Hi!  As I am sitting here drinking my coffee and mentally preparing myself for a big day of work ahead, I realized that we need to update the blog before we jump into another project!  Right now, it feels very exciting around here because there is SO MUCH happening and although there aren’t many pretty pictures to show any finished projects, that shouldn’t stop us from updating you.

OH! Remember how in the last post I wrote about how I so want to have Joanna Gaines’ vision, style sense, photographers, (possibly) soccer heading skills, and more?  Wellllll, it just so happens that I picked up her magazine, Magnolia Journal, and guess what the topic of the issue was? Authenticity.  She seems to have mastered the art of living authentically and ready for the crazy part? Ironically, it turns out, in order to be more like Joanna, I need to apparently be more like myself and less like Joanna. Wow.

That explanation was all really just an excuse for me to use a bunch of old photos that I took on my phone in this blog post, instead of going around the house right now and taking pictures with my actual camera.  Joanna would not use iPhone pictures.  Apparently, Carolyn would.  Wait, maybe my authentic self is pretty lazy?  What if my authentic self is actually super lazy and I haven’t been allowing myself to be exactly who I am supposed to be?  I need to explore that…

Now, where do I begin on all that is going on around here? I am going to skip over talking about the living room and dining room for right now, which are by far the closest rooms to, I can’t believe I’m saying this word- “finished”- around here.   I will return to these at another time.  (For those of you following us on Instagram or commenting on my personal Facebook page (thank you!!) We still haven’t narrowed down our living room light fixture choices.)

Upstairs We Go

All of the big progress this week will be happening upstairs, so that is where we will head.  Remember the before and after floorplan I shared with you on this post?  Well, Ronan and I tend to change our mind fairly frequently and luckily we have the freedom to not be totally locked into most of the decisions we have made about the upstairs plan yet, so it changes every once in a while.  We keep track of the changes on a chalkboard wall in our kitchen and although there is nothing technically sound about our drawings, it is nice to always have them on hand to look at when we are discussing our ideas or even just making breakfast.  Every time we look at it we are reminded what we are working towards.  I wanted to share the floorplan from a while back with you and compare it to the current floorplan to explain what we are doing this week.

This was our floorplan sketch until about six months ago.  Sorry for anyone who knows about art, design, or architecture because this is probably offensive to your eyes, but you get the idea of the general layout. I would pretend it looks like this because I drew it with my son’s sidewalk chalk, but let’s be real, it would look like this if I had the best drawing tools in the world too. The front half of the house has stayed exactly as planned BUT….

There have been some recent changes.

I will never forget walking by the chalkboard wall in the kitchen and the first floorplan on the way outside to tell Ronan that I had just discovered we were going to become a family of four. Of course, he was outside cutting boards to size for a project we were working on.  I remember looking at the floorplan before I had even told him what was happening and casually thinking to myself, “Well, that’s going to be changing a bit, isn’t it?” And then, “OH MY GOD! WE NEED TO HURRY UP ON THIS RENOVATION!!!! There is a baby coming in 8 short months!”

Fast forward to today and we are less than two and a half months from our little person’s arrival! We have a bit to do before he/she comes, but this week we plan on getting a lot done!

The Changes

The Guest Room=Our Son’s New Room

After we destroyed his bedroom in this post, our son wanted to move into the room that everyone was totally creeped out by in this post.  Don’t think we are bad parents when we tell you we didn’t really do anything to the room before moving him in.  He has an original sense of style and “loves the walls” just the way they are.  He has only gotten one splinter from the floors and I think that’s a pretty normal splinter average for a 4-year-old. We let him pick whether he would like to stay in his current room when the baby arrives or move to the new room that we originally were going to use for guests.  We figured we would use whichever room he didn’t pick for the nursery.  First, he tried to convince us not to change anything about his current room, and then he agreed it would be cool to have a new, bigger room, so he is going to move into the one that was supposed to be the guest room.  He says he wants the baby to move in there with him too, but we will see how he feels after spending a few months with a newborn in the house.

This week, the walls and ceiling in this room will be demoed. An area that used to be part of another bedroom and closet will be added to it, and if everything goes smoothly (for this, we pray), the walls, floors, ceilings, and paint will be done in just a few weeks and it will be move-in ready!

Our Son’s Old Room= The New Nursery

So, the creepy room/our son’s current room will be turning into the nursery.  We plan on redoing all of the walls and ceilings, repairing the floors and windows, and exposing the chimney. First, we obviously need to get our son out of there and into his new room.

The Laundry Room

We had planned on keeping the laundry on the first floor where it already is, just to keep things simple, but we realized that we would need to make fewer changes to the footprint on the second floor if we kept the little bathroom the same size it is now and just changed it’s function.  We will also be doing far more laundry in a few months than we currently do because cloth diapers are no joke, so it makes sense to have it near our bedrooms. We originally thought it would be beneficial to make the bedroom that is currently our son’s bigger, mostly for the purpose of reselling, but he has a full bed in there with plenty of room for all of his toys, his other furniture, and a play space so we really don’t think it is important to expand the size of the room.  It will definitely be more than big enough for a sweet nursery.

The Closet Situation

See the tiny little linen closet off of the hall?  That should really be labeled a “vacuum closet” because that is what we need the space for.  If you remember, we knocked out a hall closet here that was used primarily to collect dirty laundry and we don’t miss it at all EXCEPT for the fact that our vacuum really needs a specific home and we want to give it one. (We shove our son into a rundown, creepy bedroom and then feel strongly about our vacuum having a nice place to call it’s own. Go figure.)

See that closet in the original guest bedroom in the first floorplan picture?  It has been a little bit of a tricky situation for us.  As it was in the first floorplan, you walk into the room and then there is a closet wall right in front of you.  That is obviously not ideal.

The reason we put it there was because when we needed to move walls around a bit for the new bathrooms, we had to remove a load bearing wall and put a new post and beam in.  (That’s a good story about the time I was in line at Dunkin Donuts and Ronan called me from home to say he took a wall down that shouldn’t have been load bearing, but actually was due to some sagging beams and he was at home, alone, patiently holding up the ceiling joists with his hands.  Would it be possible for me to come home and bring some boards in from outside so that he could prop the beam SUPPORTING THE CEILING up so that he didn’t need to keep holding it? In typical Ronan fashion, he delivered this news as if he was telling me he had picked up a pizza for dinner.)

Now, more appropriately, we have moved the closet to the corner and will just need to find a way to cover the beam that needed to be installed.  I (my authentic self) really want to put an open shelf from floor to ceiling in that space. I envision our son’s treasures displayed there.  Ronan is a little more realistic and probably realizes that what will end up there is actually empty water bottles and dirty clothes.  I’m not ready to give up that fight yet because my authentic self says that we can win this one and I believe her.

Less Talk, More Action

Now that you know what we are up to, it is time for us to get to it!

We will have a master bathroom update and vote coming soon! Ronan has been working on that while we were waiting to demo the bedrooms. Here is a little sneak peek of one of the walls.  As you can see, there are some awesome old beams in the space that we have decided to leave exposed.  We were going to vote on whether to cover them or leave them exposed, but we couldn’t see anyone wanting to hide them and all of their character!

As always, thanks so much for following along on this little adventure.