Baby Break! (and Baby Steps...)

Enough with the house for a moment... let's talk baby! We're at about 25 weeks (that magical point where survival out-of-utero is possible - think Duggar baby Josie) and the little guy is getting stronger every day, thanks to his daily regimen of bladder punches and rib kicks. Here's how things are shaping up on the outside:

20 weeks

24 weeks

And here's how they're looking on the inside:

The tech labeled this "FACE." I only see "Skeletor."

Requisite adorable profile (awwww...)

Showing off his guns for the camera (our first clue that he was a he).

And finally: our boy in all his spread-eagled glory! (I promise to take this page down before he's internet-savvy.)

We haven't been able to do any work on the nursery yet, as we're still using that room as our primary living space, but do have some ideas about the decor... more to come!

Now for a few house updates - and I do just mean "a few." The infamous snowpocalypse set us about two weeks behind "schedule" (in quotes, since we've been entirely unsuccessful in EVER getting our contractor to mention a single flipping date), so we still don't have some of our high-priority items such as windows and gutters. We do, however, have lots and lots of bare sheetrock where exposed beams used to be, so I'm not completely disappointed.

Dining room ceiling

Dining room wall

Final installation of breaker box and replacement of surrounding wall

The combination of the two basement bedrooms, which will soon be our family room.

A panorama of the basement family room. (Sofas and TV will be to the right; sitting/toy area to the left.)

And finally: Each day we come home to a new, and not necessarily improved, environment. Sometimes it's just an empty pizza box in the corner of our kitchen; yesterday it was muddy boot tracks on our new bathroom rug; a week ago it was the thermostat set seven degrees higher than we keep it. (Once it was an air compressor, which sat at the house for almost a full month before being spirited away one Sunday morning. We still don't know what they ever used it for, or why they left it for so long.) We're not usually thrilled by these changes, so we have to find the humor where we can.

Like on this napkin. Just when you thought everyone had already heard about the internet...

The Joys of Home Ownership (Part 2)

Since we don't yet have cable/internet/phone, work closures due to weather have put me very behind on posts - however, not much has happened to the house, since the snow stormS (ugh, yes, plural) stopped virtually all travel and thereby halted any progress. Here's what's been going on in the interim:

Most importantly: Our new furnace was installed on 2/4. We now have heat and a warranty, but it cost about $2800. Since we didn't allocate any magic mortgage money towards this purchase, we have officially dipped into our "contingency funds" - the 10% that all 203k lenders (wisely) build into rehab projects. This extra pot allows for the repair of the unforeseen problems that will inevitably come up during construction. (For those of you playing at home, that means we have a grand total of $200 left for mistakes. Eek.)

Upper left: New thermostat - no more old school dial!
Center: A message to our less-than-considerate construction workers.

I've had to leave a few other similar notes around the house - such as this one in the basement, which I wrote when they had begun to re-drywall the partition that was slated for demo.

In less important, but slightly more exciting news: We got our fridge! It's a Whirlpool french door refrigerator with bottom freezer. As you can see, it is a bit too big for our kitchen (we'll need to tear out the top and side cabinets as well as remove some of the counter in order to hook it up to the water supply)... but this was our dream fridge, so we decided it was well-worth designing around.

We also had our amazing new oven delivered - a Maytag Gemini. It got horrible reviews because the height of the bottom oven apparently makes it very hard to lift out heavy items, but this is probably the closest I'll ever get to a true double-oven, so we splurged and are hoping for the best. Unfortunately, the lovely people at Whirlpool neglected to mention that we'd require any sort of additional hardware to hook up the appliance and their warehouse has been closed/unresponsive for the past week due to weather. After ten days with just a microwave, electric griddle, and toaster oven, we were getting a little fed up with pizza and pasta. But after a few trips to Lowe's for supplies, Erik was able to install the stove on Valentine's Day - Best. Present. Ever. (And yes, that means that my darling Floridian shoveled 27" of snow, changed a car battery, and hooked up a gas line all in one week! He is becoming a handyman before my eyes.)


The dishwasher and front-load dryer were dropped off as well, but both remain in boxes until we have places to put them. We're still waiting on a re-delivery of the washing machine, which was damaged in transit and had to be returned.

We were able to afford all these amazing new appliances thanks to our allotted rehab funds as well as an Employee Purchase Program through my work, which fetched us 30% off retail on all five pieces. (My momma taught me well!)

As is probably obvious by now, we have officially moved into the house. Since our office is storage, the living and dining rooms are construction zones, and the basement is still off-limits, our actual living space is limited to the upstairs rooms - our bedroom and the soon-to-be nursery.

Here's what they looked like before:

And here are the messy afters:

Boxes make great nightstands.

Left side of the "nursery" - TV and storage.

Right side of the nursery - sofa and ...you guessed it!... more storage.

Since our contractor has been incommunicado for a little over a week, we don't have any updates on when work will resume. We're hoping for little-to-no accumulation from today's predicted snow storm so that we can at least get the main floor up and running sometime in the near future.

The Joys of Home Ownership (Part 1)

Keeping my streak of horrible moving-day weather alive, Erik and I (along with a great deal of help from Mom, Dad, and van) transferred all of our wordly possessions from apartment to house over a very cold, very snowy weekend. There are no pictures of the move because, quite honestly, I don't want to remember it. (There were tears. There was shouting. There were monumental dips in blood sugar. In a nutshell: not fun.)

And to clarify: We moved our things. We were not able to move in because our furnace died.

Luckily, Erik had already taken out some of his frustrations on the slapdash wall job surrounding the HVAC appliances. This allowed us (and repairmen) a better view of the bohemoth - and after three service trips, our 1994 furnace was officially/finally declared kaput.

Furnace room, pre-demo.

Et voila - the bane of our existence!

But it wasn't all bad news: Since our house was below freezing, the leaky pipe in our upstairs bathroom wasn't able to cause much damage - instead, we just had a nice 1/4"-thick coating of ice all across the tile floor. (Ditto on the lack of pictures - I was too fed up to document the process of shoveling ice into the bathtub and using our soft, pristine towels [we were saving them for the new house!] to sop up the remaining mess.)

And so, after scrubbing out the apartment and wrangling two disgruntled cats into the car, we said a last goodbye to Hyattsville House (oh, the mem'ries):

The parking lot where Erik and I had our first goodnight kiss...

... the circle in which I almost assaulted an elderly gentleman for insinuating (while I was carrying moving boxes down to my car, no less) that I was fat, not pregnant, and rude for choosing to park my car there...

... and the 2"x6" mailbox in which many a Netflix disc was cracked by our jaded postal worker.

We'd be spending the next few days camping out in my parents' basement, waiting for the installation of a new furnace, delivery of our kitchen appliances, and an estimated project completion timeline from our contractor.