So I've been told that in every pregnancy there is a stage where the lovely lady feels the need to begin "nesting". Nesting means getting your house in order for the baby to feel comfortable, and so Mom still likes where she lives after she gets home from the hospital.
Nesting usually presents itself in the form of small projects around the house that will help the child feel welcome. This can entail projects like quilting baby blankets, sewing little clothes, assembling cribs, buying baby bedding, matching the colors, picking a theme, re-arranging some furniture, matching the window curtains in the baby room, rearranging some more furniture, matching the bedding for the twin bed in the baby room with the crib bedding, rearranging furniture in rooms not affiliated with baby nursery, buying pillows to match the bedding in the baby room, buying new furniture, throwing away old hand-me-down furniture, deciding to replace old carpet and flooring in your entire downstairs, picking a color for that flooring, deciding to paint the walls in one of those rooms, install laminate flooring in the main room, deciding to go ahead and just replace the flooring in the kitchen while you're at it, deciding that the kitchen needs a new paint job as well, replacing all the door jams and baseboards, sanding down and painting all the old doors, sanding the new baseboards and door jams, painting the door jams and baseboards, and completely renovating the downstairs area. In some extreme cases, you will have some women sell their homes and move, or just demolish the one they live in and rebuild it during the 9 months they're waiting to give birth.
In our case, we decided to do a smaller scale nesting project. The main part of this project is done and I will be finishing up other parts of it this week and next. Here's a brief summary of what we decided to do.
Tear up old flooring
Replace with new laminate floor
Paint downstairs and kitchen
Install new baseboards, door jams, and repaint interior doors
Rearrange office into guest room
Kick Ivan out of old guest room and create a nursery
Match all bedding and curtains to crib
Transform twin bed into day bed for Mommy to sleep on during nap time
Move all office bookshelves and desk into master bedroom (we just moved these bookshelves out of our room into the office in November and they weren't easy!)
I think that was about it. A pretty basic summary I suppose. Now here are some pictures of the main flooring project.
These are pictures of our home taken by the previous owner before we bought it. Not a bad look at all. He had matching furniture and a nice contemporary look. We liked it.
So we decided to complement the interior design with some hand-me-down furniture, an old piano, a kitty condo, some wired electronics hanging everywhere, some wall hangings that matched perfectly, and a fake plant. Oh yeah, and some animals' A cat... or three and a puppy. Here are some photos (editor's note: I purposely made the room a little messy for dramatic purposes. It's never like this in real life).
This was our kitchen. Notice the sweet looking brass knobs on the cabinets. I sure do miss those.
Here is the dining room. You can see the previous laminate flooring that was in here. It's lighter than what we put in.
And this miniature area is our front entry way.
So in order to get this project rolling, we needed to do some prep work. The first thing was to tear up all carpeting downstairs and small parts of laminate flooring from previous floor (It was a hideous color and smelled like our puppy's urine). We thought animals would add to the decor, but not so much...
This is me tearing up flooring. I got pretty good at this. You'll also notice in this picture, the new color paint on the walls. Ivan helped us move all the furniture out of the way and then Ashley, and her friend Kyndra got started on the painting while I was replacing the brakes on the car. For the record, I would change brake pads for weeks on end if it meant I could avoid having to paint! I can't stand painting. I don't know why. But also for the record, I did help out with the painting after I finished working on the car. But Ashley was definitely the "Painting Queen".
We didn't want to move all the furniture into the garage, so we kind of rotated this pile of stuff around as we worked in different areas. That's our piano next to the table. Tearing up the carpet padding was fun because it was stapled down all over. Ashley wanted to help with this part and pulled all the staples out with some pliers and a hammer. We got pretty good at pulling nails and staples.
Now the most important part for putting a new floor in, is having good friends who've done it before on their own houses :) In come Jason and Jon!! This wouldn't have happened anytime before the baby arrives if it hadn't been for these guys. They really made this happen.
We split up the work over 2 evenings. They showed up and went straight to work laying the floor. Jason handled all the tricky cuts while Jon mapped out the rest. Jon's the one with the shiny head trying to figure out why I'm taking pictures and not working :) Actually, Ashley was taking the picture. While they went to town on this part, I started on the kitchen...
...that would be Jason's butt. Again I did not take that picture... it was Ashley.
So I mentioned that while the other guys were laying the floor, I was working in the kitchen. Well, when we were tearing up the flooring, we realized the kitchen had particle board laid on top of the subfloor. It was nailed down every 2-4 inches and then covered with the linoleum flooring you see here. We decided that we didn't need to tear this up because I was feeling lazy and we could just throw a different type of flooring on it. Well, when Jason and Jon got there, they convinced us otherwise. So I began tearing this stuff up. It was a little slower than I had hoped for and I spent the entire night tearing this up with a pry-bar and hammer. I would estimate we took out 200-300 nails at least just in the kitchen alone.
So after one night, we had laid about half the floor and I was about half way done with the kitchen.
Here is Ashley giddy with anticipation. She's been talking about this since we moved into the house 2 years ago.
On to day 2! We started again early in the evening and went till about 10 that night. You can see here that we were filling up trash cans very quickly and leaving a fun pile of junk in the middle of the dining area.
Here's the kitchen after we had just started on it. The kitchen had some challenging cuts that Jason had to work on. He really was an expert at this stuff.
Almost there...
You can see how we shifted the furniture from the kitchen to the finished areas as we went. It was getting pretty crowded over there.
Here's the kitchen right at the end.
And here's Jon after the final piece was put in. You da man!
And here is Jason, after all was said and done making sure every last piece was set just right. He was the evil mastermind behind this job site and made everything run smoothly. Thanks again Jason.
Here's the "Real Evil Mastermind" behind the finished product after we put the baseboards in and finished the doors, etc. Ashley was kind enough to pose for this pic. Look at the adorable belly :) She just screams Evil Mastermind.
And here are the rest of the pictures we took after everything was put back in place. I told you the messy picture above was not the norm for our house :)
