Can't hardly wait!

I was put on a few days of bedrest two weeks ago, and it was probably the best thing that could have happened - not only did it give me the chance to catch up on some much-needed sleep, it also gave Erik and me a much-needed wake-up call: this baby is coming soon, and we need to get our house ready for him.

First call: Empire Today to figure out, once and for all, what could be done with the basement. Much to Erik's delight (he'd been fighting with the click-lock strips for over two weeks), our fears were validated by a professional: laminate flooring simply wouldn't work on our incredibly uneven concrete subfloor. Their quote for carpet was a bit too high for us (especially since we're still licking the financial wounds incurred by 300 sq ft of final-sale laminate), so we're having Lowes out to do some measurements this week for their bargain basement (pun intended) poly-blend. With a little luck, we'll have carpet in before I go into labor.

Next stop(s): Multiple trips to Home Depot and Lowes for paint and supplies. After a few mini-meltdowns and some very hormonal tears in front of the Olympic samples we agreed on:

Living room = Behr Liquid Blue

Nursery = Behr Corn Husk Green

Dining room = Olympic Navajo White

Bathrooms = Behr Swiss Coffee [yawn - it's just white]

Basement = Olympic Country Beige [off-white. oooh, risky!]

I know what you're thinking: "Awesome, picking colors is the hardest part!" Right? Yeah, that's what I thought, too - but I've only ever painted over nice, smooth, normal walls. As best we can figure, the previous renters "fixed" water damage by taking handfulls of spackle, lobbing it at the walls food-fight-style, then painting over the whole mess with a nice thick coat of latex semi-gloss. Water would then leak behind the paint, cause huge bubbles/ripples, and the whole vicious cycle would start anew. This means we're stuck with walls that have a lot of ...umm... character. So much character, in fact, that in one part of the dining room we actually had to peel off 3 layers of latex (down to the original drywall), treat for mold, spackle, sand, spackle, sand, tape, prime, and then paint. This same method would have worked (and is likely necessary) in the living room, but I lost patience. So instead, we've purchased several large pieces from IKEA to cover the more textured walls. Out of sight, out of mind.

Here is the finished* living room. I cannot tell you how thrilled I was to be able to unpack some of those book boxes - finally, our house is feeling like a home! I'll have better pictures once we move all the crap that's in the middle of the room.

And here is the almost-complete* dining room - we're just waiting on an out-of-stock sideboard for under the right-side window. Once we get that, we'll actually be able to [gasp] unpack our wedding presents!

*Just let me pretend they're done. We're playing Amish until I get around to making the window treatments.

And last but not least, mah huge bellah - 37 weeks (5/15). This child is going to be ginormous!