Winter Wonderland

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We’ve had an uncharacteristically snowy December.

snowy pines

It’s kinda gorgeous.

tree-lined and snow-covered

Even if it is WAY TOO COLD. And even if Dan’s extra nervous and protective of my supposedly more clumsy and unbalanced pregnant self on all of this ice.

snow-covered pin oak

I think it’s all going to melt this weekend… which is okay, really. I have a feeling this won’t be the only snow of the winter. We haven’t gotten too much all at once, so it hasn’t been too dangerous as far as the roads are concerned. But I do love seeing the wintery scenes during my epic daily commutes.(And it sure is nice to be living in a neighborhood that has some picturesque corners, too.)

bean boots, of course.

The Life Changing Thing I Haven’t Been Able to Write About Yet

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We found out on the first day of fall, a quiet Sunday only a week after we moved into our new house. We had an idea that it might be possible, but after a few disappointments, I couldn’t really let myself believe it was actually real. I always thought I’d be the girl to buy 20 tests and take them for days before it was possible to get a real result, but I waited. And waited. And waited. I had all these cute ideas about how I’d make Dan check, because I’d be too nervous to look myself… and the + appeared before I could even set the damn thing on the counter. Within seconds.

I made myself wait a whole 24 hours before I ordered the tiny red Converse.

photo(1)

I also ordered myself a new pair of chucks, partly because I needed a new pair of black ones, but partly so I could assemble my method of telling people. I nestled the tiny sneakers into the adult-sized shoebox, with a book and a few other random things to weigh it down and make it feel like it had big-sized sneakers inside.

A week later, a few hours into a birthday dinner for my sister, I told my family that I had bought a really crazy pair of Converse – maybe the wackiest pair yet – and I brought them for show and tell. I passed the box to my mom first, who opened it, looked at me in utter disbelief, closed the box, and handed it back. Then I handed it to my dad on my right side, who opened it, gave me such a Look, and handed it back. Meanwhile, my brother-in-law is all, “Well FINE. We didn’t want to see your new sneakers ANYWAY.” and I’m wondering how everyone is being so quiet as I try not to shake. Finally, I opened the box so my siblings and their significant others could see, and my sister screamed and jumped out of her seat, and chaos ensued.

It was pretty amazing. And the best part? They all honestly believed that it was just that I’d bought a pair of neon glitter-striped Converse and was so excited to show them.

We told Dan’s family in a more traditional way (well, by him pointing in triumph at my belly and waiting for them to catch on) but the reaction was equally chaotic. Waiting all this time to tell The World was really, really hard.

So I haven’t really been writing here, partly because of how tired I’ve been (which, yes, has been due to my moving hangover, and getting used to my new commute, but also because of my…condition), and partly because it’s really hard to say anything at all when you can’t talk about the ONLY THING you can think about, ever.

It has been hard to get this whole real-actual-baby idea through my head, still. I have been feeling (mostly) normal (and don’t get me wrong – I have been thanking my lucky stars to the moon and back every day for that), and I still look the same. It has felt a little bit like I just stopped drinking all that beer and diet coke to play some “let’s pretend I’m pregnant!” game. I think my appetite is finally coming back, although if I eat anything even closely resembling a normal-sized meal, I feel like I’ve just eaten four Thanksgiving dinners. (I’m truly worried about Thanksgiving itself; I may have to make my mom give me a dessert-sized plate to prevent me from causing my own misery with my inability to exercise any semblance of potatoes-and-stuffing self control.)

But we’re really just so excited. I have a million ideas for the baby’s room, and I’ve started crocheting granny squares for his or her blanket. Sometimes it all hits me – that there’s a baby in there – like a ton of bricks (like when I saw a tweet around Thanksgiving about how pregnant women have not one but TWO creepy skeletons inside them! ack!) I’m definitely afraid of many of the pregnancy symptoms people like to scare you with (“I hope you aren’t too attached to all those Converse! They won’t fit before this is over!!”) and hoping that above all, things go well from now until May (and, obviously, after that), and that this little one is healthy. This is such an adventure, and I’m so thankful to be starting it. And thank you all so, so much for all of your happy wishes – it was seriously SO grin-inducing to make all of our various posts public and see so many people sharing our excitement 🙂

Good Things

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  • pink fuzzy slippers from the moment I get home until I get into bed
  • turning down all invitations for this weekend, which qualifies as good (rather than lame) because it means we will have all weekend to make some house progress (unpacking and rainbow-ifying books! maybe possibly setting up the craft room! figuring out the 15 paint cans the previous owners left us in the garage so we can paint over the patched hole the couch made in the basement staircase!)
  • I’m reading SO much lately. (I especially loved Birthmarked. And am cautiously optimistic about Allegiant, which I’m about halfway through.)
  • the smell of fall leaves
  • looking SO forward to a sleepover with two of my best girls in a few weeks
  • dark, moody nail polish
  • the soon-to-be mine orange Filofax. Organizing nerdery, here I come!
  • coming home to the porch light on (because Dan gets home from work earlier than I do)
  • thinking up ways we can decorate our new place for Christmas
  • and how we’ll (maybe) (hopefully) get a real tree for the first time ever this year (while also finding a Place of Honor for the Little White Tree of Legend)
  • and how I keep telling Dan that I’m going to “decorate the SHIT out of this place for Christmas” and he looks at me veeeery warily

Oh hi.

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leaves

I figured I’d have so much to say after we moved; telling stories of unpacking and choosing furniture, decorations, paint colors, and settling in. As it turns out, I have just gotten very, very quiet. I’m not sure how to break out of it, but I seem to be in a big rut. In a way, I don’t really feel like myself; I’m not taking too many photos, I haven’t written here, and I definitely haven’t done anything crafty since before we moved.

The house is good, to be sure, and we really do love it… but we really haven’t been unpacking very much. Our new commutes have been wearing on us, and have left us with very little energy for projects when we get home. We’ve been spending a lot of time on the couch. I can’t say it doesn’t bother me that we haven’t gotten more done… but in some areas, at least (like the living room and my new craft room), we’re waiting for furniture that will make it possible to unpack (namely a giant new desk for me, and a certain much-desired bookshelf from Ikea!). Still, I remember how fast we got settled at our last apartment, and it’s starting to really bother me that the box of hair products and under-the-bathroom-sink stuff still stares at me from the foot of our bed. Not to mention every single box of books (and we own a LOT of books).

Obviously, the transition to being homeowners is a big Life Event, and it isn’t an overnight process. And being out of said new house for 11 hours each day thanks to one’s new commute takes its own toll. So we’re still very much in the adjustment period. But it’s bugging me, and I’d much rather skip this and settle firmly into the Our New Home Yay phase.

I’m not quite sure how to kick my way out of this strange “who am I? where am I?” rut, but maybe starting small, with finding our Halloween decorations, and unpacking that goddamn bathroom sink box would be a good start.

Confessions

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(Confessions One) (Confessions Two) (Confessions Three) (Confessions Four)

  • My car is almost always full of clutter and at least two empty diet coke bottles. It’s not dirty… but there’s always extra stuff floating around. It only gets worse the longer my commute is.
  • I find it next to impossible to be far away from windows during thunderstorms. I want to look outside, BE outside to hear the thunder, see the lightning, feel the gusts of wind.
  • Triscuits go best with cheddar cheese. Ritz are the preferred crackers for peanut butter. I do not prefer to eat cheese or peanut butter with other varieties of crackers.
  • I always put my left shoe on first.
  • I don’t understand why the internet gets so excited for pumpkin spiced things in the fall. I can’t stand anything pumpkin-flavored (except my mom’s pumpkin bread, and even then, only sometimes).
  • The last 5 shirts I have bought have been polka dots, NOT stripes.
  • I keep buying colored jeans, with the rationale that they are nicer as work pants, that I’m tricking everyone by not wearing blue jeans and therefore looking more work appropriate… and only realized recently that yellow or bright pink pants aren’t really what most people would consider “professional” attire.
  • I haven’t taken my camera out for a real photo walk in months and I feel awful about that.
  • As much as I love slippers and cozy sweaters and giant scarves, I am really not looking forward to the giant chunk of the year I’ve come to think of as the “Elizabeth’s always cold” season.

Our New Place

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We’ve now been living in our house for about a week and a half, and have owned it for almost two weeks. It’s a little strange, still, but I’m happy to report that I haven’t accidentally driven to our old apartment after work, either. The much longer commute is wearing on me already, but I’m into my second audiobook, and that helps hugely.

We have so, so much to do. Dan came up with his ten boxes per night unpacking plan, but between him getting sick, stressful work days and random trips to see about Craigslist furniture (our first time, and oh, what an experience it was!) have all combined to mean that we really haven’t done that. But we are just about done in the kitchen, and the living room is functioning… so we’re getting there, just very slowly.

It’s crazy how very quiet and dark it gets at night. I keep having nightmares about forgetting to take the garbage can to the street. We finally swept out the crap the sellers left us in the garage enough to start parking Dan’s car there (because he gets home before me and leaves later, melodramatic sigh). Baby steps. A few boxes at a time.

I took these photos the day after we got the keys, as a way to really document how it looked when we moved in. We have so many ideas, and I can’t wait to start some projects and really get settled.

the living room, looking into the dining room
the awesome bay window in the living room
the entry way
going up to the 2nd floor (or down to the basement)
the second floor is so open
the dining room
the kitchen
our little deck
the garage
the master bedroom
walk in closets!
master bathroom
i love love love how open the second floor is
the second bedroom
the third bedroom

click each picture to see it bigger.

It’s just so big and so bright and so open. We both feel so lucky to be here.

So We Bought A House

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And I’m still processing, acclimating, feeling a bit (hugely) overwhelmed. I am still feeling scattered enough that I don’t really know what day it is, so forget about stringing coherent thoughts together.

But. We did it. We are homeowners. Thursday was a whirlwind, from our (several) trips to the bank to get certified checks, to the 85,000 times we signed our names. The closing was a little strange – I don’t know what I expected, ominous music as we signed 30 years of our lives away? – but even when it was over I still felt the same. But then we drove to our! house! where we babysat the cable guy and the cleaning service (expensive, but SO worth the peace of mind knowing we had a very short time frame to get the place ready before we were officially moving in). As Dan argued with the cable company to get our new internet working, I wandered our gigantic new place, starting to feel really super overwhelmed by all of the details, and noticing things like how none of the doorknobs are the same color, and they didn’t do such a great job painting in here and why is the carpet in the basement a different color than the carpet on the stairs (srsly, gray next to beige. Why not just use the same color??) and why does our new trash-company-issued garbage can smell like cat poop? (SO GROSS.)

It all finally, really hit me as I took in all of those details. Texts were coming in from friends – my favorite being Cynthia’s “you own a mutha effin home!!!!” – and I called my parents. It was just suddenly SO BIG and SO OURS.

But Dan got them to fix the internet. And we went out and bought subs and realized that despite being in rural Miscellaneous Western Jersey, there’s actually a lot very close to our place (a real camera shop, even!). We went back home and sat in our empty living room on our new wood floors and ate dinner as we drank the champagne the previous owners left for us. And it felt like the Exciting Beginning we have been hoping for.

1Guys, we have a (non-functioning) fireplace! (We’re going to get it fixed.)

Saturday was moving day, and I can’t tell you how lucky we are to have a vertitable army of siblings to help us. At one point, with both sets of parents, we had 12 people carrying our shit. It was crazy, and made the day go by so quickly. Sure, we may have learned the hard way that our couch won’t fit down the basement stairs when it got STUCK in the stairwell. The perfect home for the bookshelves of the world is a half an inch too small (because although we thought to account for the thermostat, light switch, and outlet, we neglected to account for the baseboard on the neighboring wall, ARGH). But we got everything in and having our families there to see (and gush over) our house was so, so cool. At one point, most of us were hanging around in the kitchen, drinking beers, eating pizza, and chatting, and it was exactly what I always pictured, exactly what I love best about other people’s homes that are the home-iest.

On Sunday, the day our lease ended, we woke up early and drove back down to our apartment to clean it from top to bottom. It was so sunny and bright there, and Dan and I kept talking about how the light was such a huge selling point when we signed the lease two years ago. It was hard work, but we managed to finish, load the car, pick up subs (again) and be on the couch in our new living room only ten minutes after football had started.

2Boxes as coffee tables/footrests? Sure. Also, our wedding quilt was the one blanket that we packed last/unpacked first, which felt extra special. Also, Dan’s new beard, now sticking around thanks to a fantasy football side bet last week. (I won.)

We have SO much work ahead of us unpacking and settling in, and I’m trying not to feel overwhelmed by that, too. Dan has a plan to tackle ten boxes each evening when we get home, which sounds like a lot but felt really good when we did it yesterday. And truly, I knowwwww you’re dying for more pictures, and if I had any idea which box my camera cable was in, I swear I’d post them. Very soon, I promise.

So I didn’t really think I had anything more than a few bullet points in me, but I guess I have a little more to say. It’s an exciting and overwhelming and completely exhausting time now, and I can’t wait to be done with the boxes and on to the imagining our new space for real.

3
This is arguably my favorite view in our new house – looking from the master bedroom toward the other two bedrooms on the second floor. That window looks out onto the oak tree out front, and from the second floor it’s just a window full of greenness.

The Before

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  • The week before buying a house feels a lot like the week before getting married did. My brain is full of static, basically. I can’t stop saying how WEIRD everything feels.
  • Because less than 24 hours before we sign all of these papers and hand over a gigantic check, I still can’t quite wrap my head around the idea that we’re really buying a house.
  • I have had a series of hilarious, sitcom injuries this week – falling up the stairs at work and making the loudest clatter EVER, stabbing myself with the un-attached legs of a Lack table, slicing my finger open pretty nicely with a potato peeler.
  • We finished packing last night, finally, after emergency box deliveries care of my brother and parents, and one last trip to Lowe’s for the really big boxes. I kinda don’t care that we packed everything but our solo cups, even if it means our food options amount to take out.
  • The vodka tonics have been flowing. I’m concerned that the guys at the liquor store are starting to notice how often I’ve been there in the last two weeks.
  • Dan told me last night that even though we sorta hate it, he’ll also kinda miss our apartment. Because it was the first one that was Ours.
  • I’m irrationally worried that I’ll mess up all those signatures – I’m really not very good at signing my new name yet.
  • But all in all, it seems like things are poised to go smoothly, so keep your fingers crossed that they do. I definitely will be. And I just can’t wait to start this part of our lives.

Project Life: Halfway Point

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I have wanted to write a bit about how Project Life has been working out for me this year, since I really love reading about how others approach the project. I also LOVE seeing pictures of your craft desk/corner/area. And truly, I think Project Life is so accessible, so I feel like writing about how I approach it might help someone out there realize that they could TOTALLY do this, too. The irony of the timing of this post isn’t lost on me, as I’m here posting photos of my craft space only after it’s all packed away ahead of our move this week. I don’t know how I’ll set up my craft space in the new house, but I know that this set up worked really well for me so I’m sharing it here anyway.

album #1 is done!
I finished my first album with week 26, so it includes January – June. It seems that some people can get an entire year in one album, and others split the year into two (or even three!) albums. I squeezed 7 months into one album in 2012, which was probably just a bit much.

album #1 - end page
Here is the end page of my first album for 2013. I posted a photo of my first page in this post. I’m trying to keep the style simple, with black and white photos, some of the same patterns from the title page, and some notes about the year so far.

It’s funny to read that starting post again, because I definitely haven’t been using more “real camera” photos. Most weeks are primarily iPhone photos, and I’m okay with that, really. I still use the calendar cards and “this week” journaling cards, but sometimes I remove them if I have more content, or want to use that slot for something else. I’m trying to relax my self-imposed rules for the project by a lot, which goes a long way toward making it more accomplish-able.

So how do I approach putting my pages together?
how I plan pages
I have been using the same basic method for a long time now. I have a small 6×8 spiral notebook that keeps everything together. It actually started with what I thought of as my “wedding planning” notebook, and has expanded to be the notebook where I plan PL pages, write important to do lists… everything I don’t want to forget. It’s easy to toss in my bag if I want to work on the week’s plan at lunch, and doesn’t take up too much desk real estate when I’m building the pages itself.

Each week, I draw out the spread, and put the week number and dates at the top and bottom of the page. I use pen for the framework – and then pencil for everything else. I tend to move things around and change my mind as the week goes on. I use the mini calendar at the bottom for a quick summary of what happened each day, as I’m always surprised how quickly I forget what happened each day. I use the margins to include a list of the photos I’ve taken so far, and to help determine if I need an insert to accommodate extra photos, etc.

There are some weeks where I put the pages together very quickly, but every week, without fail, I fill out my pencil plan during the actual week. This makes it SO much easier to build pages even if I’m doing it several weeks (or a month!) later. Seriously, if you take one thing from this: it’s that planning out pages as the weeks happen is HUGE.

Building the pages themselves happens in two stages: 1. Editing/cropping photos, creating any text files, and printing everything on my printer at home, and then 2. Actually filling the page protectors. Sometimes I print the photos that week or the week after, and don’t make the page until 3 weeks later, and sometimes I print them much later. It depends on a lot of things – whether I have an evening to myself while Dan’s gaming or staying late at work, how lazy I feel, how much else is going on, etc.

4
My desk often looks like this. Even after I organize it nicely, this is mostly how things end up. I have the piles organized by size or category (the pile to the left is all letter stickers, for example). It sort of makes sense as I’m working, but I often forget about supplies that I don’t use much.

5
Once I bought the second core kit (I now have Honey and Seafoam), I bought little bins for 3×4 and 4×6 cards. I pulled out one or two of each design so they’re handy, since flipping through the entire box wasn’t working very well. I’m very tempted to get one of these Things Bins from fab to replace all of my various mugs, bins, and bowls… even though I love them (and the excuse to buy more mugs/bowls/bins).

my workspace
This is my desk on a good day. I try to keep it clean when I’m not working, so that I can pile the papers and business cards and menus I collect as the days pass right in the middle where they won’t get lost. (Or, okay, sometimes “clean” = keep all the crap off of the green mat.)

7
And this is my super-fancy solution to where to keep my album as I’m filling pages. We had piles of wedding gifts in my craft room (because our apartment has been packed to the GILLS, and we’re saving many of these for the new house, to help the new house feel even more fun, rather than have to re-pack everything now), and I made a nice little shelf out of boxes. I keep the open album on the pseudo shelf, which is right behind me when I’m sitting at my desk. In my new space I would LOVE a corner desk, but I’m not sure it’ll work out that way.

So that’s how it works. I have gotten pretty seriously behind a few times this year, and surely will with our move to the new house this week, and that little spiral notebook has made it possible to catch back up pretty quickly. I’m always looking for more ways to stay organized, that’s for sure. I’ll probably also sign up for Catherine Davis’s Process workshop at Big Picture, just because I can’t get enough of anything process- and organization-related.