Moving In, Again (pictures added!)

I haven’t blogged much this month as I’ve been burning the candle at both ends, at home and at work. Eidan’s due in a few weeks (it’s nice not calling him Baby X anymore!), and Maria and I are having a race to see who finishes first: she’s determined to have the baby at least a week early, and I’m just as determined to get our house not just livable in time for the baby, but actually comfortable. Over the past month I’ve finished the dining room, our bedroom, and the rec room. Before Eidan arrives I need to finish the 3rd floor stairwell (it has no railing or balusters at the moment) and the 3rd floor bathroom (it’s painted, but I haven’t installed the sink and toilet yet). Pictures are below.

This past weekend wasn’t about construction or painting though, it was about unpacking. Last November we packed up just about all of the stuff that was in our old rec room and put it in boxes. This weekend we unpacked it all for the new rec room. Since most of it was Kai’s toys, and since Kai can barely remember as far back as November, it was like Christmas in July for him. He spent the whole weekend playing with his “everything old is new again” toys. That gave Maria and I some time to sort through baby clothes. We have Kai’s old clothes, plus some clothes given to us by family and friends, and even more from a surprise baby shower Maria’s friends had for her last week. So if you’re thinking of getting something for Eidan, please don’t get clothes, we have plenty!

We’ve even hung art on the walls in the dining room, the rec room, and the bathroom. Seeing the pictures on the walls after we put them up provoked a lot of feelings for me. We had spent two and half years working on our house in San Mateo, and didn’t finish it until about 45 seconds before we put it on the market. So we never got to enjoy it. If you don’t know the story, here’s the two sentence version: picture Mike, Maria, and infant Kai living in a 790 sq. ft. house for two years with Maria’s parents, while Maria’s father went through a liver transplant, and we didn’t have a kitchen (we put an addition on the house, and it attached on the kitchen, so the kitchen was unusable for most of that time). There are pictures of the old house on my first Route 50 page if you want to see how it came out - the addition more than doubled the size of the house. Then we moved here to PA, and we’ve spent the past two years fixing up this house. And we now have a few rooms that are actually done - so done that it makes sense to put pictures on the walls. So after more than four years of working on houses, putting up the pictures made me feel like we’ve finally arrived.

Note that when you click on one of the picture’s below, don’t click on the page’s navigation arrows for the next picture - click your back button to come back here, and then pick the next picture. (The problem is that my photo albums for the house projects are organized by floor, but that’s not how I’ve organized the pictures here. This is another good example of why I’ve starting working on my own software that’ll let you distinguish a slide show from a photo album.)