32 Weeks

Welp, we've got a little less than 8 weeks till Cashew is set to make her arrival (I hit 32 weeks on Wednesday). And it's about time for a reality check: we have A LOT we want to get done in the less than 2 months till she (might) get here. Lord, please don't have her come too early.

The good news is that we've checked off two major items off our to do list: finally finishing our TV room



And finally finishing the back bathroom

Having those tasks checked off our to do list definitely feels good, but we're still pretty far off from completing all the things we want to before our little girl arrives on our doorstep.

Originally I wanted to get my art room done. To get this room done all we have to do is put legs on my work table and trim off the top of my shelving unit, but we've decided to put it off. We've determined that those two tasks will not be terribly, horribly difficult with a little baby around (we hope), so we're holding off on finishing my art room till post baby. For the time being it'll have to stay looking like this disaster

Eh, not that big of a deal. My rolly polly pregnant self can still work in here with no problems (though it would be nice for me to actually move that box of documents up to the attic...) so I'm not too broken up about it.

Cashew's room is now not nearly as disheveled as it has been in the past, though we have started to accumulate more baby items thanks to a very wonderful shower my old office job threw us

But clearly everything still needs to be put away in its proper spot and things need to be put up on the walls. And I need to finish her mobile so that we can hang it up. I've been seriously lagging on that one.

One project we're really not excited for? The laundry room

Neither of us are really at all motivated to work in here. Me mostly because I'm not looking forward to all the bending down laying a new floor will require. Squatting 35 pounds hanging off my belly over and over and over again sounds like a workout I don't really want to do. At some point we really need to get to this one though because no one wants a non-working washing machine with a new baby pooping and barfing all over everything.

While we're procrastinating we have made ourselves useful though. It may not look like it, but we decided to do a little work in our bedroom. This is what it looked like several days ago

Madness.

The most laborious undertaking though will happen over the next several weeks: tackling the drainage issues under the house and in our backyard

We somehow got lucky and convinced enough of our friends and family to help us out over the course of two days to come over and help dig a giant hole under the house in the crawl space for a sump pump and a big trench in the backyard for a french drain. It will be a lot of hard work and we are so thankful for everyone who is donating their time, backs and energy to help us. We really are very lucky :)

And how's my belly looking? Well, I know that's why all of you are reading this post :) Here I was at 27 weeks

And here I am at 32

Yup, I'm getting BIG, and apparently I'll be getting even bigger :) Don't get all excited and think I figured out how the remote on the camera works, Chris took this picture :) And naturally, I posed like a sexy model

Sexy, right? ;)

I would like to give a shout out to the awesome Miss Nikki of 86'N It who donated many maternity clothes to me and these are just about the best maternity pants ever. The waistband is super comfy and there are even front pockets which apparently no other maternity pants have. Just because I'm fatter does not mean I have lost the use of front pockets you evil maternity jean manufacturers. I'm disappointed however that soon I will not be able to wear these every day like I would like because we're not allowed to wear jeans at work at the A's, damnit. However I am excited that baseball season officially starts Monday, yay!!!

How is my pregnant self feeling? Still really good, hooray! I'm still working out, though now I average about 3 times a week (just slightly less than a month or two ago). I'm on the bike, the elliptical, the treadmill and in the pool. I LOVE the pool. I'm still helping out on house projects, though now I'm only good for about 6 or 7 hours. I start to get pretty tired so I make sure to take breaks and not push it too hard. But it feels really good still being able to help out. And it's really important to me to stay as active as possible.

Cashew herself has gotten very active. She used to only move just a little, and it was mostly at night and after I ate breakfast. Now she's a mover and a shaker all day long and I've started being able to see my belly move around which is completely silly and totally weird (I try not to think too much about the fact that there is a human being moving around in my stomach that is making my belly jump all over the place because then I get all weirded out). It's crazy to think that she'll be here so soon. But the longer she holds off the more likely we are to get all of our projects done, so keep on cookin' in there! :)

Before & After: Back Bathroom

2 years in the making and we've FINALLY finished the back bathroom and it feel sooooo good. Once we actually started working on this room it actually took us about 4 months of work, which when you consider all the things we had to do, is really not too long. However, we did demo this space in January of 2011, and I even wrote about the plan for this room and we started buying materials that January too, so the official length of renovation is 2+ years. Damnit. But I'll just keep thinking about the fact that we didn't start working on it till November of this past year to make myself feel better.

When we first moved in in January of 2009 it looked like this

Yup, not only ugly, but completely disgusting. And that was the bathroom we had to use for nearly 2 full years before our main bathroom was redone. It was not a fun bathroom to use. I always felt slightly dirty. But now, it's fun to pee

Photographing this room was actually really hard because it's not too large, so it's basically impossible to get a full shot of each wall, so that kind of sucks (a fish eye lens purchase in the near future, hmmm?). Another bummer is that I have SO FEW "before" shots of the bathroom. Mostly because we hated it so much. There was of course the fun discovery that was made in January 2010 of the glass enclosure just shattering (because the asshole who "renovated" this bathroom shoved the glass into place and nothing was square)

Yes, that's a shattered glass wall in our shower. It was lovely. But because at that time our main bathroom was still in shambles, we were still using that back bathroom so I cleaned it all up...

And Chris installed a waterproof barrier so that we could continue to shower in there for another year before the main bathroom was done. After we finished the main bathroom we were happy to completely destroy this space. It went from this...

...to this...

...in a day. And then it stayed like that for a very long time. Until November, when we worked and worked and worked for 4 months. We worked on so. many. projects. But this room was completely out of level, out of plumb, needed all new electrical and plumbing, walls, insulation....the list was long. Chris leveled out the floor, installed all new plumbing, and after we hung all the drywall we did the mud, tape and texture, we did our first shower mud job (and I mixed and lifted 60lb concrete bags while 5 months pregnant, oy vey), we built a cubby out of a hole in our wall, we rediscovered how much we hate laying basketweave tile, we spent 52.5 hours tiling the floors and walls and then we spent a lot of time grouting. After all that, it was just a bunch of little stuff before we could finally call this room officially DONE

I don't have before angles to compare all these after shots with, so I'll just give you with a bunch of afters :)

So what do you think? I am so unbelievably happy to call this room done for many reasons: there is no longer a pile of materials for this reno sitting in our laundry room, we can walk right from our bed to our new bathroom in about 3.4 seconds, our new shower is gloriously large and awesome, and we did 99% of the work ourselves (minus the glass enclosure). I'm really proud of the quality of work in here and every time I shower, brush my teeth, pee or just stare at its awesomeness I give me and Chris a nice little pat on the back. And Cashew worked very hard in utero as well. :)

Those Last Bathroom To Do List Items

A back bathroom Before & After reveal will be popping up tomorrow (HOORAY!!!!), but for today I'll fill you in on the last little bitty things we did to officially call this room DONE and check it off our 2013 house goals list.

First up: trimming the top of our tile. We wanted a decorative way to transition between the tile and the wall and just the edge of the tile wasn't really too appealing. Originally we wanted tile trim, but holy crap it was SO EXPENSIVE, so we decided to just get wood trim and paint it ultra pure white. So little by little, Chris measured out the length of each span of wall and cut the piece down to size

We made sure that as they were installed they went up in one continuous piece so that we didn't have any joints. This wasn't too difficult of a task because the longest span of wall was only about 4 feet, everything else was much smaller

The pieces that went on the door wall and sink wall went up about 3 weeks ago. But we'd been waiting on installing the rest until after the shower enclosure was installed to make sure we had the least amount of stuff in his way. The pieces that went vertical along the tile required a little modification

Because the tile is sliced in half and is beveled it's thicker and our trim didn't cover the complete edge, so we had to attach a small piece of wood to the back of our trim to fur it out a bit to make sure we covered the edge of the cut tile

We patched the seam and sanded it down to make it nice and even

Once they were furred out and cut down to size Chris worked on installing them

What complicated things a bit more was the gap we had between our tile quarter round and the drywall around our cubby

So after Chris installed the trim on the top of the tile...

...he installed an itty bitty piece of quarter round

After he was done installing all the trim I came in to patch all the nail holes

The patches got sanded down and Chris caulked the transition between the tile and tile trim and I primed and painted the patches. I had already primed and painted the trim before it got installed because I knew it would be hard painting the trim after it was up without getting paint all over the tile. Spot priming and painting just the patches was easy and only required a little bit of sponging to clean the tile here and there.

I painted the trim pretty messy, so I had some touch ups after

But there were touch ups throughout the room, so it wasn't a big deal.

Next item on the to do list: finishing the medicine cabinet

I had already installed the glass shelves inside of the cabinet and the new hinges we purchased had finally arrived (the door is crazy heavy so we got hinges that were more heavy duty). Installing the door took about 15 minutes, and it looks so pretty :)

And the last task? Organizing

Because I'm delusional I actually find this task very fun :) It smells like a Before & After tomorrow, hooray!

A Little Shower Bench

We wanted to have a bench in the shower. Well, I wanted a bench in the shower. I'm a lazy bastard and getting to sit down while shaving my legs sounded really exciting. When originally planning the layout for the bathroom I thought about framing a bench in, but then Chris had the brilliant idea of getting a bench that could be mounted on the wall. Enter my Amazon wishlist and at Christmas I was gifted an awesome wall-mount teak shower bench from my dad and step mom

(image found here)

And that bench sat on the ground in the laundry room for 3 months waiting till we were done enough with the bathroom so that we could actually install it. Well my friends, that time is now

We wanted it to go on the larger wall that shared the shower faucet. Sitting here will be nice because the water won't blast me so it won't wash off shaving cream or get water all in my eyes. Plus, there's a larger area on this wall for it

The directions were of course not super helpful in that they indicated we should install the bench 11.8" on center. Really, 11.8 inches? What the hell tape measure do we have that gives tenths of an inch?

Luckily the stupid directions didn't deter us too much. 

To figure out the height of the bench I sat on the toilet, figured that was a good height, and then measured the distance from the top of the pot to the ground. We're very scientific. Chris held up the bench to our desired height and we marked it off

Then it was time to drill for the brackets

We used our handy dandy tile bits and went right through the tile for the first hole

The instructions called for the bench to be drilled into blocking for support, so after we had the first hole drilled we went around into the laundry room and installed our blocking. The instructions suggested using a 2x6, but we went with a 2x8 because we had one in our scrap wood pile

Once the blocking was in we went back around to the bathroom side and drilled the remaining holes (we only needed to drill for 3 because of how we were installing it, but we did 4 just to be safe for extra strength)

After the holes were drilled Chris squirted in some silicone into the holes as he was installing the brackets to help waterproof the area

Then, after the brackets were installed he squirted silicone all around the brackets for waterproofing again.

After that, the hard part was done. Chris popped on the bracket cover and installed the bench

Chris made sure it was level and then installed the bolts to hold everything in place

And again, we went for more waterproofing :) This time around the edge of the bracket covers

There is officially no chance one drop of water is getting anywhere near inside of the bench or the wall.

The last task was sealing the bench

2 coats went on to make sure it holds up against the water really well, with 72 hours wait before we could shower in there again. Doh! I miss the showers... :( Soon again though, soon :)