Phase 1: Remove Guest Room Furniture.
Grandpa Rask came by the first day of break, Saturday the 17th and collected the two dressers and the bed and took them out to their house and put them in their downstairs guest room for us (bless their HEARTS!!! We are so grateful).
Phase 2: Sort and organize closet and storage cupboard.
I did that on Sunday afternoon after church while Jeff went out to his parents' house to help them move into the loft in their shop the stuff that came out of the room which now holds our furniture. Here are some pictures from the sorting and organizing saga. Surprisingly, this only took me a few hours:
Got that all taken care of, which led to phase 3, painting the wall (Monday). Glidden calls the color "Tropical Lagoon," but we call it "Beavlet Blue." Because we were going to be painting over an adobe pink wall, I got the Glidden Duo paint and primer in one and OH! MY! GOSH! It is the BEST stuff I have ever painted with (and I have done a fair amount of interior painting in my day), it covers amazingly. One coat and done with nothing I even had to go back over. Here is a pic of the wall partly done with the pink still showing at the top, Jeff came home and did that part so that I could keep the Beavlet off of a ladder:
Phase 4, clean all of the carpets in the condo, which means the entire upstairs and two staircases. After pricing out a couple of companies locally, it was evident that the two staircases with their total of over 30 stairs was going to kill us in the cost. So, since I had the time and had done it before, we rented a machine from Home Depot and I did it myself. Jeff came home after work and helped with the stairs and returned the machine. Here are some pics of the room empty:
I am particularly proud of that last one as it represents my victory over the entropy of Jeff's extensive shoe collection. :-)Probably about 90% of the stuff that got done up at this point was done by me. From this point on, Jeff was the primary contributor (with some help from Granddad Dickinson for part of it).
My parents arrived on Thursday evening for the next step in the process, Phase 5: picking up and assembling the baby furniture, which had been ordered about a month ago. They brought with them a sofa bed for us to have in his room. Because we only have two bedrooms we still need to have a place for guests to stay when they come. The sofa bed had originally come with their trailer but the air mattress made it difficult to blow up and take down day after day, so they replaced it with one with a real mattress. For us, however, it's just PERFECT and it fits like a CHARM!!! Here are some pictures of the proceedings, don't know if it shows in the pictures or not, but Scotch was involved.
And, of course, Nana Dickinson making magic in the kitchen. Leftover ham? OK then, ham and potato chowder and biscuits it is!!! The woman is amazing:
And, at long last, the guest room was starting to look like a baby's room:
The empty space in front of the window is for the glider/rocker.
The TV is going to go, it doesn't work anymore.
That was as far as we had gotten on Friday, when work resumed after Christmas (Monday afternoon), Jeff put up the decals on the walls, which began Phase 6: Decorating the Baby's Room. I was BLOWN AWAY by the color match to the tan paint which had been there all along. It felt like God was throwing in His two cents in the decorating process.
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Since then, Jeff has put up more shelving in the garage, reorganized the storage unit (with a little help from me), installed a dimmer switch in the baby's room, I have taken three loads to Goodwill, and a partridge in a pear tree. :-) Before the week is over (today is Thursday), he will also hang two curtain rods (one for a valance in front of the window and one above the baby's crib to hang his quilt, which is ADORABLE but not cozy enough to sleep with) and hopefully we will have shopped around and ordered our glider. Then, I will feel like we are all set for this stage in the game.
Converting the guest room to his room is the latest in the series of milestones that have felt like they would NEVER come. The first was the 6-week checkup on Jeff's birthday when we first saw his heartbeat, then it was announcing and telling people at 10-12 weeks, then it was the BIG ultrasound at 18 weeks, now it's setting up his room over Christmas break (29 weeks tomorrow), next we start birthing classes in a week and a half! Crazy! All of these milestones have come... maybe his actual birth will get here someday, too, although it seems so far away because we are so excited!
Love and blessings to all. I hope you can feel a modicum of the joy and love we feel right now, God continues to bless us beyond either of our wildest dreams!
Jeff, Tori and Our Beavlet
