Re-Arranging and Decorating

We got a lovely new piece of furniture for the pink room today -- a TV cabinet. Thanks, Tony & Stacy, for passing along this great piece! It does wonders at hiding the clutter of the TV-related stuff!

We moved things around a bit in the pink room to make it all work. Check out the room:

This is no doubt the last time it will be this neat, ever. As you can see, Carter is enjoying it all. He does seem a bit confused by all the activity around the house. Just wait til later this week, pup.

Here are a few more shots of the finished baby room. It too is probably the neatest it will ever be:



We'll let you know when there's something to know!

Decorating

Today we added a few special things to the baby's room. First, for something old: a mobile -- it happens to be the one from my own crib! I really love the retro plastic barnyard theme:

And here's the something new: this nifty cable wire setup from Ikea (it's called "Dignitet"). It will provide ample room for hanging artwork; for now it holds cards and some other decorations we're going to put on the wall eventually:

Countdown to New Arrival

We've had very little time to blog, or do much that's bloggable, lately. Our regular readers will want to know that we head to the hospital on Monday morning to start having the baby (no word yet from said baby on how soon he/she will arrive after that). We'll keep you posted. We're relieved to note that the room is ready for his/her arrival. Check out our crib:

And thank you to Tony, Stacy, Adelaide, Zoe, and Emma for passing it along to us!

Jake also got a Diaper Champ today -- someone had put it out for free and he spied it while walking Carter. Score! We love hand-me-down baby stuff!


UPDATE: We discovered the next day that the Diaper Champ came with an unexpected accessory: some dirty diapers. No kidding. So it got a thorough washing. I mean, it's going to be filled with dirty diapers eventually, but we thought we'd wait until they actually belonged to a resident of 83 Durant. No need to import dirty diapers.

We also got this nifty lamp at Target, since the only fixture we had was the overhead light.


So we're (mostly) ready for our new resident at 83 Durant.

Electrifying Goodness

No big updates recently; our jobs and my exhaustion have kinda kept us from doing much around the house on the big projects (or from blogging about them). This week, we did have our next-door-neighbor, Lisa, the licenced electrician come by to fix some stuff for us. She has been great!
She re-installed the lighting fixtures in the baby's room, including the overhead light in the main room


and in the closet.

Let there be light! She also dealt with the electrical cord that was sticking out inside the built-in, as you can see in this before and after pair:


































We also had a new problem -- the one outlet on the front wall of our bedroom blew a month or so ago. It was the one we used to power our bedside lamps, alarm clocks, and the air conditioner (perhaps that's why it blew). It wasn't just a fuse or circuit-breaker issue; it seems that it was one of the outlets with older wiring, and somewhere along the line, the wire fried. Lisa couldn't find the specific spot (without, say, ripping apart all of the walls) so we decided to cover that outlet completely and have two brand new ones installed.
Here's the old one, covered up:

And here's one of the new ones:

These are heavy-duty receptacles, with 20-amp (instead of only 15-amp) service, so we're good to go for plugging in all our power tools and air conditioners and whatnot.

Putting in the new ones involved a lot of fancy professional electrician kinda stuff, so we were very pleased to have an expert. She set things up and strung new wires from the basement, up through the wall by the chimney, overhead through the attic, and then into nice new heavy-duty outlets in the bedroom (one for each side of the bed). It's great, and now we don't have to worry about plugging in the air conditioner. [On a side note, I cannot believe that we still need an air conditioner in October in Massachusetts!]

While in the basement, Lisa showed Jake some of the fascinating wiring in our house. Most of it is more recent, and all of it looked safe to her, but it's really quite the wiring museum down there. Jake has some pictures, and he can probably elaborate further on our little piece of electrical history.



Other than that, we need to get back to finishing the baby's room; that's on the list for next week. Jake has primed all the trim, and also painted the ceiling with the ceiling white color (it has a name, but I forget what it is. Weirdly, it's not just "white.") The room is looking a bit creepy right now, with white on every surface. It's like some weird optical illusion:

In which we break our house

It has been raining a lot. The chimney has been leaking a lot. This has led to the discovery of water in the spare room closet. It's obvious that this has happened before, but it's the first time we've seen an active leak. So it was not so surprising exactly, but it certainly wasn't pleasant. The plaster is all wet and soft, so we decided to take out a big hunk of it, both to get rid of some of the wetness and (we hoped) expose the leak so that we could direct it more productively (say, into a bucket, rather than into the rest of the plaster).


It's rather shocking to see a hammer knock off plaster.

With our shop-vac, we sucked up all the mess. Jake hung some towels from the laths, hoping to direct the water seepage out of the walls. There's not any active driping at this point. I think we actually contained a fair amount of the drippage in the attic by putting more plastic up there.


Incidentally, horse-hair plaster is crazy stuff. There are CLUMPS of hair in there. I am not kidding. We took some pictures, but you can't really see it; you'll just have to take our word for it.


So that's where we stand. I don't know if there's anything else we can do at this point, other than wait for chimney-repairing weather, which may be a few months.

A Few More Little Things

We continued with the hanging efforts this afternoon. We put up two old maps from Jake's grandfather in the front hallway. There was a bit of trickiness with making them level, but I think they work here!
(I also think the shadows from the lighting fixtures in this picture look really wacky. Note to self: we want new hallway lighting fixtures.)



And I am THRILLED to report that we have finally hung my mirror. It has actually been sitting around, wrapped in a blanket and leaning against the wall ever since we moved from Northampton! It was once attached to the vanity, but after a few moves, the screws that attached it actually broke, so we decided it would be best to hang it. It's a rather heavy mirror, so we never got around to getting appropriate hanging materials. Finally, oh joy, we did it today! The mirror, vanity, and bed, are a matching set that my parents bought at an auction when I was 10; they refinished them in the backyard. I like them quite a lot.

Incidentally, if you look very closely at this picture, you will notice a previously blogged "WHHHHHAAAAAT?" element: the wallpaper in this room is lovely and stripey, with the stripes impressively straight and matched, especially considering the lack of level or straight corners anywhere, and the rather uneven plaster. Despite this great attention to detail on the part of the paperhanger, one step was neglected: PRIMER. This room, at some point in its history, was the same HOT PINK as the main room downstairs. This pink now bleeds through in patches all over the walls. If you look at the picture, you can see some of it. When you're in the room, it sorta seems like maybe your eyes are playing tricks, but no, there are pale pink bleed-throughs all over the place.