A few years ago, after much debating, my parents decided to keep the house they had lived in nearly my entire life, but renovate it throughout. They figured that in their mid-fifties it might be nice to have things like, oh, say… central air. And a fridge that wasn’t puke yellow and from 1989.

Projects like installing central air and wood floors throughout your house are a bit of a pain, but nothing is as much of a pain as knocking down a wall in your kitchen, gutting it, and putting in a new kitchen from the ground up. This I know from experience, although my parent’s budget and timeline was far different than ours. They hired an awesome contractor and over the span of several months lived in their finished basement while the kitchen was being renovated. For those many months, they referred to the room in the finished basement as “The Studio” and became well accustomed to cooking with a toaster and microwave and living out of a dorm-sized fridge.

This past weekend, we blocked off our own kitchen to finally get around to painting the wood floors. Because we didn’t want to push our luck, we decided to plan the painting with the most conservative of timelines including two full days between coats for optimal drying time. Which meant that I had 5 days worth of food to plan out in advance with a toaster oven and basement fridge as my only options.

I spent much of Friday at the grocery store and in the kitchen making up a whole host of sandwiches, cutting up cucumbers and summer squash and marinating chicken that could be grilled outside. We’re on day 4 of living without a kitchen, and I’ll be honest, the sandwiches are getting old. Same for washing our dirty dishes in the bathroom sink. And going outside and around to the back of the house to get milk from the basement fridge.

Here’s what our dining room currently looks like with a mattress blocking off the door to the kitchen and the dining room table covered with our picnic staples.

From Daily Daguerreotype

And here’s the kitchen floor drying.

From Daily Daguerreotype

After five days of living like this, I honestly cannot imagine how my parents lived for months on end in The Studio. But then again, our finished project is nothing like theirs.

From Daily Daguerreotype

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that every time I go to my mom’s house I beg to cook a meal, and the entire time I talk to my pretend audience as if I’m a Food Network chef.

I’ve spent the afternoon calling and meeting with local handymen who are stopping by to give me quotes on drywalling our upstairs. Right now it exists as two rooms that are used to house the litter box and lots of half-opened, half-unpacked boxes of miscellany that I have been happy to live without for the past year. But soon!? Soon they will be our guest room and cozy den for watching Netflixed movies on Friday and Saturday nights when we’ve finally gotten Penny to fall asleep. Frankly, that sounds like the perfect weekend to me.

Originally we had planned to do the drywalling ourselves, and honestly Matt is still not too keen about hiring it out. But the pressure he is receiving from his wife is akin to the pressure that I will soon be feeling on my abdomen when it’s time to push this little girl out. And there’s only so much fighting off the nesting urges of a pregnant woman that a man can do.

Plus, I think even HE realizes that drywall dust plus spending every weekend away from his 4 week old baby to be upstairs spackling by himself isn’t all that appealing.

So it’s been a stream of phone calls and visits from handy Southern gents all afternoon while I pepper them with questions and try to find out how quickly they work. After all the people we’ve had into the house, electricians, plumbers, HVAC repair guys and general handymen, I’m getting pretty good at this. At first I was a little intimidated, what with my big belly and swollen ankles and them with their Ford F150s. But now I’ve grown accustomed to being called “Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa’aaaaaaaaaam,” and I kinda like it. I like that nobody pressures me into anything and that they’re all kinda on island time. I like how they tell me to “talk it over with your husband and have him give me a call if he’s got any questions.”

So I’ve come to the conclusion that most of them are better people than the folks I know with college degrees. Plus they’re all a heck of a lot nicer to work with than business executives and women in designer suits.

I love my old house that’s constantly in a state of renovation in a neighborhood where not a single person has the interest or energy to be pretentious. And I love Tennessee.

A little over a year ago we inherited my grandmother’s bedroom set which, aside from her china sitting in my kitchen cabinets, is my all-time most prized possession. It’s a beautiful set made from solid mahogany and weighing a million tons. Originally it came with a headboard and footboard for a double bed, but since Matt and I sleep on a queen mattress (a hand-me-down Sterns & Foster from my parents that is quite possibly the world’s greatest mattress, but was too hard for my mom’s back) the headboard and footboard wouldn’t fit. We originally toyed with the idea of mangling up the headboard and footboard to extend wide enough for a queen, but decided not to rip apart a beautiful antique in that manner. Instead, we’re using it for the guest room which has a new double mattress and boxspring.

So for the extent of our marriage we’ve been sleeping on a bed with no headboard which absolutely drives Matt nuts as he likes to lean back and read in bed. Personally I hate that my pillows are always falling down between the mattress and the wall behind it, but that’s neither here nor there.

This weekend we were inspired to make the headboard that we had been dreaming of for a while. I had seen a bunch of upholstered headboards and decided that it needed the following functionality:

1. It had to be tall because we have a tiny bedroom, and I needed something to extend the eye upward making the room look bigger.
2. It had to be tall enough so that when Matt was sitting in bed, it would extend higher than his head so he could lean back against it.
3. I wanted little “wings” on the sides of the headboard that extended down to the floor. I thought this might look cozier and give the whole thing a more solid feel.
4. The wings couldn’t be too deep because we religiously use our bedside tables, and I wanted to be able to conveniently reach my Tums.
5. I wanted nailhead trim!

So we mapped it out and measured how big the whole thing would be. Then it was off to Hobby Lobby to score 4 yards of linen fabric (at $2.50/yd) and batting ($13.99 to cover the wood with a bit extra left over). I had hoped they would have lots of nailhead options, but their selection left much to be desired. So we trekked off to Home Depot to buy the wood.

We decided to go with full sheets of plywood, although I had read you could do something lighter weight with craft board. We wanted this to be sturdy and since it would run all the way down to the floor and be screwed into our bed frame, we bought the thickest sheet of plywood we could. We needed 2 sheets of 4×8 plywood ($40 total) with quite a bit of plywood leftover (good news as I have a design for living room side tables that I want Matt to build!). I was in luck when I walked down the nail aisle and found a whole slew of upholstery tacks to choose from! I wound up picking an antique brass finish, and Matt calculated that we’d need 18 boxes of nailheads. I bought all 20 for about $25 in case I needed extra.

Our total cost was around $95 for supplies as we needed to pick up some extra screws and metal plates. Matt had plenty of staples and a staple gun as well as four big bolts to screw the headboard into our metal bed frame. So we headed home to put her together!

The first half of the project involved Matt measuring and screwing the frame together.

From Daily Daguerreotype

Next we covered the back frame in batting, stapled it down, and did the same thing with the fabric which I had cut to size and ironed. Then we upholstered the wings in the same manner leaving one flap open where Matt could screw them perpendicularly into the back frame. After the wings were screwed to the back frame, we only needed to pull the remaining wing fabric behind the back frame and staple it down.

Then came the nailheads. Hundreds of little nailheads that we individually hammered into the plywood with a rubber mallet. This is a job I would not recommend unless you A) are extremely anal-retentive and B) enjoy going bug-eyed. It’s nearly impossible to get those nailheads in straight, and they frequently have to be re-done. If you’re planning on putting nailheads into ANYTHING, I highly recommend you find an upholsterer who has recently been through a bad break-up… and… yaknowwhati’msayin.

It took us much of both Saturday and Sunday and I’d say we easily put in about 9 hours of work on the headboard, but we are super-psyched with how it turned out. In fact when I was Googling how close to set the nailheads, I found an image of this Nate Berkus Headboard that looks pretty darn similar to ours, except without the tufting.

So are you ready for the After photos which were taken in haste with piles of clean laundry on the bed and disorganized side tables?

From Daily Daguerreotype

From Daily Daguerreotype

The next project on the list is to make curtains to hang behind the bed which I plan to hang high and wide over that window giving the appearance that the window is as wide as the queen-sized bed. I think having a big billowy expanse of curtains behind the headboard will do even more to make the room look taller and will also balance out the very tall headboard.

Whaddya think? Any headboard creators out there who have made their own? Or do you prefer a bed with no headboard?

I had been ogling this pendant lamp over at West Elm since I got my latest catalog. CB2 has a similar one for about $50 more which I was resigning myself to until West Elm decided to do us all a favor and shave off some dollah bills from the price tag. Plus the West Elm lamp is a little cuter.

I really really wanted it for our dining room, but was discouraged when I saw that it was on backorder until April on the website. So I called our local West Elm to see if they had it in stock, and what do you know?! They did! So they held it for me until I could get my booty down there Friday afternoon to pick it up.

Now usually I wouldn’t go and blow $150 on a new lamp for my dining room when the one that came with the house was perfectly good. But I was struck by some genius lightning last week and realized I had just enough credit card points to cash in towards a West Elm giftcard towards the lamp. SCORE! I wound up paying around $16 total since I had to pay 9% sales tax and buy a new 150 watt lightbulb.

I ran into two problems while trying to install the lamp. First of all, the pendant kit was outfitted with a three pronged plug to go into an outlet, but I wanted it to be hardwired to the ceiling like the old lamp. Easy enough – I just cut off the cord at the length that I wanted and found the three separate wires – green (ground), black (positive), and white (negative). Next I had a large-ish hole in the ceiling from the old lamp with no base plate on the new lamp to cover it with. So I had to use the base plate from the old lamp which meant I needed to wait for Matt to get home and bend some chain for me to acquire it.

All in all, with Matt’s help and my knack for guessing the polarity of ancient house wires, we got the thing installed in about an hour with no electrocution or breaking the dining room table on which we were both kneeling.

Before:

After:

In the annals of items we have purchased with our credit card points, I tend to think my pendant lamp is far superior to Matt’s gas grill which has never burned a very hot flame. Which is really fine. We could grill burgers on Matt’s shirtless body. OH SNAP!

I think it’s too early to say that my nesting instinct has kicked in, because I think that isn’t supposed to happen until my third trimester. But over the past week I’ve had more and more interest in pulling lost and forlorn items out of boxes that were packed over six months ago. There’s been a lot of “Oh yeah! THIS!” along with the realization that my house doesn’t feel quite as spacious as it did before I had all this stuff out and everywhere.

Last week I was motivated to install the tile backsplash in the kitchen and after five hours of painstaking labor, I stupidly insisted that Matt stay up until 12:30 am helping me grout the thing. We’re both happy with how it looks, but I fear my husband is starting to think of me as one more of his cases.

Inevitably I’m running into the same old stupid problems that you always run into when you’re working with what you’ve got. When we first moved into the house I loved the color on the walls of the living room and dining room, but there were a few patches where the paint needed to be touched up. Luckily we had an original paint bucket in the basement that the previous owners left, but it had no lid with a color code, and was empty with dried gray paint on the interior. I had high hopes that my favorite paint guy at Home Depot could match it for me, but after painting my touchups with the new paint I’ve discovered what I have is a shade darker. So yes, this means we need to completely repaint the living room and dining room. The optimist in me keeps saying to Matt, “Yeah, but I wanted to repaint the trim anyways.” And again, he jots down notes about my behavior in his little black notebook.

Last night I decided I was going to hang some shelves on the wall while watching the Superbowl. Matt was in front of the computer doing some last-minute work.

“Look at me! I’m even measuring where to hang them so they’re perfectly centered!”

“Good job, hun.”

“But I’m not going to screw them into studs.”

“You should definitely screw them into studs.”

“Well, I’m not going to. I won’t put anything heavy on them.”

“But they’re pretty heavy as they are.”

“Yeah, well… <sound of drill>… too late.”

So the floor is open for bets. How much longer before Matt decides to murder me? And/or institutionalize me?

This morning I awoke to the beautiful realization that the bathroom renovations were complete, and that for the first time in almost a week I would be able to shower in my own bathroom instead of at the gym. So I grabbed my towel and danced into the bathroom to hop in a steaming hot shower.

Now I say that the renovations are complete, and they are. Except for one small thing. With the installation of a new threshold in the doorway, the bathroom door has been taken off its hinges so an inch can be cut off of the bottom allowing it to fit snugly back in place. Currently the bathroom door is leaned up against a wall in the living room. But that was of no concern to me. The cat and dog have both seen me naked, and into the shower I went.

Just as I was starting to lather up, I heard a hissing and swatting. And then, out of nowhere, Berlin had hopped in the tub with me. I was, frankly, stunned. After thinking about it for some time, I have no reasonable explanation except to say that I believe the cat chased the dog into the shower. Yes, I do.

Berlin is quite familiar with the shower, so her hopping in of her own accord is really not that crazy. Someone told us when we got her that the easiest way to bathe a big dog is to just take it right into the shower with you. And as strange as it may seem, it really is the easiest way. So about every 5 weeks or so, Matt, who is in charge of bathing the dog, takes her into the bathroom and about fifteen minutes later they both come out sparkling clean. (If you could only hear their conversations in there, and the singing, you would think much differently about my husband than you currently do.)

So after my shock wore off this morning, I realized it might be a blessing in disguise. After all, Berlin hasn’t been bathed in over 7 weeks, and is certainly overdue for a shower. But I had neither the dog shampoo nor her towels in the bathroom with me. So I told her to sit, and sit she did at the other end of the tub while I figured out a plan.

I might as well clean myself up, I thought. So I looked at her and she looked at me while I washed my hair and shaved my legs. All the while she was getting soaking wet, and all I had in that doorless bathroom was MY CLEAN TOWEL.

If I had even so much as thought of walking out of the bathroom to get her towel, she would have followed me dripping through the house. So I did what any decent person would do – I dried her off with one side of my towel, and I dried myself off with the other. And I daydreamed about a day in the near future when I really COULD have that new bathroom spa experience that I had been longing for. A shower in a clean bathroom, with a clean towel all to myself, AND A DOOR CLOSING OUT ALL OTHER CREATURES.

And then I saw it – my hair elastic on the floor. Berlin must have been between it and the cat; never a good place to be.