Plastic Box

Coming together

The last two weeks have meant major progress on the nursery, so I wanted to share some more photos. We're about ready to sand, prime, and paint, and the carpet measurer has cometh from the Home Depot.

Even though we'll be using the bassinet next to our bed for the first few weeks, I dare say that the nursery just might be complete by the time our baby girl makes her grand entrance. Which, if you ask my ankles, can seriously just come any day now. For reals. Any day. You know you want to. 

Mom, dad, and Rachel came up two Saturdays ago so that Shannon could have some extra muscle to lift our new window into position. They got so much done that day. And, see, they seem to have fun doing it:


 While the boys were slaving away, mom, Rachel, and I took the kids to the treehouse at the Botanical Gardens. Little did we know it was Parade the Circle day, but we managed to squeeze through the crowds and have an awesome time.

Since then, Shannon has managed to finish nailing individual boards of cedar siding to the outside (we'll be painting it to match the rest of the house) and drywall, mud, sand, mud some more, and install the interior trim of the window.

The old pictures don't truly show the sad state of disrepair from water damage and neglect that this room was in when we bought the house, but at least we have a record of where it's been and where it's going. And like all things inside these walls, we're not afraid to roll up our sleeves and work hard to make them better than we ever thought possible. 

 

Another stud in the wall

I type this as Shannon is still outside (and will be, for quite some time), applying the last strips of Tyvek to the new sheathing he hung yesterday. 

Ahhh yesterday. Fourteen hours he worked on the nursery yesterday, proving to me yet again how motivated and skilled he really is. In another life I'd like to think he would make a fine carpenter. But in this one I'm glad it's just a hobby, something he does to make our home nicer. I've seen the bruises and felt the stiff muscles from it just being a hobby, so I could do without having my husband's body wrecked every day, at the mercy of hammers, saws, nail guns, and tall ladders.

At 8am yesterday morning the room still looked like this (though do note the new electrical; he's also handy with wires):

That is 85-year-old half-rotted sheathing and decaying wall studs. After rebuilding the stud frame under the window and supporting anything ready to come tumbling down....

OFF goes all of the exterior cedar siding, leaving the back of our house looking like this. Our neighbors loved us yesterday. Yeeee-haw!:

All of the old sheathing and ant-infested felt were the next things to go, creating a lovely sun porch on our second floor. Hello nature!

It was a very calming moment to stand up there, in our baby's future home, hanging on to a bare stud looking out at the world. 

But this calm moment was short-lived, as what goes down must certainly go back up again. Next he had to cut new sheathing and nail it to the studs. It also gave me a chance to help out (finally! This pregnancy thing can be so limiting when it comes to power tools), as I handed him the nail gun and used a crowbar to pry away the old rusted window frame. More on the window later...which will be a very happy post.

At 9:30pm, we had a new exterior wall (well, most of it anyway!). Tonight he's finishing up the Tyvek, which, after the new custom window gets put in next Saturday, will be topped with brand new siding.

Inside we still have more electrical to do, followed by insulation, drywall, painting, carpeting, and...oh yeah... bringing home the baby. 

Shannon is bruised and scraped and I'm just generally fatigued from heat and being 35 weeks pregnant. But at the end of the day we crawled into our crisp, cool sheets, thankful that we have the means and ability to take on these types of projects and make our house the perfect home for our family. 

And if Daphne ever complains about her room, I'll lay on the guilt nice 'n thick with these progress pictures. 

 

Writing with Scissors

I don't know what it is about memoirs by addicts, but I can't ever seem to put them down. I'm nearing the end of Oran Canfield's Long Past Stopping, and I know that once I turn the last page I'm going to be jonesing for more. Oh, the irony. 

There's something about people, real or imagined, who go through amazing arcs in their lives. Paths that start off down one road and end up turning left on holy-shit-how-did-I-get-here, turning right on relapse, then miraculously back to something livable.

People that can look back and say that they lived in their mistakes, in their choices, quite literally. For Oran it's a converted office space with boarded up windows, for Augusten Burroughs in Dry it's his Manhattan apartment overrun by fruitflies trying to lap up the remains within his discarded liquor bottles. The physical manifestation of hitting bottom...and then coming out the other side. 

Even in fiction (see: She's Come Undone and Lullabies for Little Criminals), these are the people, the characters, that give us the critical sense of being awed by life. How it's never what you think it should be, but it's far more complex than you ever imagined. 

As one lit critic put it: "The well-crafted memoir becomes the legacy that can change untold lives, in big and little ways. It can make another addict try recovery. Or, it can make a nonaddict develop compassion for those going through a hell they can never understand."

So I'm looking for my next memoir fix. Will it be Mary Karr's Lit, Caroline Knapp's Drinking: A Love Story, or Richard Farrell's What's Left of Us?

Filtered in amongst my chapters on Hypnobirthing and Heading Home With Your Newborn, of course. A girl has to have some variety.