Well well, what have we here?

Dang, it's been so long since I've posted that Blogger went and completely changed the layout of the "new post" screen... I feel so disoriented... where am I? Who are you? And what's with all this paint on the wall?

This is the upstairs spare room, a.k.a. snake-and-guitar room, a.k.a. random junk room, a.k.a.... nursery?!?! Yep, the rumors are true, I am officially parasitized.

But ain't it cute? I mean, except in that top right pic, that is some straight-up alien sh!t right there.

Cletus The Fetus will be arriving (and most likely renamed) on or around January 22, 2013. We are going to find out the sex (hopefully in early September, if Cletus cooperates), but we are definitely forgoing the pink-or-blue color selection for the nursery. In fact, B ruled out the blues in the pic above (L to R: Crystal Blue, Tranquil Blue, and Icy Blue, all Benjamin Moore and all left over from our frenetic whole-house paint selections last year) on the grounds that JUST IN CASE Cletus is a boy, he can't have a blue nursery, too gender-normative thankyouverymuch.

I love green in theory, but we have so much greeny-yellow (Summer Lime) going on everywhere else in the house that all of the greens looked a little clashy from the hallway. So call me crazy, but orange it is. I have a somewhat long-standing obsession with partiality to orange home decor, so this isn't really that shocking. That said, I also don't want a color that will glow in the dark (I hear getting babies to sleep at night is recommended if possible), and a couple of these were just too bright.

Nacho Cheese (L) (I REALLY REALLY WANTED TO BE ABLE TO SAY I PAINTED THE NURSERY "NACHO CHEESE"... SOB) and Sweet Orange (R). These colors do not look as psychadelic in real life as they do in this crappy cell-phone picture, but they were still pretty bright (and would probably be overwhelming in larger quantities).

These are the colors one shade lighter than each of the ones mentioned above - Yellow Haze (L) and Morning Sunshine (R). I think something in this ballpark will work better given the very tall expanse of wall we have going on in this room. They look pretty washed-out here (again, crappy cell phone photos, sorry, have been meaning to buy camera batteries for ~2 months) but in real life they are still bright and cheerful without being ker-azy.

I really thought Morning Sunshine would be the winner based on the paint chip (OK, and the name), but in person it's a little banana-y, and I wanted creamsicle. If that makes sense. Humor me, I'm pregnant. So anyway, I think Yellow Haze is the one, despite having the least cool name

And so ends today's poorly-illustrated tale of paint selections and knocked-up-edness, and proof that YES I still know how to type, it's just so haaaaaard to fit in between eating pickles and taking naps.

Oh, plus I owe you all an update to the dining room table saga that you probably don't recall from three months ago. And when I say "saga," I mean that the current "table" is still a discarded door (complete with knob, for extra class) perched on two sawhorses. Because we're fancy.

A house of a different color

PAAAAAAAAINT!!!

I promise that is all the same color - Benjamin Moore's Summer Lime - even though it looks wildly different in each photo. At least on my monitor, the bottom one is the most true to life, and the top one is much more buttery-yellow than the real color. It's a great cheerful yellow-green that changes a lot in different lighting conditions, but so far I like all of the permutations it's thrown at me!

The dining room has also been painted (Benjamin Moore's Silver Fox), and I loooove this color. It immediately sets the dining room apart as a more calm and serene space - a little bit formal without being stodgy.

We decided to bring the guest room Tranquil Blue out into the entry way as well, so as not to get overwhelmed with Summer Lime. I love that it's bright and cheerful without being obnoxiously turquoise. I also admit to a bit of geekery at the thought that my beloved jellyfish will be swimming around in a Tranquil Blue sea...

The back of the kitchen island (where you see the 2x4's in the photo above) will be white beadboard with a dark wood countertop. The wall below the cabinets will be tiled - I am thinking something in tones of gray and white, possibly like this inspiration pic from Pinterest:

That will basically leave us with a bright and light kitchen separating the Tranquil Blue entry from the Summer Lime living room, which I think will work really well.

The plumbers finished up installing the sinks and faucets in the master bathroom vanity - now I have to modify the drawers to fit, and stain and install trim around the bottom where we ripped off the ornate original trim. I think it is going to look fantastic when it's finished!

All of the lights

OK, not ALL of the lights. But I've been looking for an excuse to link to this video ever since my sister introduced me to it - gotta to love a music video with an epilepsy warning, am I right?

And check it out... WE HAVE LIGHTS.

They don't all have bulbs in them, but oh my gosh, I skipped around the house like a little kid, flipping switches and doing a completely ridiculous dance/squeal combo whenever a switch actually did something.

Walk into upstairs guest bedroom...

Flip switch...

EEEEEEE IT'S MAGIC!!!

As you can see in the photo above, the plumbers were back today installing fixtures, and I think water is supposed to be hooked up tomorrow! The master bathroom now has its shower faucet and glass surround and it looks absolutely gorgeous. Now we just have to get in there and paint the trim and beadboard, and the tile installer has to finish off the shelves in the shower (where you see the red below).

The plumbers also installed the faucets for the vessel sinks I mentioned a couple days ago.

The toilets are in too, but I figured no one really wants to see pictures of toilets...

BUT LOOK, MORE LIGHTS!!

The painters were also back at the house today, and painted the entire kitchen/living room area! We settled on Benjamin Moore's Summer Lime, and it's actually pretty subtle at night with only a limited amount of lighting. It looks pale yellow, whereas in sunlight it has a bit more green in it. I can't wait to see it during the daytime, but for now this was the best I could do, photo-wise:

Things are getting SO CLOSE, you guys. Seriously, I can hardly deal with it. Throughout this whole process, I have every so often just burst into tears when I visit the house, but I think the frequency is increasing. This evening I sat down on the steps for a while to look around, and before I knew it I was crying my face off because I was so overwhelmed with how completely amazing everything is, and how I am the luckiest person in the universe to have the opportunity to build this house, and live there with my best friend and our best canine friends, and have our wonderful family and friends support us in this crazy adventure, and have a job I love so much that hanging out here for the duration of a 30-year mortgage is totally appealing. And all of you who stop by and read this goofy little blog! And and and... amazing. And now I'm totally crying again. Get it together, basketcase!!

Love and spiders

It's never really occurred to me before how... organismal (for lack of a better word) my taste in decor is. The more I look at stuff I like, the more I see trends toward natural materials (well, I noticed that a long time ago), and simple, clean lines that mimic organic elements. I guess this shouldn't really be that surprising, right... I am a biologist. Still, it made me laugh to think that we now have a jellyfish hanging in the entryway, and a spider hanging in the dining room.

Granted it is an extremely elegant and nonthreatening spider.

I mentioned yesterday that the matching pendents have been installed over the kitchen island...

Here is one of them with the spider in the background so you can see them together. Love! You can also see that the sink faucet has been installed - I forgot to photograph that yesterday. Sorry for all the terrible flash photos with super-evident dust - it was the best I could do under rapidly darkening conditions this evening.

When I first pulled up to the house this evening, I thought "something looks different..." Took me a moment to realize that I haven't had this lovely unobstructed view of the porta-potty in quite a while.

Why? Because that's where the dumpster has been living for the last several months! I think no more dumpster is an excellent sign. Our house is no longer full of things that need to be ripped out and discarded. Hooray! Now we just have to deal with the pile of rubble that the dumpster had been partially obscuring...

In other news, the painters were back today working on the ceilings, so the entry stairs were draped with dropcloths when I arrived...

...and look at my beloved jellyfish! Sniff. At least it is protected from paint drips.

Slow but steady...

... is apparently an apt descriptor of my painting skills. We have a whole lotta trim to paint, and that was the plan for this weekend...

...oh, along with painting the master bedroom, which was going to be totally quick, so no problem, right?

Um, right. Except for the part where the master bedroom has twelve foot ceilings, four doors, three windows, and five paired beams that intersect the walls. Not to mention the other part where we hadn't realized we'd have to fill all the tiny nail holes in the trim with wood filler before we could paint. So yeah... we'll paint the trim next weekend.

Nice day for a white decking

My first clue that something new was going on in the house yesterday was this view at the top of the entryway stairs:

That is one large pile of stuff sitting in front of one large expanse of tarp.

And why, you ask? The painters were back, tackling the somewhat crazy challenge we presented them with: paint the ceiling decking white, but leave the big dark beams unpainted. I know, could we be a bigger pain in the neck?! It looks like they've got a system all figured out, though. They did a test run in the master bedroom, covering the beams with brown paper and painters' tape, to see if they could get away with using a no-VOC paint. Unfortunately there was a ton of bleed-through from the original stain, as you can see if you look at the photos in that older post. It wasn't purty. We gave the green-light to use a stain-blocking primer - still low-VOC but a bit stinkier than the original plan. It worked like a charm though, and the ceilings are looking great. I can't wait to see them without the beams all covered up...

Painting and tiling and flooring, oh my!

Turtle House must have been a bustling beehive of activity today, since evidently the painters, tile installer and flooring guys were all at work. The painters were in the master bedroom, taping off the beams (which we're leaving their current dark brown color) and painting some of the decking in between. We think this is going to look great (like this inspiration picture - but a less glossy white), but we wanted to test it out in the bedroom before committing to doing the whole living room/loft ceiling this way:

Not sure if that is primer or paint, but it certainly looks like it'll take a few coats to get an even color up there, because the decking was so irregular and discolored in certain areas. I am excited to see what it looks like with the protective paper taken off the beams!

This is actually an update from a day or two ago, but the painters have also completed the porch ceilings...

...and the much discussed garage doors! We went with plain brown to match the trim:

The tile installer came back today to grout everything in the downstairs bathroom. For those of you who have been up all night worrying about it, he also switched out the mismatched soap dishes. Both are now the glossy white color - so they don't match the matte white subway tiles, but they match each other, and the tub, toilet and sink. So much better! Here is everything all groutified:

Perhaps the most exciting thing today was the beginning of installation of the wood flooring. I am not sure if I've posted about this on the blog yet, but this flooring is one of the things we're the most geeked out about (and clearly, we're super geeked out about a lot of things). It is actually old barn wood reclaimed from a barn on Brandon's grandmother's property. Brandon's uncle, who farms their land (and a lot of other land!), couldn't fit his enormous farming equipment into the barns that were built nearly a century ago, when farming implements were muuuuch smaller. They decided to modify one of the barns by removing a whole bunch of interior beams (and then securing the exterior structure with cable instead - it's actually pretty ingenious). When Brandon heard about this, he begged his family to save the beams for us, which they did - and his amazing parents even hauled it all up to Michigan for us (yes, I totally lucked out in the in-law department).

We found a miller up here who cut it down into tongue-and-groove flooring several months ago. He told us that it is mostly red oak and white oak, but there is also a lot of other wood mixed in there - whoever built the original barn probably just used whatever was on the property! We asked the flooring guys to just lay it haphazardly, so the different colors and widths will all be randomly interspersed. Luckily they were totally gung-ho about this, and told us they'd done another similar floor recently and it came out looking amazing. We are so excited!

One thing that's really neat is that some of the boards still have holes from the wooden pegs that held the whole barn together. We asked the flooring guys to just fill these with a clear epoxy, so they'll still be visible and we can tell people the neat history of our wood floor.

Here are a couple shots from the upstairs landing. There is still a ton of wood in piles all over the place, but the flooring guys said they'd be back all day tomorrow - can't wait to see how far they get!