Extreme Nesting

I’ve been surfing the web, trying to figure out if there is any correlation between pregnancy and major home improvements. I haven’t found anything specific, although it’s a well known fact that we women like to ‘nest’ as the arrival date looms near. The last time I was pregnant, we took down 2 walls (one interior, one exterior), de-paneled and painted one room, painted two ceilings, installed sliding doors and built quite a large deck. And then we started tearing out the kitchen. While the other moms in our prenatal class were buying crib bedding and wall hangings for their nurseries, we couldn’t actually get into ours, because it was filled with kitchen cabinets (no room anywhere else, the appliances were in the living room, after all) It turns out that we were back up and running just about 8 weeks before Norah arrived, and we’ve been picking away at minor finishing touches ever since.

This time around, we started out in the basement, tearing down a wall. At the time I said, “No more kids, there are no more walls to tear down in this house!” So what did we do? We geared up to build some more – a second story on our house to be specific. That does NOT imply more kids, by the way. Now, we’d always planned to expand our tiny house – some of the last pregnancy’s changes cemented that. Also, we love where we live, we have a nice big yard on a quiet street, we can walk to the lake and an awesome playground, we’re close to a couple of key major highways and tax free shopping is only moments away. Best of all, our neighborhood is full of families like us. There are 5 kids within a year or so of Norah’s age that she can visit without ever crossing the street!

So why, pray tell, would we decide to do this now? Well, I’m generally known to be one who ‘goes big or goes home”, so I guess that’s part of it, but much like the last time around, when would be a better time? Mortgage rates are low, most contractors are looking for work, and really, now there are only 3 of us to move instead of 4! The initial hope was that we might move back into the house shortly after Brudder arrived, but a more recent and realistic estimate is that we hope to be started before he is born.

Last week, I wondered if we’d lost our minds… baby #2 means daycare x2, not to mention I’m not exactly at full capacity right now due to Brudder catching a ride for the next few months. In addition, here in the US maternity leaves are so short that they don’t hire or assign replacements; the plan is for me to do all of my work before I go! Poor Matt bore the brunt of this stress I was carrying, and of course, he’s an architect, so he’s doing all the house plans. So not only was his pregnant wife having a meltdown, but I was also keeping him from working on the plans! Anyway things are looking much better this week, the plans are coming along, we visited a home show on the weekend and got a lot better feel for some key items, I had a nice chat with both the mortgage folks and the town permitting folks and more fully understand the process for both of those and most importantly, I’ve let go of the idea that I’ll be spending my maternity leave in my beautiful new house.

Anyone have a alternative suggestion to nesting, cause I think Matt will kill me if I start bringing home blue nursery decor items