7 months pregnant

New belly picture! I'm now in the third trimester, and I'm definitely feeling more pregnant these days. Still have a ways to go, though. Plus, you can see a little of the new couch we bought last weekend. I'll take better pictures of that another day.

Power-outage party

We hosted my parents, grandmas and Aunt Stephanie for dinner on Sunday (Ben was there, too, but he was actually staying with us for the week), just in time for the remnants of Hurricane Ike to sweep through in the form of a huge windstorm and knock out our power for the night! So my first dinner party at the new house didn't go exactly as planned, but we made the best of it. And really, I can't complain, because our power was only out until Monday afternoon, while my parents didn't get power back until Wednesday and Jason's mom is still in the dark.

Luckily, I had decided to make a roasted pork loin and apples dish in the crock pot so I could get all the work out of the way in the morning, so even though the power went out at about 4, the pot stayed hot and continued cooking and the meat was finished by dinner time. The side dishes hadn't gone in the oven yet, so they were all casualties, but we did have a salad and a loaf of bread to round out the meal, plus pie and lots of ice cream -- we had to eat it all before it melted!

After dinner, we lit some candles and sat around in the dark and talked. As you can see from the book on the table, we discussed our family's favorite subject of the last several months -- baby names. Jason and I are still at an impasse, even after another very thorough discussion.

Jason and Grandma Carol

After everyone packed up and headed back to Fairfield to assess the damage there, Jason and Ben and I played a nice long game of Monopoly by candlelight. Jason beat us terribly. Darn those orange properties!!

Anyway, like I said, we were very lucky to come through the storm with little damage. Entire trees and huge limbs were knocked down in the yards all around us, but we didn't lose anything. We didn't have enough ice to keep the food in our fridge cold until the power came back, but luckily it was kind of empty to begin with, so we didn't end up having to throw away all that much.

And now it's pretty much guaranteed that our next party will go much more smoothly!

More makeovers: China cabinets

Here are my two other Craig's List projects, the china cabinets. We didn't have china cabinets at all in the old house, mostly because we didn't actually have china. But with the limited cabinet space in the new house, I really needed more places to put things, and they needed to be cheap. And these cabinets certainly were. The taller white one was $25 (!), and the yellow one was $45.

The yellow cabinet was definitely the bigger challenge. As you can see in the before picture, the cabinet had been abused and neglected. It was in rough shape. But it had such pretty curved glass windows that I couldn't pass it up.

The original wood color was gorgeous, and I would have loved to have somehow refinished it, but big chunks of veneer were missing, especially on the sides, which you can't see here. First I tried filling in the missing chunks with wood filler, but after some trial and error and a lot of sanding, I ended up ripping the veneer off most of the cabinet and taking it back down to the bare wood. Then I cleaned (and cleaned and cleaned) it, sanded it and painted it the same color as the living room walls are. (Thanks to Ben for helping with the painting!)

Here's the finished product, and I love how it came out. I put all my pretty glasses and stuff up top, and then the roomy area down below is home to my stand mixer, crock pot and some other big kitchen stuff.

The second cabinet really just needed a fresh coat of paint, so I'm not going to bother posting before pictures. I now wish that I'd painted the inside walls and shelves some other color to give it a little more contrast with the china that's in there (a pretty Depression-era set that Jason's grandma recently gave me), but that can always be done quickly down the road.




So here's the very nearly completed dining room. The only things I'd still like to do are replace the chandelier (I conveniently cut it out of this shot because I don't like it, ha) and find a bigger and more neutral-colored rug for under the table.


And then I just have one Craig's List purchase left to fix up, another $25 white cabinet from the woman I bought the other one from. This one desperately needs a new coat of paint, and could also use some new hinges and a new handle. It's sitting in the garage for now, but eventually I'm hoping to put it in the basement and use it to store the rest of the kitchen stuff that STILL doesn't fit upstairs, even with all the new cabinetry.


So those are all my projects. Hopefully I've inspired some of you to check out Craig's List if you haven't already. And don't worry, there are a lot of things on there that DON'T require hours of work to fix up -- I just like to make things way more difficult than they should be!

Five and a half months

Nikki requested pictures of me, so I'm assuming she wanted to see pictures of my belly. People keep telling me I barely look like I'm pregnant, which drives me crazy because I feel like my belly is huge. Although in the pictures it really doesn't look that big. Weird. I'm 22 weeks along, or 5 and a half months. (I probably shouldn't have been wearing a white shirt, but you get the idea. I'll take new ones next month.)

Here's one I tried taking myself:



Then I got Jason to take one:

Extreme furniture makeover

So during the time between when we found the new house and when we moved in, I took on a ridiculous number of furniture projects, mostly from trying to save money on new furniture by buying cheap stuff off the online classified site Craig's List. I was truly addicted there for a while, checking the furniture listings multiple times a day, because the key to Craig's List success is snapping up the good stuff before anybody else sees it.

I bought a dresser for our bedroom, a table and chairs set, a very neglected china cabinet and two more antique freestanding kitchen cabinets. All of them needed various levels of work, and my plan was to finish all that before we started in on all the painting and stuff at the new house. Well, no surprise, that didn't end up happening. But I have been slowly finishing some of the projects, so I thought I'd share a few with everyone.

First up is the table and chairs set. I don't have before pictures, but it was in pretty good condition when I bought it. The only thing I did was recovering the seats with new fabric. The old fabric was a dingy grayish-looking white and smelled like bad BO. The actual process of removing the old fabric and foam and putting on the new stuff wasn't all that hard, but getting the seat cushions out of the chairs and back in was a bit more difficult. They didn't screw in, like all the websites said they would, instead they were somehow stapled in. Luckily Jason's mom's boyfriend helped me out with that part. I really like how they turned out! I bought the table and set of six chairs for $120, and the new fabric was $30.




Next up is a bedroom armoire I turned into a pantry for the kitchen. Like I mentioned, we have a LOT less cabinet space in the new house than the old one, so I ended up needing something bigger than the antique cabinet I'd bought (which is now going in the dining room). I didn't actually find on Craig's List, but at a Wal-Mart-type general store here called The Anderson's.


It was originally this brown color, but I painted it the same color white as the rest of the cabinets hoping it looks like it belongs in there a little better. I actually kind of like the darker-colored handles on it, and now I'm thinking of trading out my kitchen cabinet knobs to match ... more projects!

Baby news!

Well, we had an ultrasound this morning, and ... it's a girl! You can see the side of her head (she might be sucking her thumb?) in the top picture.

Some of you know that we actually had another ultrasound on Friday where they couldn't tell the gender for sure. So we were lucky in a way to find out for sure less than a week later, though we had a couple days of worrying in between the first scan and today's more detailed ultrasound.

Basically, the doctor thought they might have seen something called choroid plexus cysts, which can be a marker for a very serious chromosomal disorder, Trisomy 18. She scheduled us for a level 2 ultrasound at the hospital to rule out any problems, and today they couldn't find any sign of the cysts and confirmed that everything else is perfectly normal. Apparently they could have misread the ultrasound results last time around, or it's possible the cysts could have been there and already gone away on their own (which does happen, but it's not all that likely since it was just a matter of days.)

Anyway, they assured us there's absolutely nothing to worry about ... except for that we might have a stubborn child in our future. She was very uncooperative during both ultrasounds, moving around and not letting them see what they needed to see. The first time, the tech called the baby "squirrelly," and today's woman said she "had a mind of her own." To which I say, is that a bad thing?

A few more pictures:
The baby waving hello.


Hopefully Jason won't mind me posting the "proof" that it's a girl. The little arrow is pointing to her, you know, private parts.

All moved in

Last weekend was moving weekend! And I haven't had a free minute to blog about it since then. Part of the problem is our internet isn't set up yet, but hopefully that'll be resolved by this weekend.

So yeah, we're all moved in, and overall it wasn't too painful, despite the 90-degree temperatures. And now we're slowly but surely settling in. It's really, really nice to be back in our own place again.

I'm not going to include too many photos this time because everything's still sort of a mess, but at the top you can see our basement full of boxes yet to be opened. And you can also check out our living room, which will hopefully look a lot different once we finally buy the new couch we've been talking about buying, and move the TV to a location that doesn't require stretching the ugly black cable straight across the middle of the floor.


My project for this weekend is going to be working on the kitchen and dining room. Moving always reminds you of just how much stuff you have, and even though we really did get rid of a LOT of stuff before packing up in Georgia, we still need to pare down quite a bit. (For example, maybe two boxes full of SweetWater pint glasses might be a bit excessive. Whoops!)