The Journal - Ryan and Leah's New House

Small improvements are continually being made throughout the house. For instance, we now have an actual dining room table in our dining room. Imagine that.

This room started its life as the living room...

Then it became our temporary bedroom...

(Gratuitous kitty shot...Ryan's three girls cat-napping on the bed a couple months ago.)

And now, our dining room set is seeing the outside of our basement for the first time in almost three years.

Obviously, we still have a lot of work left to do on this room. The boogie boards will probably not always live in the entry hall (haha), we'll eventually unpack all our books onto the bookshelves (our poor books have also not seen the outside of the basement for almost three years), and we have big plans for wainscoting the walls — plate-rail height — which is why the baseboards aren't finished. But that is not a high priority.

And we're very much enjoying the new shutters on our guest bath windows...

Ooooh, dappled sunlight.

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12:49 p.m. — Wednesday, October 4, 2006
Ceiling Fans

All three bedroom ceiling fans are up now:

And in case you forgot, here's our master bedroom fan.

I always feel like the designers from Trading Spaces are going to come yell at me for having ceiling fans.

"Um, they were up when we bought the place...?" Uh-HUH.

But regardless of how they may or may not look, I still think ceiling fans are WONDERFUL. They provide just the right amount of immediate cooling and comfort that no combination of sheets and blankets can reproduce. And for a pregnant woman married to a man who takes up far more than his half of the bed as the night progresses (it's not his fault, of course — he's asleep!), immediate comfort is top priority.

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1:08 p.m. — Thursday, October 12, 2006
Dreaming of a Deck

Ryan and I have often talked about adding a deck onto the back of the house. Here's where it would go.

Current Survey Survey Including Deck Survey Including Deck 2

Very creative, huh? What can I say...we're square people.

Ryan has also been interested in integrating a gazebo onto one corner of the deck, but with our little yard, I just don't think we have room.

Survey

Here was his inspiration:

This house is next to the one my parents rent for a week every summer at the Jersey Shore. A beautiful example of a wonderful front deck with a spacious gazebo. But at the beach, you don't NEED space to run around in the grass — that's what the ocean and the sand are for. You need space to LOUNGE and soak up the sun, hence the deck-that's-bigger-than-the-house.

If anything, our deck-to-be needs a large hot tub attached to it, not a gazebo. ;) Hehe. Maybe next summer, we'll revisit the whole deck idea. We have enough to think about at the moment. So for now, our elevated "patio" will do quite nicely.

(Don't let the date fool you. These yard photos were taken in August. Nothing blooming now but perennial Mums, Asters, and Sedum.)

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Noon — Friday, October 13, 2006
Ultrasound Photos

I've shown the crib. I've shown the room. Might as well show the baby! Here she is at 20 weeks, which was 12 weeks ago.

8 weeks go go!

Still feeling great, though Ryan is a bit sad to have lost his partner in house projects. "Leah, will you help me carry this dresser upstairs?" — "Uh, no. Sorry." — "Oh yeah. My bad. Wanna stain the stairs...?" — "Sure. Go ahead. Right after I leave."

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