like there's much wood but once I got started, realized that there's much more to it than I had thought.  Every side of every piece of wood had to be stained and trying not to get any of the hardware or accessory pieces stained was tricky.  All in all, I think I did a pretty decent job and I'm happy that it's FINALLY done!  I'm hoping that it will last another 2 years before it requires re-staining.

The second sigh of relief is that we picked up a new (to us) used car to replace Tim's truck which has put in a good effort in its last months.  We purchased the 1994 Ford Ranger truck from our best friends, about 5 years ago.  We only held a loan payment on it for a few months and we got several years with minimal repair costs.... the truck had served its purpose and didn't owe us a dime.  We'd been trying to squeeze every last week out of it and this time last year, we weren't quite sure it would even make it through the winter.  With its inspection expiring at the end of this month, and a heavy repair bill to get it to pass, we decided it was long overdue to get a more practical car for Tim.  We have the minivan now, so if we need to haul bigger items, it's almost as big as the bed of the pickup is, so we'll use the minivan now.  Tim's commute to work is roughly 45-55 minutes and the truck's gas mileage was less than desirable.  We spend hours searching online and basically concluded that our goal was to get something small, inexpensive to fit our budget, good gas mileage and 50K miles or less already on it.  We emailed and called on a lot of cars but the best deal that we found (looking at affordability as our primary priority) was a posting on Craigslist for a 2002 Hyundai Accent with 53K miles on it, one owner and a clean title.  I noticed that there were quite a few postings for the same vehicle with around 90-120K miles on it.... seems like that's when people are dumping them, my guess, for mechanical reasons.  So we figured that we ought to be able to get another 40-50K miles out of it before it needs any real major work done on it (we hope!).  That said, we should get 2-3 years with it... and for $4500, it was the most affordable option for us.  The gas mileage for highway is expected to be about 34 mpg.  We anticipate that Tim will only spend about $150/month (at the current gas rate) on gas commuting to work compared to the $250-280 he has been spending.  So Tim is happy that he has a newer vehicle to drive that he doesn't have to worry about breaking down and we're both happy that we found something that fits our budget pretty well.