My friend Brittany recently gave me her childhood bedroom set and I’m in the process of nursery-ifying it.
I still need to touch up a little paint but the trim and hardware is navy now, and I picked up the diaper changing top at a going-out-of-business sale this week.
Spring has sprung in downtown Durham and we couldn’t be more excited for it! We’re still trying to beat the back yard into submission and Chris can be found out back with his axe on any given weekend. You’ll notice from the 2nd picture that we haven’t removed anything he’s chopped down, one of these days we’ll have to borrow my Dad’s truck and take a few trips to the dump.
Mary Kyle’s parents visited and brought us some hydrangeas which are loving the “April showers” we’ve been seeing. Otherwise we haven’t improved the yard much, we’ve put down some new mulch but we’re mostly just trying to maintain what we have.
However, the real motivation of spring are the changes going on around us! All the flowers are in bloom, there’s no end of renovation projects going on in the neighborhood, the weather is beautiful, and a doughnut shop AND an ice cream parlor opened up within walking distance. It’s enough to make us smile and feel endlessly optimistic about our choice to invest in this old house and neighborhood.
We’ll be adding 2 feet to the house in September! We found out Friday that it will be a bouncing baby girl! This will be the first time I will have lived in a family household with majority women since I was 14 months old, and Chris has never been outnumbered before!
This is good news for everyone who thought we were stalling on house updates, because now we have A LOT to do and a deadline! As soon as we get the windows finished upstairs we’re going to start some projects up there: creating a master bedroom, nursery, and guest bedroom out of 2 blank-slate rooms and a kitchen and getting the upstairs bathroom into working order.
Remember the state of our windows? Dozens of layers of paint covering the whole rainbow and who-knows how many of these layers were lead? Well after a brief attempt to strip it ourselves last summer, we’ve finally gone ahead and brought it the pros. You can tell from these first 2 pictures that restoring these windows is no joke. The paint is a disaster but they’re also riddled with nails. Still, waste-not, want-not when it comes to beautiful historic wooden windows so we started by going to Graduate Custom Painting (they did our lead abatement and paint on the exterior) for a 1 window trial.
What a difference eh? I was so impressed by how smooth and uniform they were able to get it. They’ve currently got 5 more windows to finish off on the upstairs back-unit. For now we’re having them leave the vinyl windows alone and we’ll replace those to match at some later point down the road (we’re on a bit of a time crunch that we’ll get into in another post coming soon). So right now our plan is get the upstairs windows into shape and move upstairs so they can do the downstairs. We’re going to wait until MK moves out to do the front upstairs unit since it would be super inconvenient for her to be boarded up for a month!
PS- anyone want a free fridge? The one shown in the picture above is available, I just need to get it up on the free section of craigslist! Also, the kitchen cabinets and oven which are in decent shape for a rental.
A covey of Covis! 