Finishing Touches

In the past few days Mommy helped me finish up a couple more little projects - including removing the wallpaper from the hall bath, applying lots of sheetrock to repair and patch, the wall, and re-painting that room.

She also helped me paint the pocket doors to the kitchen as well as the front and back doors black - something that didn't happen when the rest of the doors were painted black a few years ago. Now all the doors are coordinated.

And finally, yesterday our new living room rug arrived so I could remove the towels from the floor. Now I just need a coffee table and I'm done with the house ... until November when the next flurry of activity will take place.

The big reveal ...

Mommy has been here about 36 hours and we've finished up most projects in progress and started some new ones.

Here is the guest room as we prepped it for painting yesterday and after we got it all set up this afternoon. Miran helped nail in the quarter round this afternoon. Its a bit sparce and I didn't bother hanging all the pictures again because this room will become the bird room in 6 months when Milada arrives and their room becomes her bedroom. (it will become the bird room / Miran's office when and if we ever have children).

And most excitingly, here is the living room ... with sofas, window seat, pillows ... and a couple towels on the floor as a mock rug and the leaf from our dining table as a mock coffee table.

And I casually mentioned to Mommy that I'd eventually like to paint the dining room gray as well to help tie the two rooms together. Two hours later the dining room was gray - and now I've got the pictures rehung in there as well.

 Compare the new living room to my design ... pretty close, huh? (note the light fixtures, pillow fabric ... I got the dimensions/proportions of the sofas off a bit though - and we won't be ordering that coffee table I picked out because its much lower than the sofa seat height and so won't work well).

And mommy relaxing in our new window seat this evening.

Floor Refinishing, Part 2 ... and the new Office

Here are a few shots of us finishing up the floors, including Miran putting down the polyurethane,  then after I painted the walls gray and repainted the baseboards white, and we put in the quarter round molding. I even painted inside the closet because it was pretty scuffed up and yellowed.

We are proud and satisfied with the finished product, but its a little different than the rest of the house. Our theory is that the rest of the floors were finished with oil-based polyurethane instead of the water-based that we used. Apparently that is a little thicker, shinier, and smoother. The only place the difference is really obvious is right at the doorway where the two floors meet.

And then we moved the office furniture in and got it all set up. We even hung a few things on the wall. We are already very happy with our new office - its especially nice to have a closet in the office to stick all the random stuff in and keep it out of the way. My desk (the smaller one in the lower picture) will eventually be removed and replaced with a sleeper sofa as this room will be both office and guest room after Milada arrives in December and we don't have a dedicated guest room anymore.

old habits die hard !

In the spirit of Margaret's baby box post as well as in keeping with the redecorating theme of my own blog - below is a scan of a drawing I made at some point when us three girls' shared the basement bedroom at Roderick Road.

Apparently I've been drawing furniture rearrangement plans for quite some time!  My favorite part is the reference shelf ... which is distinct from the bookcases.

 This was in a folder in my file cabinet and I came across it while putting our new office together. I'll post some pictures tomorrow of the new upstairs office.

Floor Refinishing, Part 1

This week-end we tackled the refinishing of the floors in the two guest rooms upstairs. It pretty much took us all day Saturday (we got a Miran Makas start at 2:00 pm and quit about 10:00 pm) and Sunday we worked from 10:00 until 4:00. We only made it through the sanding and clean up and still have the polyurethaning left to go.

For dramatic effect I'll start with photos of the  rooms before we started and how they look now - sanded and ready for finishing. Then I'll post the play by play photos. In the after photos the floors are wet from being mopped so you can get a sense how they'll look when they are refinished. Its going to be so great - we are proud of ourselves and very excited!

 The first step was dealing with some rather serious gouges in the floors of both rooms - which we sanded and then filled with wood filler.

 Then we went to Home Depot and rented a buffer/sander, which the guy talked us into because he said its all we would need. But it wasn't tough enough. It did an ok job on the flat surface of each board of wood, but it would actually pull up any wood so we were left with white stripes of paint in the cracks between practically every board. I was following Miran with a hand sander to get the cracks, but that was crazy inefficient.

So we went back to Home Depot and rented the orbital sander we had wanted in the first place, it did a better job of actually sanding down the wood and getting more of the paint, but there was still a lot we had to do by hand - of course along the walls, but also some stubborn spots in the middle of the rooms.

As we still had the less intense sander, we used it with the finer grit sandpaper to do the final sanding. Plus I wanted to include this picture of me - even though I look pretty terrible - this was at 10:00 pm when we were ready to quit on Saturday night and I'm filthy and exhausted. We actually took turns on everything and both did every step, but I seemed to be the only one taking pictures so it looks like Miran was doing all the work. So Miran took this picture of me at the end of the day.

When Miran gets home tonight we are going to do the first coat of polyurethane, but we have to decide what to do with the spots we filled with wood filler because they look terrible. We've bought a variety of wood stain pens and colors to try to stain them to look like the wood, but they don't. So now they just look like ridiculous white spots, or brown spots in the case of the ones we stained. So before we put hte finish down, we are going to have to do something about these. I kind of want to pull the wood filler out. I think a gouge the same color as the rest of the floor would look better than these spots.

New blog feature - Labels!

I just categorized most of the posts on my blog. The list of labels is now in the right hand navigation menu. So if you'd like to just read the fertility stuff, you can skip all the house project stuff - or vise versa!

Dr. Update

I went to the doctor yesterday as scheduled and basically confirmed that my internet research on endometriosis and its treatment and its connection to implantation was pretty accurate.

Dr. Taeff and I discussed the surgical option, but as it would cost between $2000 and $3000 out of pocket (instead of about $50 for the hormones), because its invasive, and because its possible the pills won't take months to make a difference - I decided to just stick with the hormone therapy.

I go back on June 19 for another CA-125 blood test, so 6 weeks after I restarted the treatment. After that test we'll have more information on if and how quickly my CA-125 level is lowering and hopefully even when I might be able to plan a new trip to Brno for the FET.

Details

I completed two little projects today on the bookcases - making a mat and framing a 1945 map of southeastern Europe that I bought on ebay and hanging a pendant light over my future window seat. The later I'm particularly proud of because the light fixtures is supposed to be hardwired, but I converted it to a plug lamp with an adapter kit and installed it almost completely by myself. There was one extremely helpful phone call to Matthew to double check my wiring (which was a good thing because I'd done it wrong). And after he heard me on the phone with Matthew, Miran oversaw the final wiring and helped screw it into the ceiling.