Merritt: 1 Year

June 24, 2016

She’s 1

She’s so damn cute. Oh, hello there! 🙂

And the comparison

I can’t believe this past Wednesday this little lady hit 1. It’s pretty crazy to me. I think the first year with Merritt went by faster, just because we’re so busy, life has a lot going on and there’s so much more to keep up with.

If I could explain Merritt in one word, it would be JOYFUL. She’s just a happy little human. She’s content to hang around, she loves to just be around people and she’s really happy to hang out. I feel like she just makes people happy. She’s just a little bundle of positivity. She seems to really make people around her happy, and that makes me happy. She’s the best.

Still no walking yet. Or really any interest in walking either. She’s standing up a lot more on her own and is cruising around on things, but just doesn’t want to walk. If she’s standing up and you grab her fingers to try to get her to walk, she will sit right down. Or if you try to pull her up holding on to her hands to get her to walk she’ll tuck her legs under her. It’s humorous to me, she really doesn’t want you to “help” her at all. That girl is determined to do things on her own without anyone helping her. But she is a speedy crawler. Just like Zoe was. It’s funny, they’re both probably going to be on the later side with walking, but they ZOOM around with the crawling. Sometimes I have to run to keep up with her. And she thinks that is fabulous of course.

One string through everything is that Merritt really is independent. She doesn’t want you to help her stand or walk, she loves to take containers of food and feed herself out of them as opposed to you taking the food out for her, she likes to hold her pouches and feed herself, she likes to try to figure out how things work – she is very inquisitive and independent. I really love that about her. I love how much she wants to accomplish on her own. I really hope she never loses that quality. It’s awesome.

She’s starting to communicate more. I remember at this phase there was a lot of grunting and pointing with Zoe, and we have definitely hit that with Merritt. She has become really communicative and wants to talk with us about what’s going on and what she sees. The funniest is when you’re holding her on your hip and she wants to “talk” to you. She leans into your face, grunts, and then looks out and points to what she likes. Then she looks back and leans into your face and grunts more, as if to say, “Look! Do you see that!? Isn’t that great!?” It always makes me laugh. Sometimes it can be a challenge because we aren’t really sure what she’s grunting about or trying to communicate. She doesn’t get too frustrated or angry though, so that’s good.

Words she’s got as of a year are: momma, dada, balloon, ball, yummy, ow, and maybe a couple more. There are some words we think we might be hearing, but we’re not sure. Our kids seem to be on the slower side with walking, but on the faster side with communication. We used to sign a lot with her, but don’t as much anymore. I wish we did, but a lot of the time we forget and are just moving on from one thing to another. A good lesson to stop and smell the roses more

She still loves Zoe and Chris so much. Can you see how much she adores her?

It’s really quite awesome. I love to see the two of them play. Zoe continues to rough house with Merritt, and Merritt continues to try and keep up. She’s getting to be a bit of a bruiser, which is pretty hilarious. If Zoe does something that Merritt isn’t too much a fan of she will literally shove Zoe. The first time it happened Zoe was a little surprised by it. I laughed.

She still LOVES food. My brother’s love of food was famous when he was little. But my mom said a week or two ago that Merritt might trump him. People don’t really believe me when I tell them how into food she is. But then they see her grunt and get so excited whenever she sees you eat anything or sees her own food and they start laughing and understand. You basically have to accept that you can’t eat in front of her without her demanding that she try whatever it is that you are eating.

She has also started to try to use utensils and yells at you if she’s sitting at the table with everyone without a fork of her own. She used to just bang it around, but she’s actually got a pretty good use of it now. It’s not like it’s successful all the time, but I am a little amazed with how often she attempts to stab at her food and actually gets some at the end of her fork. She also likes to try to scoop with a spoon and loves to grab my spoon when we’re eating yogurt and feed herself.

Balloons and cars are her favorite toys still. She just about died with the balloons Zoe got for her birthday and has been chasing them all over the house. When you hold her so that she can grab them she thinks that is just about the BEST thing in the world and SQUEALS in delight. She’ll point to them and say their name (it sounds a little like, “blll-aaa.”) Sometimes Zoe takes them away (after all, they are her balloons) but most of the time she’s okay with letting Merritt play with them. Cars are rolled around all over the place and anything with wheels is examined very closely. My dad and Wendy got her a couple cars for her birthday that roll back to wind up and then fly across the room. Those are, of course, adored.

She’s finally through the night with sleeping. HOORAY! She’s also been on one nap for about a month. She fought the morning nap for months, and it finally seemed like she was okay enough to switch to one nap. She’s been a little cranky in the evenings, but I remember it took Zoe about a month to make the switch. Merritt is doing well with it and usually takes about a 2 1/2 hour nap around 12:30 or so. She seems content with that schedule and it actually makes things easier in terms of planning activities and running errands.

She LOVES music and will dance and bop around. I can’t tell quite yet if there’s a certain kind of music she likes more, but she will take note of when songs change and look at you and grunt, “Where did that song go?” It’s pretty cute

Her stats…

Height: 30″ (I think right around 85%)

Weight: 18 pounds 13 ounces (about 35%)

She is our crazy string bean. I actually asked the doctor to make sure this was okay because she eats SO MUCH food, but gains less than a pound a month. She’s stayed in her weight curve the whole time though and takes about 4 shits a day (literally) so she said it was nothing to worry about, little Merritt has just got a really fast metabolism.

So there you have it, our little ONE YEAR OLD baby girl. I guess we have to stop calling her baby now 🙂

Thank you for being such a happy little human Merritt. You are just a joy for everyone to be around and we love you so much!

Shopping for a New Front Door

June 22, 2016

Our front doors are so ugly

I hate them. Every time I walk into them I shudder. This is incredibly superficial – I completely admit it. But I find most applications of Oak (besides flooring, I love oak flooring) to be unattractive. I also cannot express how incredibly distasteful I find decorative glass like this. Again, INCREDIBLY superficial, but it just looks so fucking tacky to be when it’s got those ugly little “stained glass” patterns in it.

They also suck as far as their installation. Which isn’t surprising because everything these people have done was shitty. They used about 1″ screws to install these heavy as fucking shit doors. So of course they started leaning in. Instead of figuring out the problem they just continued to sand down the top left corner of the right door over and over and over again because it was catching. When we bought the house it would always catch here and you’d actually have to shove it really hard to get it to close. So Chris replaced the screws with CORRECT screws. It’s helped the problem. But there are additional problems as well.

The plan was to just paint them, but as we’ve been working on the exterior of the house both of us were kind of itching to get them replaced. Me a lot more than Chris, but it was still nice to know that Chris wasn’t feeling them either. We gave ourselves a budget of $2k for the double doors and I got cracking.

The considerations as I was looking: I would have gone with something with privacy glass, but Chris doesn’t like glass in front doors, even with privacy. He doesn’t like that someone can see that you’re right at the door (even with privacy you can see the shadow), and I get it. I also didn’t want something terribly decorative because the house just doesn’t feel like it needs it.

I perused and perused and perused. There was a lot of perusing. And honestly there wasn’t a lot that I liked. In true “Meryl Fashion” I tend to gravitate towards things I don’t think are as popular. It’s an annoying trait of mine to like to be original. If I feel like a door is more common, I don’t want to use it. Which makes things a little more difficult because doors that weren’t incredibly decorative, didn’t have glass, and that also seemed original at the same time (that weren’t RIDICULOUSLY expensive) were hard to come by. But there were a few.

Chris and I really liked this one and it was an early favorite, but it was the most pricey. We didn’t mind breaking teh budget by a little bit, but it would be breaking it by 150%. And that seems like no point to having a budget.

I really liked the simplicity of this one and the aluminum strip was really cool to me. Chris wasn’t really a fan though.

I had originally liked this one a lot, but Chris wasn’t a fan at first. He said something like, “It’ll do.” But I didn’t want him to feel like he had to settle on a door. Also, the longer I sat on it, it felt like a door that belongs on a more rustic house. No dice.

I really liked the opposing wood grains of this one. And of course I liked the metal trim. Chris looked at it and was pretty disgusted, lol. And honestly, you’d lose the opposing wood grain look once we painted it, so yeah, I don’t know what I was thinking.

Then I came across this one

It was obviously more detailed than I had originally thought I wanted, but I really liked the pinwheel design. Chris really liked it too. The only problem was that we had no idea how much they cost. So I contacted them. Then they told me to contact their distributor. The distributor doesn’t sell to homeowners. So they told me to contact a store they sell to.

So then I contacted two of the stores. It took a little while for them to get back to me, but one of them never even gave me the quote. Which is kind of annoying. The other store actually contacted me because it was taking a while and they called to let me know they just hadn’t heard from their distributor yet, which I thought was nice of them. Because it did take about a week. And it’s a decent amount of time to just wait on a price. So I appreciated their effort. And the good news is that…they came in $150 under budget before tax, yay!

The hilarious part is that we haven’t had time to order it still, lol. I’m HOPING this week. It’ll take 4-6 weeks for it to come in, so we really should get on top of that 🙂

Picking our Exterior Paint Color!

June 20, 2016

Our painters have been hard at work on the outside. And it’s been an exciting transformation thus far.

Because out house is wood siding and it has maybe only been twice since the home was built in the 1950s. That means that the siding is in rough shape in A LOT of places. That means they spent about 3 days just sanding. They moved their way around the house sanding just about everything, including nailing in or removing the plethora of nails that are all over the outside of the house. There are seriously so many nails sticking out, it’s ridiculous. But that’s why it’s nice to have someone else tend to all of them 🙂 At the moment our house looks like it’s spotted

While all the sanding was being tended to, I figured now was better than ever to….PICK THE PAINT COLOR! I was both incredibly excited and scared to do this. I REALLY wanted to pick a dark color, so I pushed myself to go for it. Chris left me alone to go through my plethora of paint decks to select what colors to get samples of

Obviously Merritt is making a great intern.

What was I going for with the color? Well, when I tested out the colors digitally with Benjamin Moore’s color tester I realized that I really needed to go darker than I thought in order to get the impact I wanted. When I thought colors were dark, after I virtually painted them on the house they didn’t seem to be nearly as dark in that application.

So I pushed myself to pick DARK colors. And when I brought all the samples back home from HD and showed Chris he had two reactions: 1) holy shit those are DARK and 2) they all look the same. I admit, that little tiny dot on the top of the paint sample cans makes all the colors look pretty identical. But then I painted them all on a sheet of plywood (two coats of course) and they looked a lot different from each other

Colors go…(top row left and right, second row left and right, third row…etc)

The absolutely crazy thing is to see the color variation in all the blacks. And they definitely all looked “BLACK” on the fan deck, so it’s very interesting to see how purple, or blue, or light gray all the colors lean to in a true life application. It just goes to show you that you should never pick a color without trying it out first.

The color that I like the best at first was Tricorn Black (#5). But later in the day when I came home from getting Zoe at day care, I didn’t really like it anymore. Chris liked Mysterious best, and I really liked Wrought Iron and Cavernous, so I took those 3 colors and I painted them in a very large swatch at various spots around the house. A small piece of plywood is nothing compared to how it’s going to look actually on the house

I made sure to paint them in a couple different places. Our porch gets NO direct sunlight EVER. Whereas our garage is in a lighter area. I didn’t like Mysterious as much because it was so blue. I liked it as a color, but not for our house. Definitely too blue compared to the brick. I wanted to pick a color that was a more pure form of gray/brown. I didn’t want a purple or blue tint to it because I thought that would compete too much with the brick. There was a clear favorite for me, but I didn’t want to push Chris in that direction, I wanted him to share which one he like the best too. And the winner…CAVERNOUS! The middle color in the swatch

I love it. It’s black, but it’s got a brown undertone to it. I think it’ll be perfect.

YAY!

And I’m so happy Chris like it a lot too. It ended up being his favorite of the three as well. So that’s super awesome.

Now that we have the base color picked for all the walls of the exterior of the house, we need to figure out what the trim color will be. Unfortunately that will be a little more difficult to pick – we need to select gutters first. For some reason no one ever installed gutters on the house, and so that’s why the fascia and eaves were rotted and moldy. We are definitely getting gutters and downspouts installed on the house, but the gutters will be installed over the fascia, so I’d like the two colors to match. We won’t be able to pick any color we want for the trim, instead I’ll take a sample of the base color and compare that to the selections we have for the gutters. Not ideal, but also not terrible. I’d rather have the gutters and fascia match in color and just work with what we have.

We haven’t gone to check out the gutters yet, but once we do we’ll pick the eave and post trim after that. Exciting exciting! And I super LOOOOOOOVE the base color, so I’m excited to pick the trim colors now! And a door color tooooooo. I’m not as into the blue lately and have been feeling more of a Citron or a Chartreuse

What do you think? I’m still loving how bright it is, and it just feels more cheerful and happy than the blue. We shall see, we shall see 🙂

Zoe: 3 Years Old

June 17, 2016

This crazy, compassionate little person is now 3 years old

It both seems like so long ago and so recently that we welcomed Zoe into the world. And from the very beginning she has been ready to experience life.

If I could use one word to describe Zoe, it would be EFFERVESCENT. That kid, she is just a bundle of something. She is exuberant, enthusiastic, funny, joyful, compassionate. She just wants to be part of life and make sure that you enjoy it too. One of the things that Chris and I love about her so much (but also feel bad for her a little bit because we don’t want it to be a burden) is how completely concerned she gets with people’s happiness and well-being. If she knows either Chris or I are upset she very quickly asks, “Mommy, are you happy? I give you a hug and make you feel allllllll better.” My mom recently got back from Croatia. She was supposed to come home a week earlier, but she got a concussion while working out and the doctor’s made her stay a week longer just to monitor her (she’s totally fine now, but yes, I was a little scared having my mom be many thousands of miles away hurting). I told Zoe how Grams would be coming to see us a bit later and broke the news that she threw up. That was a mistake. Zoe does not like when people throw up and that became a big topic of discussion for several days – if she was okay now, where she threw up, who cleaned it up, how many times did she throw up…Zoe needs to take control of the whole situation and ask every imaginable question. My step mom Wendy was sick maybe 5 months ago and Zoe still asks if Nana feels sick. It’s such a sweet and wonderful trait of hers. It warms my heart that she feels such empathy for people. It definitely makes me feel bad sometimes though because I don’t want her to think that she is responsible for everyone’s happiness.

Zoe herself: such a happy kid. Always smiling, laughing, likes to tell jokes, likes to tell you stories. She’s entered an stage of imaginary play and it’s a lot of fun

I remember when she was a bit younger and she would ask what everyone’s name was. She still does ask that a lot, but now she likes to make up names for things herself. It’s pretty hilarious. The names are never any “real” names like Jim or Molly. They’re usually just a combination of sounds. We have given ourselves all pretend names that she calls us when she wants to goof around in her room (it’s usually always this game in her room). Zoe is Kassandra, I’m Francesca, Merritt is Bubaloo and Chris is Jumbokin. You’re welcome for that creativity 🙂 Zoe finds it hilarious, “Francesca, do you want to go to the park with me?” And I wish I could properly convey the sing song voice she says it in. It’s adorable.

She LOVES to play in her room, “Mommy, do you want to play in my room with me?” I love how much she loves her room so much. It makes me VERY happy. She had a little bit of a tough time when we first moved with temper tantrums. And she asked a lot if we were going to go back to our old house. And I definitely get it. Especially with how routine Zoe is. So it’s really nice that she has adjusted and asks just about every single person who comes to the house if they would like to see her big girl room. And then she would LOVE if they came in a played with her. That would make her so happy. She even dragged our painter into the house to play in her room with her. It’s hard to turn that kid down 🙂 My heart melts a little every time that we were able to create a space that she loves so much. It really does make me so happy. She thunders around in there playing. It’s awesome

That girl LOVES to be helpful. LOVES to get a task assigned to her. “Mommy can I help?” I mean, how awesome is that? If I’m super crunched for time or in a frustrated mood sometimes agreeing to this is difficult because I just want to be able to blow through it and get the task completed. She’s usually pretty good if I say something like, “Well, I’m almost done, but how about next time?” A lot of the time though we appease her and let her feel like part of what is going on.

She LOVES to help in the kitchen. LOVES IT SO MUCH. Ever since she was little she has really seemed to like the communal aspect of food. She loved eating and sharing her food with you. It almost seemed like the happier she was the more she wanted to share her food with you. We always joked that she somehow knew that my step dad never ate any carbs (he’s a crazy worker outer) because she just ALWAYS wanted to feed him bread – here, you need this, bread makes you HAPPY! 🙂 On the weekends I frequently make pancakes and she gets very excited to bring her stool up in the kitchen and help me pour things into the bowl and make the batter. When it comes time to cooking it she brings her stool over to the stove and I let her help me pour the batter into the pan. She likes to try and flip the bacon. She helps me make my salad a lot of the time before work at the A’s. We let her at the stove, but no knives yet – I feel like a responsible parent 🙂 Sometimes people are AGHAST that I would let my 2 year old (at that time) be at the working stove with me. I found that ridiculous. I obviously wouldn’t let her do something like that if she couldn’t handle it. But I also think it’s important to let her discover the things she likes and learn that it can hurt you. I used to tell her, “Don’t touch, don’t touch, don’t touch.” Finally one time I just let her touch it —- OUCH! But she hasn’t done it ever again. And she’ll even tell me when we’re playing at her toy kitchen, “Mommy, don’t touch, you have to be really careful.” At least she pays attention sometimes 🙂

She also LOVES to help out on house tasks. If we’re painting, or installing a closet system, or Chris is putting in a light…Zoe is always right there with us handing us tools or watching very carefully. I’ll let her paint sometimes or Chris will supervise her with a tool. It’s really awesome how much of an interest she takes in these things. We’re careful not to push it because I don’t want her to feel like she has to like it, but it’s definitely cool that she likes it now

She LOVES music. We always listen to music in the car. I can only handle nursery rhymes so much, so usually it’s music of my taste. For the most part she likes it and will ask for certain songs. We’re currently listening to a CD that Chris made for me and she loves many many many songs on it. Favorites of hers are “Wake Me Up” by Aloe Blacc, “Daylight” by Matt & Kim, “Lights” by Ellie Goulding, “Lazy Eye” by Silversun Pickups, “Twilight Speedball” by Mos Def and “Radioactive” by Imagine Dragons. The crazy thing is how quickly she picks up on lyrics. She listened to Radioactive about 3 times before she would sing the whole chorus. I’m always impressed by how quickly she sings the song and how accurate she is. Obviously she gets a lot of words wrong, but she understands the sounds and so she’ll sometimes make up a word or insert another word that sounds like it that she knows. I love listening to music with her. Even if I do have to listen to “Radioactive” literally 6 times in a row on the way to day care.

We used to always sing songs when she went to bed, but we don’t do that as much anymore (she goes through phases of what she likes to do before bed). It was the same thing though, she would listen really carefully as I sang the song to her, then she would sing them herself. One of her favorites was “One Tin Soldier,” an anti-war song from the 60s. I only sang the first verse and then the chorus because they start talking about killing people in later verses, but she listened about 6-7 times really quietly, then she asked if we could sing it and she sang the whole chorus. Another 5 or so times and she sang the whole song with me. After a little more she could sing the whole first verse and chorus by herself. I would always give her a high five after and she would be very proud of herself.

She doesn’t like movies as much at the moment, but LOVES Daniel Tiger on PBS and a show on Netflix of nursery rhyme songs called Mother Goose Club. I don’t mind that she watches them that much because Daniel Tiger is the Modern Mr. Rogers, and obviously you can’t go wrong with that. And MGC is just all singing, and well, she loves to sing.

She loves Merritt a lot, it is very sweet to see. She is extremely protective of her also and if some kid at the park or at day care when I drop Zoe off comes too close to her she will walk over and sit between Merritt and the kid. It is very adorable how much she wants to protect her and take care of her. She also gets annoyed that Merritt always wants her toys and has a hard time sharing, so I totally get that and can’t really fault her for it because Merritt does absolutely want anything that Zoe has. But for the most part she can play fairly well with her and seems to like her, so I count my blessings. She also calls her, “My puppy” which is rather hilarious. I guess it makes sense because Merritt crawls around and follows Zoe, so I can see where she got that from 🙂

She loves to play rough with her. That’s her favorite. Rolling around with her and rough housing. Chris tossing them both around, that is always certain to make Zoe (and Merritt) giggle and laugh and be so happy. I always love that 🙂

She is still a talker. Oh, so much. SO MANY questions a day. SO MUCH TALKING. I guess I can’t really say anything because I absolutely never shut up, and I have a kid who can talk forever. People frequently think she’s older than she is because she’s really good verbally and will engage in full on conversations with you. I always feel like, “SHAMELESS MOM BRAG!” when that happens 🙂 For the most part it’s a lot of fun – she says hilarious things now (which I write down in a notebook) and asks pretty thoughtful questions. She has a habit of asking the same question over and over and over again, even when she knows the answer, so I’m not sure what that’s about. I love the things she comes up with and her taking note of things – her observations or what she gathers from a certain situation. We always joke that Zoe is life’s narrator. And it really could not be more true. She likes to tell you about what has happened and share her experiences with you, or even something that happened to someone else. She gets playful and makes jokes sometimes or is a bit of a trickster, and that always makes me laugh.

She is our dreamer and performer. She is happy. She is smart as hell. She is just a fucking joy. I love you kid. You’re awesome.

Zoe’s Perfect Purple

June 15, 2016

With the nook painted in Zoe’s room, that meant we were FINALLY ready to paint her walls. HOORAY! It seems crazy that we’ve been in this house for three months and my goal was to get this painted BEFORE we moved in, but so is life, right? We did get SOME work done before we moved in: trim paint

That’s our friend Ethan. He’s actually started working with Chris from time to time, but he also comes to work on our house with us about once a month – cuz he’s awesome. Between him and I we got all the trim painted. And then we sat on things. Forever.

Well, we did PICK the paint color, so that’s something too, right? Zoe requested that her room be purple so I looked through the paint decks and picked a couple soft, dull purples. I didn’t want it to be CRAZY with the pink and curtains and bedspread and all her other decorations, but I still definitely wanted it to be her personality

Once we picked three samples, we put them on the wall we let Zoe pick which was her favorite. She picked the most PURPLE one, of course 🙂

It was Behr Marquee Lights Paparazzi Flash, but we had it color matched to Benjamin Moore Aura. Then we sat for three months 🙂

Two weekends ago I wanted to FINALLY get it painted as a birthday present to her (her third birthday was last Monday, obviously I’m behind on posts). I was super annoyed that Saturday night so I made Chris let me lock myself in her room with a paintbrush while he took care of the girls for about 60-90 minutes. The cut ins took fucking forever

In her room there are 4 doors and 6 windows. Yeah, fucking forever. In about 80 minutes i didn’t even get the first coat of everything done. Gahhhhhhhh.

But Sunday after a morning in San Francisco enjoying birthday festivities we got our act together after nap time (naps by everyone in the house, including Merritt who fell asleep eating – it was an eventful morning). We were really good parents and were both in Zoe’s room painting while we let the girls fend for themselves in the living room. We had a good 30 minutes in there so that was pretty awesome. This is what the living room looked like after though, lol

I told you, we’re excellent parents 🙂 we only had to go out once to check on them with screaming, so I feel like that was a success, hehehe 🙂

But we got lots done, so that’s awesome

I stuck with the cut ins and Chris was on roller duty. Chris is a roller master and was even able to help with more cut ins with me because damn it took forever.

We were lucky that it was HOT so the paint dried super quickly with a fan blowing in the room. We were able to get two coats on the wall and finish the first coat of cut ins and get the second one done as well. By the end though we definitely had “helpers”

That means…. PAINT IN ZOE’S ROOM IS DONE! Well, actually that’s a lie because I still have to paint her second closet. Damnit.

The next day (last Monday) was her actual birthday and while she went to my dad and Wendy’s house I put together her frames, hung curtains, etc. so that when she came home her room was all done for her birthday. Here’s a little preview 🙂

There are still a couple touch ups I need to do, but I think I MIGHT be ready for a before and after soon. Gahhhhhhhh! I’m hoping to actually get my ass in gear and paint that closet soon so we will be SO CLOSE to checking this project off our 2016 goal list. AND AND AND it’ll be the first FINISHED ROOM in the house. So exciting.

Exterior Paint has Begun!

June 13, 2016

We have started exterior paint!!! Well, kind of. Our painter came out 2 weeks ago to power wash our house, and that means things have officially begun. Even if it isn’t the glamorous part yet, it still means there is progress!

Merritt thought the process was amazing. She was very interested when they were at the back of the house along the deck where she could see what was going on

It was pretty adorable how into it she was. I thought she might find the loud noise and the spraying of water everywhere a little overwhelming for her, but she just sat there soaking all in. Even waving

Cutie.

Luckily it was super hot last week and over that weekend, so the house got a really good chance to dry all the way out and we got started on some fixes.

About 2 weeks ago Chris got the basement door replaced (gotta write that post…), and the bars that were on some of the windows gave been removed as well (we live in a great neighborhood, I’m not sure why these were ever put on). But the big item that needed to be worked on was the fascia boards on the front of the house: they were basically completely rotten. It made more sense to replace the boards rather than repair them.

But soon realized that more was in not great shape and it was better to just replace it ALL along the front of the house

While the fascia was off Chris took the opportunity to wire in for another light. There were two existing lights flanking the garage. But there wasn’t a light on the other corner of the house, which didn’t really make aesthetic sense to either of us. Chris wasn’t exactly thrilled wire in another light, but with the fascia boards all taken down, it was a really easy process

And while he was at it he even went for extra credit and shifted the light in the corner so that it lined up evenly the other two

The first light at the corner of the house was on the third board of the eave, but the light in the corner was on the second board of the eave. Yes, I know, totally being nitpickers, but we wired the new light on the third eave (looked the best) so we wanted all three to be lined up properly together.

What lights did we get? Well, it’ll be a while till we install them (a finishing touch after paint is done), but I of course have spent too much time online shopping 🙂 Because we needed three ceiling lights for the front and one wall mounted light for the back I vowed to keep the price under $100/each. And it took a little convincing, but I got Chris onboard wth having lanterns, hooray! The lights along the porch will stay recessed lights, but these three in the eaves will be lanterns. And after MUCH research I settled on these babies

They have a couple sizes, but got the 14″ ones for $68.25 each with a trade discount. We also opted to get the wall mounted light that matched the series for the back of the house (at the same price)

It’s exciting that this process has started!!!

This Place Needs Some Serious Love

June 9, 2016

It was only a matter of time before the next project for my brother started. There was a bit of a breather between the sale of the last one, but about 6 weeks ago my brother acquired this place

Horribly ugly, right?

We’re at a question mark phase as to what to do on the inside – do we get new kitchen and baths, clean it up and keep it and rent it. Or do we really go to town on the inside and re do everything and then sell it? The good news is that there are LOTS of original details intact on the inside (cove ceilings, great moldings, giant pocket doors), but the kitchen and bathrooms had been “re done” maybe 30 years ago and are absolutely horrible. And not functioning great. So in some way or another work needs to happen inside, just a question of how much.

The outside? I think we’re all in agreement that it looks, well FUCKING UGLY. Very sad. There are three similar buildings in a row that the original builder built for his daughters and this one completely went to shit. It’s incredibly sad. The original wood siding got covered with atrocious metal siding, all the dentil molding, corbels and columns got ripped off. Major sad face.

The good news is that yesterday Chris and I went out and met with a ton of contractors about repairing things and starting work soon (hopefully). And NUMBER ONE on the list is the façade. God damn that thing needs some serious help. And it will get it!

I’m super excited to see where this journey will go. It’s more responsibility than the last project, so I’m both excited and terrified for the challenge that Adam has given me. Cheers to ripping off fucking ugly metal siding!!!!

Pretty in Pink

June 6, 2016

When I was pregnant with Zoe I decreed that I didn’t want any pink stuff. I knew that LOTS of people would get pink things because I was having a girl, so I asked the people I was close to not to get her more. We stuck with black and gray for things like car seats and strollers and green and yellow for sheets, highchairs, towels, etc. I’m a tomboy and a lot of the guys I worked with at the A’s thought my attitude about this was hilarious. They asked what would I EVER DO if I had a girl who liked pink and ballet because I was rejecting pink in the beginning so much? These were my thoughts:

1) dresses on little babies are just plain stupid to me, they get in the way of their movement and they literally make them fall over.

2) I have no problem with pink. Or purple. My problem is that people feel SO COMPELLED to get pink pink pink pink pink and tutu’s and tule and giant headbands the second they find out you’re having a girl. There are A LOT of different kinds of girls out there. They don’t all like pink, they don’t all like headbands. And I feel like this same behavior isn’t the norm when you’re pregnant with a boy. It really frustrated me.

3) I wanted Zoe and Merritt to figure out what they liked because they actually liked it. I put them in pink. I put them in blue. They have doll toys. They have car toys. I want to expose them to as many different things as I can and let them decide. If they decide they love pink and love ballet on their own, well, then I’ve got to learn what plie is and learn that it’s not appropriate to scream from the audience during a recital.

Zoe has decided that she likes pink. And purple. She also likes going to Raiders tailgates. She is very assertive with her opinion about things. I love her opinions. And I love her self confidence. So you know what, I had to swallow my pride when it came to painting Zoe’s room, specifically her closet nook

Her room is an excellent exercise in releasing some control for me – allowing Zoe’s opinions to rule more of the roost. Purple seems to be her favorite, but she also picked pink for the back of her bookcases. Originally I thought about painting this nook the same color as her room, but only got a gallon, so I didn’t know if we’d have enough. Instead I decided on a little experiment

I took an extra gallon container we had and decided to mix a custom color for Zoe with samples and other paint colors were had around. Zoe thought this was FABULOUS

AND we mixed in some sparkles too. That’s fucking right: sparkles. Zoe really likes sparkles, so I bought a sparkle additive that you mix in to give the paint shimmer. HOORAY! A fun little treat for this cool little nook.

Working on the house with the kiddos has been a challenge for me. My step dad has been taking Zoe a lot of Friday mornings lately, but last Friday I asked if he might stay at the house and help get the nook painted. He was all for it

Over the course of about 2 1/2 hours Clarke got the cut ins done and rolled it. Children were obviously involved as well

It’s sometimes a big headache, but I really try to let Zoe be involved in projects

There was definitely a lot of use of the sponge cleaning things up, but she really enjoys helping and I want her to love her room and love taking part in the process. So I sort of just take a deep breath and go with it.

It was all painted and dry by nap time, but i still left things out to make sure it was all 100% before the furniture went back in and things got hung up

Then it was just a matter of getting things up on the wall which I am of course not going to share with you because we are SO CLOSE to the final “after.”

We just need to get the paint up on the rest of the room and hang everything up. SOOOOOO CLOSE. And to think I wanted this room done before we moved in, ha!

Merritt: 11 Months

May 26, 2016

Little Squish-face hit 11 months this past weekend

Aaaand, the comparison

I felt like the ice cream pants were very appropriate. If you hadn’t guessed, yes: still food. Still the love of food. It’s interesting though because this month she has gotten a lot pickier. She loves food A TON, but sometimes she will just not like anything you give her. She goes about it in a rather hilariously annoying way: she looks at it, takes it, and then throws it. Most of the time it’s just to the side, sometimes she just drops it to the ground in front of her. Clearly she’s not satisfied. Apparently she wants foie gras instead of crackers.

The best food in the world is still absolutely whatever you are eating. Zoe will literally have the exact some thing on her plate, but Merritt will stare at Zoe’s plate grunting that she must eat Zoe’s instead of her own. I’m not sure what the deal is with that. I usually eat meals hanging out with her and she chomps away at it. A favorite is my Greek yogurt, granola and fruit in the morning (she is now okay with me having dairy again and her eating some as well). I still encourage tastes of just about everything we’re eating so that she is hopefully not too picky of an eater as she gets older.

Merritt continues to not only love Zoe’s food, but just Zoe in general. Zoe is the best, her toys are the best, her room is the best. It’s adorable. She just loves Zoe with all her heart. One morning she heard that Zoe was awake (she’s an earlier riser than Zoe is) and when she heard Zoe and me in Zoe’s room she made her way as fast as she could possibly crawl and sat at the foot of the bed squealing in delight that Zoe was awake. Zoe obliged (because she actually seems to love and adore Merritt just as much) and she got off her bed onto the ground. Merritt crawled over to her and wrapped her little baby arms around her and had the BIGGEST smile on her face. And then she did it again. And Zoe thought it was fabulous and exclaimed, “She can hug now, she’s learning!” Oh my god I died. It was adorable. I literally almost started crying. That for sure got written down in her baby book.

Merritt also loves to play on Zoe’s bed. Nearly every morning when Zoe wakes up she crawls into her room and waits anxiously at the foot of Zoe’s bed for one of us to put her up there with Zoe. Zoe gets all excited too and asks for Merritt to come up with her. What usually ensues after is body slamming by Zoe and silly grunts by Merritt. They are like puppies. They crawl around and tackle each other. It’s absolutely hilarious. I look forward to this each time I know it’s about to happen. So far it hasn’t resulted in any tears. Sometimes Merritt whines and we have to remind Zoe that her body slams are too rough. But there have been no broken bones or crying yet – WINNING!

She’s a strong little cookie, that one. She loves to rip toys away from Zoe and then make a run for it crawling away as fast as she can. I always laugh when that happens. She totally makes a run for it – she knows Zoe will soon yank it away from her so she tries to get away as fast as possible. It gets me every time.

The one thing that’s hard with them is that Merritt does want every toy Zoe has, because she adores her so much, and Zoe has a little bit of a hard time with it. I understand both sides – Merritt thinks Zoe is amazing so she wants to do what she’s doing. And Zoe gets frustrated that Merritt wants to play with all of her things. That’s usually the only time Zoe will act out with Merritt. She’s very good and understanding with her in almost all other cases, but she doesn’t like when Merritt takes her toys, or sometimes even shows interest. She’s not malicious, it’s usually just taking all the toys away before Merritt can get to them. We’re lucky that Zoe isn’t too aggressive with her (she sometimes pushes, or bops her, but it’s never too aggressive or hurtful). We remind Zoe to be gentle and try to also tell Merritt not to do what she’s doing (Merritt obviously doesn’t understand, but we don’t want Zoe to think that she’s always the one in trouble).

Other than that though, they really can play together pretty well. About 2 weeks ago Chris and I were having a serious conversation about work and it was super distracting with Zoe running all around and Merritt yelling and grunting, so we asked Zoe if she could play with Merritt in her room. Chris took them both in there and they played happily with each other for 20 minutes. It was like magic.

I love that they like each other so much. I really hope that sticks. I know there will be hair pulling, crying, yelling and fighting in our future, but I REALLY hope that we’re one of those super lucky sets of parents who have kids that actually like hanging out with each other. It can happen, right?

The other person Merritt loves? Chris. ADORES. He’s probably her most favorite person. It’s a really close one between him and Zoe, but she does SQUEAL if I’m outside with her and she sees Chris’s truck come down the driveway. Mommy is comfort, daddy is everything else. I come home and I get a nonchalant crawl over with a smile, “Oh! Hi there mom!” When Chris comes home, it’s head down and motoring over to his feet, hands up with grunts and whines for him to pick her up. It’s quite adorable to see how fabulous she thinks he is.

She also reminds me so much of him. She still really seems to love to see how things work – trying to put the tops on things, spinning wheels on toys, putting things in and out of baskets. She focuses on learning one thing at a time and really trying to figure out how things work. And she gets really engrossed in things. Zoe is like me – all over the place trying to figure out 17 things at the same time. Merritt is like Chris – she sits and focuses on one thing at a time

She’s not showing a ton of interest in walking yet. She’s started to cruise on things and shifting from one object to another while standing. She stood up with confidence on her own at the park about 2 weeks ago. I was there with friends and all of a sudden a friend of mine and I looked over and noticed that Merritt wasn’t holding on to me anymore and was standing on her own for a good 10 seconds. And she had SUCH a big smile on her face, like she knew what a great thing she was doing. It was pretty adorable. I’d guess that she’ll walk earlier than Zoe (14 months), but we’ll see.

She’s full on had her first work officially: momma. Yay! 🙂 She’s said “dadda” we think too and sounds like she’s trying to say other things. Zoe asked over the weekend, “Can she say Zoe yet?” Cuteness overload 🙂

So that’s how life is with our happy, mostly smiling (though she was sick this past week and wasn’t super happy), strong, thoughtful little lady. She’s a cutie and we all love her so much. Crazy that she’ll be 1 in a month!

Our Closet Gives Me the Heebie-Jeebies

May 24, 2016

Our master closet freaks me out

It’s just weird to me. And as much as I’ve rearranged things in my head I can’t really come up with a way to make this space more efficient. I’m always bumping into things when I’m in here, it feels really chopped up, and it just, well, gives me the heebie jeebies.

Our bedroom is huge. And I realized there was a lot of space on this wall where I could store things

I don’t really have too many clothes and I thought if I really maximized some closet cabinets on this wall I could get all the clothes from our closet and my dresser packed onto this wall. So I set about doing that.

I love Pax closet systems from Ikea. LOVE THEM. Both the girls have them in their closets and I was dreaming of one myself. We have put MANY of these in for clients. In all of my organizing I have found them to be the best closet system in terms of money, simplicity, customization and quality. The only kicker is that they only come in 3 different widths (19″, 29″ and 39″ ). It’s a bit of a bummer if your closet is not a width that is flexible with those sizes and you want a built in look, but you can always add fillers like you would with kitchen cabinets. They come in 2 depths (about 13″ and about 23″) and 2 heights (I think 78″ and 93″).

I measured the width of the wall on either side of the window and on each side a 39″ and 19″ cabinet fit just about PERFECTLY. I opted to go for the full length ones and get doors on them to make them look more built in (the tall ones go just about to the ceiling of a standard height room). In order to have clothes hang inside the cabinets and have doors you need to get the deeper cabinets or else the hangers will stick out.

I went through our closet and measured how much space my day to day clothes, work out clothes, work clothes, “fancy” clothes, shoes, pants, etc. all take up. Then I went through my dresser and figured out how many drawers I needed to better organize my PJs, socks, underwear, bras, etc. After calculating things and laying it out I came up with a pretty good plan

I wrote out a list of all the items that needed to be stored and checked them off as I went along to make sure that everything made it in here. I think it did with a little room to spare, so that’s good.

The nice thing about making a plan with the Pax system is that if you print the list, it gives you an option to tell it what store you’ll be getting everything at, then it tells you where in the warehouse it’s located, as well as the likelihood that it’s in stock. Pretty awesome.

We took the girls over 2 separate trips (the wide units weren’t in stock the first time we went) and got everything purchased (minus the doors because we weren’t quite sure which ones we wanted to get yet). I have become a bit of an expert at putting the cabinets together, so I decided it was time for Merritt to figure it out too

After I put each one together Chris helped me move them into the room. After all the cabinets were together I built all the drawers as well

And then the progress stopped. Why? Well, I really want these to look built in, so because of the larger-ish gap along the top we need to raise them up a bit, then attach them to the wall and then install some trim. After that we can install all the organizing systems, put in the clothes and then install the (still yet to be purchased) doors.

Then comes that little window area. When I posted about the bedroom before a couple of you guys had a great idea about bringing a chair into the room. And I LOVED that idea. I’m not sure if there’s going to be enough room or not, but I really hope there is. I want the space to feel comfortable and lived in. If the space is too small I think I’ll go with a bench (still practical for putting shoes on, etc.) I’m really hoping a smaller chair will fit, but either way this wall will now be full.

The room is still big enough that the giant cabinets don’t feel like they pour into the room, so that’s really good. But there is definitely balance now, whereas before I felt like this end of the room felt so empty. It might not be the plan that would work for a lot of people (having giant closet cabinets in their bedroom), but I like the practicality. And I like the idea of soon not having to go into the heebie jeebie room to get my clothes 🙂

My Basement of Dreams

May 20, 2016

You may be preparing for a basement that giant and finished and GLORIOUS in all its splendor. But, that’s not the case at all. It’s unfinished, dirty, cement walls with some cement floor. But there is STORAGE! Unlike the midwest and east coast, in most of CA we don’t have basements. And what I mean is full, large, spacious could be lived in basements. In LA for example a lot of homes are on a concrete slab foundation and so there is no basement level. Our lower level is on concrete slab, but because we’re built a little into a hillside at the front of the house there is a smaller basement towards the front.

When I toured the house first without Chris I KNEW the basement was going to be a huge plus for Chris. At the Picardy house we had very little secondary storage. As a result the workshop was FULL of tools and materials we needed, but didn’t use very much: the tile saw, pressure washer, MANY cans of paint, etc. When we were looking for a house, “secondary storage” was an item we REALLY needed on the list. For working on our own house as well as other people’s we accumulate a lot of tools and materials. Many of them we use incredibly frequently, but a lot are great to have, but not used very much (like bats of insulation for example). They take up a lot of room and come in handy, by we don’t really want them taking up usable space in the workshop.

It’s also nice to have a place to put some of the work storage for my brother and our house. I have old files of properties and deals that have sold, but we still need to hold on to. There are suitcases, cold weather clothes, Christmas decorations… having a place out of the way to store all these things is awesome as well.

Enter: the basement.

When I saw this space I knew it had A LOT of potential, but it was hurting. The previous owners used it for storage as well, but they just had piles and piles of stuff everywhere. The plan was to put standards and rails allllllll down the left wall before we moved in. But Chris got one set up and it just took too long and actually didn’t feel as sturdy

He made an audible and decided that the rest of the storage that was going to be built would be with plywood and 2×4’s. We’ve built this kind of storage several times for clients in garages and utility rooms so we’ve become well versed. Chris built most of it one night before we got the house and on another evening before we got the house I helped him

We wanted this done before we moved in so that as we were unpacking all the boxes from the garage we could immediately move things in here. Over the last 2 months (that long ago, oy), we’ve fine tuned things a little more. This area is by NO means done (AT ALL), but it certainly is awesome

Over the coming months and likely even years, we’ll shift things around, but for the time being it’s working out pretty great. The best thing is that this space is just down a small hill from the driveway where we both park our cars, so if we need to load something it’s really convenient. And all these things used to live in our Picardy garage, so we’re SUPER excited for how much more room we’ll have in the garage now to make it an actual workshop. We used to just have to shift piles of stuff everywhere, but now there really should be room

At the end of this long corridor is all our (and Adam’s) business files and miscellaneous house stuff

I LOVE having this stuff out of the way. Most importantly I love not having it in the attic where we had to pull down a ladder in the middle of the hallway and climb up to get it. This is stuff is both completely out of sight, but also totally convenient. It’s the best.

And what’s even better? There is still this area past the corridor that is completely blank

I smell some more shelves in a few years 🙂

Ahhhh, I love you, you awesome basement

There’s just about nothing that makes me happier than great storage 🙂

I Can Now do Laundry ANYTIME I Want

May 18, 2016

I am so fucking happy to say it: I CAN DO LAUNDRY WHENEVER I WANT AND I LOVE OUR WASHER AND DRYER!!! The dryer is great – honestly I can’t tell the difference really between dryers – but our washer is AMAZING. AMAZING. AMAZING. (and full disclosure, no plug from the washer company or anything, I’m just really excited to be able to do laundry. And our washer and I are in looooove).

Last off, we were here

And then shortly after that my dad and Wendy’s washing machine broke, and so we really had to get our shit together so that we could wash clothes without having to go to the laundry mat. I know, serious #firstworldproblems.

The most important part was of course getting the sink set up. In our house we have always had the washing machine drain into the sink. A big faux pas for some people. A lot of time people have the discharge run back out through the drain line, but in Picardy and this house we have it in the sink. No biggie. But in order to get the washer to drain, we needed the plumbing for the sink hooked up, or so we thought…

Things got pretty desperate laundry wise. And we still didn’t have our counter top back. We decided on having a stainless counter. We liked the utilitarian look of the stainless cabinet and stainless counter in a utility space. We also wanted it to look really finished so we opted to have our plywood template clad in stainless by a steel manufacturer we frequently use for projects.

Because we have a very large utility sink our counter had to be a specific size. So Chris cut down two sheets of 3/4″ plywood and attached them together. He had to go back and trim a little here and there to make sure the sink fit (the curvature of certain corners was different)

After that we send it off to be clad in stainless to give it a seamless look. But it took longer than we thought. And the laundry was PILING up. As I spoke about in this post, I was running seriously low on underwear and we hadn’t done any laundry in nearly 2 weeks. It was desperate. It was Friday and we weren’t getting the counter back until at least Monday. So desperate times call for desperate measures

Yup. You’re seeing that right. We had our washing machine draining in a trash can. But we could wash clothes! It was a JOYOUS Saturday. We did 7 loads of laundry that day. And that might not sound like a TON, but we got a GIANT washing machine. I did a lot of research about what washing machine I wanted and spent far too many hours. But these were the things I wanted: front loading (an efficiency of space and water saving), really good at washing heavy duty loads (we get things REALLY dirty with the work we do), a good and fast quick wash cycle (when you’re in a rush) and a BIG capacity (we do so much laundry with work clothes, regular clothes and kid’s clothes). I settled on this one, a 5.2 cubic capacity LG washing machine. And it’s AWESOME. It came really well rated and satisfied all my criteria. We also got it on a pretty good sale for $999 when it’s usually listed a decent amount over $1k. We got the dryer in the pair for $999 as well.

Over that weekend (about 10 days ago) we got a lot of laundry done and put a lot of laundry away 🙂 Then we got the sink back and Chris worked on putting things together last week after a couple early days of work. The counter got put in, then the sink was attached and the faucet we got was installed

The drain line took a little longer than anticipated. And that’s not just because Merritt decided to help

It was quite adorable. Though sometimes she got a little too involved

Things were just a hair more challenging because Chris had 2 drains to hook up and because the hookups were on the perpendicular wall so we had to have drain lines that were longer than normal. But he got it done and it looked glorious

OMGGGGGG I love it

I know you might be a little shocked that I got a double bowl after I professed my hatred for the double bowl in our kitchen 🙂 But for the laundry room I find this practical for us: I don’t want one giant bowl because I’m not washing big ol’ pots. And because we have the washer drain in here it fees me up to have another bowl to be washing my hands, cleaning off a paintbrush or roller, or prewashing or soaking something without getting in the way of things. It feels practical for me in here. It works

I told my dad and Wendy that now with our washer and dryer hooked up they were free to bring their laundry over if they’d like. It seemed only fair 🙂 Alas just as things were getting desperate for them the repair guy we work with was able to get out there. Sadly their washer was irreparable and so they had to buy a new one. That kind of sucked. But at least everyone can do their laundry again

And the washer doesn’t have to drain into a trash can! 🙂

There are still some items to complete to finish this area: install the other cabinet on the other side of the dryer, install the cabinet hardware, get the counter fabricated and installed for the other cabinet and over the washer and dryer, and then tile wall to wall counter to ceiling. But this is perfect for now.

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