Hi there friends! Seeing as how our little guy Owen is now a month old, I guess it's about time I show you the nursery? I half-wrote this post a couple days before I went into labor, figuring I needed a couple more photos. One thing led to another, and post-baby I haven't gotten around to it until now :)

So, maybe you might remember the original room looking something like this:



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The long awaited master bathroom project is finally done! Hallelujah. In reality, it's been 90% done for quite some time (check out this post from November to see the demolition and some earlier progress - to recap: cat pee stench, rerouting sewer lines, rebuilding the room from scratch), but we changed our mind about the mirror/medicine cabinet situation and that meant going back to IKEA a few more times, before the important step of letting the pieces hang out in our bedroom for a month. Too, when you have to lag into a block wall to hang cabinets, it's a two-man job. And if one of your two men is a large pregnant woman, you have to schedule some extra help.

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I can't believe it's been a little over a year since we bought this house, and today marks the one year anniversary of this blog. The house will be a work in progress for a while, but I'm amazed at how much we did this year! It's more than we planned originally. Let's take a little photo walk down memory lane, shall we?

Remember this? We tore these walls right down (and why is there a tarp over the doorway? Oh yeah, Crazy Dan the tenant was setting off a bug bomb... no big deal)!



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Just a little quickie post, but I wanted to show you the little garden that we've got started! For my birthday, Don and Kyle built me these three raised garden bed planters, and now we've gotten filled them with dirt, just in time for the spring planting season.

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Ever since we moved into this house, my mother has been extremely concerned about the window situation. The existing windows in the house were original steel casement single pane glass windows that while historically accurate, were leaky and even a safety hazard as some of them wouldn't even open (that's what we call a "code violation"). This photo above is one of the old ones in our office. Most of the cranks were broken off, so even with the windows that weren't caulked shut (why?), you could open them by pushing them out, but couldn't close them without one person on the outside to push and hold them closed, and one person on the inside to lock them in place. None of them had screens, so in practice, they just never got opened. I think it was the combination of the energy inefficiency and the lack of being able to sleep with the window open that so bothered my mom, but she'd ask about them frequently. Since windows are kind of an investment (especially in this house, where we have 11 of them), so we've been remedying this over time. Mom should be thrilled!

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Here's a little project that made a big improvement in our lives! One of the things that Contractor Don insisted on when he and my mom were here helping us last spring was that anything that might be trash be tossed in the dumpster. Makes a lot of sense, but the downside for us that a lot of things got tossed that we might not get around to replacing for quite a while, just because they're down the priority list. That included closet doors and shelving, most of which were in pretty rough shape. So since last March, we haven't had doors on any closets or any shelving in most of them. As we've been putting together Baby L's nursery (aka, the room that used to be the place we threw all our random stuff), the need for organized storage has become more and more apparent. Closets are important, people! Especially for an OCD organizer like me.

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I thought you guys might be interested to see how we decorated this house for the holidays? It was really fun for us figuring out how we wanted to decorate in our new space!

We love modern design, of course, but we especially like when it has a warmth to it. Scandinavian design does this particularly well, and we definitely take inspiration from our friends to the north (east) when decorating for winter holidays. This means we're into coziness, natural materials, and simplicity. This winter, Christmas also coincided with some hardcore nesting instincts (including but not limited to a panic that "I won't have time to do any of this next Christmas!") so there was a fair bit of DIY involved. Just warning you.

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Want to see some pictures of bathroom construction? Of course you do.

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Gratuitous kitchen photos ahoy!

I think earlier I predicted not getting backsplash up until July? Hmmm, or try September. We bought the tile for the backsplash earlier in the summer, when we took a June trip up to my parents' in Northern California. Sausalito-based Heath Ceramics makes beautiful hand-glazed tile that would normally be pretty far out of our price range, but luckily for us they also have seconds and thirds, which can only be purchased at the main store. You never know what colors they're going to have, or how much, so you pretty much just have to go and pick from their selection.

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Sorry everyone, for the lack of the promised kitchen post! I had to take my computer in to be repaired, so I did't have access to my photos for several days. Then, the repair timeline overlapped my trip home to California, so even though my lovely husband had picked up my computer, I wasn't actually there to use it :) Promise though, this week, for a lengthier and photo-filled update. Read on...