Archive for March 2013

baby room: part 1

besides the most common "when are you due", and "are you going to find out if it's a boy or girl?", the other questions that i was often asked at the beginning of this pregnancy usually related to the baby's room.  deciding to put the baby in small front bedroom next to our room seemed like the obvious choice.  and while dark blue might not be a typical wall color for a baby's room, i liked the color and thought that we might be able to make it work.  i knew that we didn't want a "themed" room, or anything that was overly cutesy or baby, so i was determined to make a calming, baby friendly space that still fit with the rest of our house.

one of the first purchases we made for the baby's room was a glider chair.  as with most of our furniture purchases, we weren't really planning on buying a glider right away.  but we found a chair that we really liked, at a great price, so we went ahead and got it.  we went to west elm while in ohio after christmas to look at the graham glider.  all their furniture was on sale and we really liked the glider, so we started thinking about making our first baby purchase...  after doing a little more shopping and grabbing lunch, we went back to west elm to look at the chair again.  the manager of the store rushed over as soon as we walked in the door to let us know that someone had just returned a brand new glider and she had set it aside for us, hoping we would come back.  there was nothing wrong with it, they had just changed their minds. since it was out of the box, she could sell it to us at an additional discount.  we decided that we couldn't argue with the price that she was offering, so we bought the chair.  the glider is currently in ohio at my parents house because we couldn't fit it in the car, but they are going to bring it out in a few weeks.  while i never really thought i'd buy a glider (i looked at an eames rocker instead), the general opinion from other parents is that we'd really like having a comfortable place to rock the baby.  and this chair is super comfortable. 

 

while in west elm, we also found a pendant light that we thought would look good with the dark walls.  impulse buy number 2.

 
(impulse buy number 3 was the sectional for upstairs, which is still in our living room, but should hopefully be picked up soon)...  we really need a west elm in st louis...

the other item that we saw and liked at west elm was a mid-century style dresser.  the room is not very big, so we knew we wanted a smaller dresser that we could put a changing pad on top of.  a lot of the mid-century style dressers are low, so we liked that this one was a little taller.  while the dresser at west elm was really nice, we didn't really want to buy any more furniture.  luckily, after a few weeks of craigslist stalking, i was able to find something similar.  we did not pay very much for it, but it is in need of some repair.  i'm hoping we are able to make our craigslist find work.  i don't have a picture of it, but it's similar in size/style to the west elm dresser.

 
which brings us to the biggest baby room item - the crib.  i knew that i would not find a crib that i liked at any of the chain baby stores, so the search for something else began.  i actually liked a few options from ikea, but i wasn't sure about the finishes that they were offered in.  i found plenty of high-end, really expensive options that i liked (the oeuf sparrow for example), but again, couldn't justify the prices.  finally, i came across the crib below:


this is the babyletto hudson crib, which we were able to buy (on sale!) from amazon.  it's still sitting in a box in our entryway, but i'm excited to put it together.  i liked the fact that it was simple, and the gray color.  it also looks similar to the sparrow crib.

one of the last larger items that we still need to purchase for the baby's room is a rug.  i've been looking at the ikea alvine ruta rug.  i'm driving up to ikea in a few weeks, so hopefully they will have it in stock, and we can get it for the room.
so that's where we are today.  we still have some other small things to think about, but i'm hoping to get these items in to the room first so we can see what else we need (and what else will fit!).  we need to finish up our bathroom project so we can focus on the baby room!
 
and ps - we did find out the sex of the baby - we're having a boy :-) 

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the weekend

saturday morning - we woke up early to get ready for the sectional delivery.  the sectional that was supposed to go upstairs...  and then didn't fit.  such a huge disappointment.  they ended up leaving the sectional in our living room so we could test it out and see if we liked it in that space (we have also been shopping new sofas for the living room).  after living with it for 24 hours we decided that a sectional really doesn't work in that room.  and we also discovered that the frame was bent on one side, so the sofa was damaged anyway.  we are in the process of negotiating a return of the sectional.  i think that we'll end up exchanging it for a different sofa from west elm for the living room.  i hate to buy another sofa without seeing it in person and testing it out, but it is what it is. 
  

saturday afternoon - after a rough start in the morning, we spent way too long trying to establish a level line on the bathroom wall to start tiling.  the good news is that the tiling went pretty quick after that and we're loving how it's turning out.  the bad news is that we still have a lot of tile to go!  we have 1.75 walls done out of 7.

 
sunday - rugby day!  and it rained the entire day.  this is what mike looked like at the end of the game.  just a little muddy...  and that's a giant puddle behind him, not a pond.  
 


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catching up...

in addition to working on the bathroom, we've also made some progress on re-arranging rooms and furniture upstairs in preparation for baby. these photos are a few weeks old, but since everything is still in process, i haven't taken any updated photos yet.
 
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this is the room that will become the baby room.  we are planning to keep the dark blue wall color (it looks really dark in this photo, i promise it does have lot of blue in it).  all of the furniture has been moved to the new guest room, we are in the process of getting new furniture for the baby's room.
 
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this is our former office, which we have turned in to the guest room.  the desk (already moved in the photo above), the rug, and the ikea chair are the only furniture that we are keeping upstairs, everything else has been moved to storage in the basement.
 
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and finally the den. we are turning this room in to family room and office space. since the baby room isn't very big, we are hoping that we can keep a lot of the future toys in this room instead.  we bought a couch for this room a few months ago and it is being delivered tomorrow.  i'm a little nervous that it will not fit up the stairs.  i'm also nervous because we haven't actually sat on the couch that we bought.  we really wanted a certain west elm sofa but they did not have it in the store.  so i'm hoping that they are able to get it up the stairs, and that it is comfortable!

we have a busy weekend planned, so check back next week for updates.

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floor tile


here's a preview of the tile that we picked for the floor in the bathroom.  it's a 2" hex carrara - i really liked the larger than normal format of the hex size.  the floor tile wasn't cheap, but we're using simple white subway tile on the walls so i feel good about the overall budget.  now we're waiting for the grout to arrive, i didn't realize we'd have to order it so i'm hoping it doesn't cause too much of a delay.
 


meanwhile, we will probably start working on the wall tile, and see if the tub reglazing company can go ahead with reglazing the tub.

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bathroom update

we have quickly moved pass the planning stage of the bathroom project and have offically just started. we realized we were running out of time and still had many things that we wanted to get done pre-baby. so... nothing like just starting a project to force you to make some decisions! i cannot believe i am sharing this photo with you all, but i tend to keep things real around here, so this is what our shower really looked like before (minus the hole in the ceiling, we did that a few weeks ago to see what was going on with the vent):

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gross, right? do not zoom in, it just gets worse. for the record, that mold/mildew/whatever it is has been there since we bought the house. we have tried everything to remove it and it is permanently stained. this is the number one reason why we wanted to renovate the bathroom before the baby. well, that and the fact that we had a blue tiled shower. moving on, we decided to start this project by demo-ing the tile. we quickly realized that part of the tile issue was that the tile was installed with liquid construction adhesive and caulk - no mortar or grout. the good news is that once we removed the tile and the drywall, we did not find any additional mold or water damage.

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next up, we spent a day doing plumbing work. we installed the new fixtures, and we also wanted to raise the shower head to be at a better height for mike, who is 6'-4" tall.

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if you haven't figured it out by now, we also decided to just keep the tub. we will reglaze it at the end of this project so that it is white. we debated replacing (thank you for your comments by the way, they were very helpful), but in the end decided to go with reglazing. i realized that the deeper tub i wanted might be difficult to use every day for showering (the step in/out would have been really high), and our blue tub really isn't in bad shape. we had a hard time justifying the cost and time of replacing the cast iron tub.  our friends have had good success with reglazing, so i am hopeful that we will too.

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after installing the new durrock for the tile around the shower, we moved on to the floor. we wanted to see what was going on under the vinyl tile so that we could determine our starting point for the new tile. we also wanted to try to keep the bathroom floor as level as possible with the hallway.  we removed the first layer of vinyl along with the 1/4" plywood that was under it... only to discover another layer of vinyl. we originally thought we could just install our tile backer over the second layer of vinyl, but after closer inspection we realized that the vinyl had a substantial cushion backing, and we really needed to remove it too before installing tile. luckily mike was able to scrap it off without too much trouble.

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we installed the tile backer over the particle board, and this is where we are today:

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we've been able to shower this week thanks to our lovely plastic shower surround. not ideal, but much better than not showering! our goal for the weekend is to remove the toilet and the sink so that we can remove the rest of the vinyl floor and prepare the floor for tile. we would like to actually get the floor tile installed this weekend, so wish us luck!

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