Living Room (and other rooms) Make-Over

We are in the middle of a big project that involves redoing multiple rooms simultaneously.

 I already posted about ripping the carpet out in the empty room so it could become the home office (at least until we have children and it becomes a nursery). I set a little desk back up in there for now because Miran needs privacy sometimes when he works from home and is on a conference call. Because we only want to rent a floor sander once, I've also ripped up the carpet in the guest room so that we can refinish that hardwood floor as well. The guest room will become the bird room when Milada arrives in August, so we need carpet out of there. In both rooms the floor is in decent shape, but has a thin spray of white paint and a couple of gouges.

Emptying those two rooms of their contents, as well as emptying the living room for its make over has meant that our bedroom and the dining room have become storage areas. Hopefully we'll only have to live like this for a couple of weeks. My legs are already bruised from bumping into things in the night in the bedroom.

In the living room itself, So here is the before picture of the office ...

And here is the design plan for it to actually become a living room. We tried out the couches last week at Macy's and I ordered them yesterday because they were on memorial day super sale. The bookcases we bought from IKEA, but we saved some money and didn't buy the doors (as shown on the left side). So its more the open shelves like on the right side.

So the first step was getting everything out of the room and selling the two big black bookcases. I also sold the low bookcase and the mission clock from the guest room. Then I painted the walls the same silver gray as our bedroom. It barely shows in this photo, but on the right side over Miran's desk you can see that I only painted 3/4ths of the room - I didn't paint behind our desks yet, which haven't moved yet, because the floor upstairs isn't done.

After the walls were painted, I assembled the bookcases with a little help from Miran to secure the tops to the wall and get the corner ones positioned right. I painted the inside back green. I think it looks nice and a little fancier because these bookcases are kind of cheap. I'm pretty excited about how they turned out and really like how they wrap around the corner. There is more shelf space now than before - so I have room for expansion as well as for some decorative objects on the shelves.

Dad's going to build a window seat chest for the space between the bookcases - and here is a shot of me testing the space out during a break from putting the books on the shelves.

So now we wait for the couches and window seat to be delivered in a few weeks. In the meantime I'm going to look for a cheap white rug, order the roller shades, and get the lighting from IKEA.

And now we need to turn our attention to the floors upstairs so we can get our desks out of here before the couches arrive!

Carpet Removal

I'm still not quite done with admin stuff for school, but took a break from that to start on some home renovation projects. I started two things I've been thinking about since we moved in three years ago ... I removed the carpet from the lower stairs and from the empty room. It wasn't easy (literally hundreds of staples and tons strips of wood nailed down that had to be pulled out one by one) - but it only took a few hours.

Here are the stairs before and after - they already look so much better. I did a first pass at sanding, but I still need to sand and put a coat of polyurethane on the steps, at quarter round at the bottom, and of course patch and re-paint the risers.

And here is me at work and the empty room with the carpet removed. As you can see the floor has been painted white - or rather, it just wasn't protected when the walls were spray painted white at some point.

In a couple of weeks we'll rent a sander to sand the floor and refinish, but first I also want to remove the carpet from the guest room. And before I can do that I have to get all the furniture out of there  (and figure out where I can put it). So it may be awhile before this project moves forward. It felt good to rip the carpet out though!

Veggie Garden 2013

I've been documenting Miran and Azra's progress over the past few weeks in preparing and planting our vegetable garden.

So here is a series of shots showing the situation before, after Azra cleared it, as Miran tilled the soil, as he began planting, as he and Azra installed an irrigation system (with detail), and our first tomatoes starting to form.

Azra's off for over seven months!

The house is extra quiet and empty tonight as I dropped Azra off at the airport this afternoon. She will arrive in Sarajevo tomorrow for the summer - and then for the fall semester she'll be studying abroad at Freie University in Berlin. So she won't be back until mid-December. So we are on our own for seven and a half months!

Major Setback

Unfortunately, I just cancelled my trip to Brno for next month and have postponed  the Frozen Embryo Transfer for at least half a year, probably.

I had a follow-up blood test earlier this week to re-check my CA-125 levels. This was the test I had in March when we learned that implantation hadn't been successful after the embryo transfer. In March my CA-125 level was 44.2, and after six weeks of hormone therapy, it was 40.8. My Charlotte doctor, Dr. Taeff, said that she would not recommend an embryo transfer to anyone with CA-125 levels over 30. Why no one suggested I have this 2-second blood test previously I don't know.

Apparently CA-125 is a possible indicator of endometriosis - which means growth of uterine tissue outside the uterus, usually in the pelvic cavity or in/on the fallopian tubes and ovaries. The only way to really know is visually, which means by having laproscopic surgery and looking. And apparently, endometriosis can cause fertility problems, particularly implantation problems, for chemical not mechanical reasons. The uterine lining is itself fine physically, but the other growths elsewhere give off hormones that confuse the uterine lining and can cause it to reject the embryo's "requests" to implant. Or at least that is my understanding based on reading  about it online. There are other connections between endometriosis and fertility, but this is the one I think Dr. Taeff is focused on.

So basically we don't really know for sure that I even have endometriosis, but I might, and we don't really know whether it is causing implantation problems for me, but it might. So even though there are a lot of maybes in that sentence, I would never stop second guessing myself if I went ahead with the embryo transfer in a couple weeks and it didn't work again. Its just such an emotional and financial investment, and we only have four embryos, I really have to take every step to optimize my chances of sucess.

So I've cancelled the trip and the transfer. My flight ticket was non-refundable, but fortunately Luftansa has a medical condition clause that allowed me to keep the money as a credit for a future ticket instead. So that is good.

I made an appointment to talk to Dr. Taeff about next steps regarding confirming and treating the possible endometriosis; however, her first available consultation slot isn't until June 3, so it may be awhile before I even know what happens next. I did leave a message on for her nursing team so I may get squeezed in if there is a cancellation or they may go ahead and prescribe more hormones in the meantime.

Obviously I'm not very happy about this setback. I was already discouraged after March's failure, and was not particularly positive about my odds in June, but now the indefinite postponing of the next step is very frustrating. I just want to know if and when. This inability to plan my life is really hard for me. And of course every development seems to suggest it is less and less likely this is ever going to work, which is depressing