The past 6-8 weeks have been a whirlwind of house work and getting things ready for the changes to come. Our house was built in '99 with three bedrooms upstairs that we were originally using as our bedroom, the guest room, and the office. When Ant arrived, we turned the guest room into his bedroom, leaving the spare bed there so when push comes to shove we still have a place for people to stay. Now that Fwed is on the way, we decided that we hardly use the office anymore as we both have laptops with wireless access and mostly use our computers downstairs - so it made sense to turn that into Fwed's room. We do still need a place to put some office stuff, so decided to finish the basement. It ended up being a much bigger endeavor than I imagined at first.
1. Clean out and organize the garage so we had a place to store all the stuff from the basement while we were working.
2. Install shelves in the garage to accomodate all the extra stuff that now needs to be stored there
3. Move everything from basement to garage (we had a lot more crap than I ever imagined!)
4. Get the basement done - my BIL and his friend did most of the work for us, in terms of putting up a wall between the laundry room and basement, putting up the drywall
5. Get the plasterer in to plaster the drywall
6. Clean up from 5 (LOTS of dust!)
7. Paint the new basement (I love the color blue we chose, definitely makes me happy)
8. Install trim
9. Paint trim
10. Choose carpet, get it installed
11. Move stuff back from garage to basement
12. Clean garage (I swept and MOPPED the basement because of all the dust - I had to laugh at myself while mopping though!)
13. Move office furniture down to basement
14. Move rest of office furniture to attic
15. Put together crib
That's as far as we've gotten - still have a huge amount of junk and paperwork in the office that needs to get filed / sorted through / recycled before we can move the dresser into place and get rid of or move the file cabinet. But we're getting there, at least now Fwed has a place to sleep.
The other nice thing is that it means that the whole idea of a new baby seems to have become more solidified in Ant's mind. He is now calling the ex-office the 'baby's woom'. This morning he wanted to jump in the baby's crib, so I said he could after we changed his diaper. Once I put him in there, he said, "Baby come out of mommy's belly soon. Baby sweep in cwib. Baby dump (jump) in cwib wif Antony!". I had been saying to him in previous days that the baby would be coming out soon, and would eat, sleep and cry a lot - he put together 'baby sweep in cwib' and 'baby dump in cwib wif Antony' all on his own though! I had to explain that the baby wouldn't be doing much jumping to start with - but it makes me feel a lot better about the upcoming changes that Ant seems to be starting to accept and understand what will happen.
Much better than the "no thank you baby" I got when I first told him this weekend that the baby would be coming out soon!
Top of the post has one view of the basement before / after (unfortunately I didn't think to take a picture of the REAL before, that is before we moved all the junk out!)
3 comments:
Oh that is so gorgeous Nic! Wanting to 'dump in the cot' with new baby. They are so delightful these small folk. You sound so brilliantly organised, that new basement room is superb!
Wow. Ant seems so much more aware of the impending baby than my girls do. Both of my girls will point to my belly and say "Bruvva! Tummy!" when you ask them where Brother is, but they have no clue what Brother is actually going to entail. We talk about it a lot, but I just don't think they have a framework for it. They're in for a rude awakening in two weeks!
Wow. What a transformation. Where did you find the energy to do so much?
I'm checking in every day now to see if Fwed has arrived. I can't believe how quickly the nine months have gone by.
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