I have been titling posts things like 'life goes on' and 'right now', but speaking only of my father and my child. It's more than that, however, I'm not living in a vacuum of life and death. Between visits, we resume 'real' everyday life, and aside from when my tailbone aches from sitting too long, I can forget I'm pregnant for hours at a time.
Work continues apace on the house. The House Formerly Known as the Lavender Loveshack (now a lovely shade of greige, because we're boring) is still having the front door and balcony trim painted. We've destroyed the inside of the master bedroom - all the lining is gone, P is insulating in there and the electrician arrives Thursday to install new ceiling lights, new sockets and move some switches around. We're going to install a new door and a built-in wardrobe in the room, have it freshly lined and then I'm selecting yet another shade of grey paint. We're still debating retrofitting the windows with double glazing, waiting on a quote.
Once the master is completed, the guest bedroom is going to get the once over. This will become the nursery, I suppose, though not for a while. The baby will live with us for a bit, as advised by Plunket to mitigate the SIDS risk. We'll need to keep a spare bed in the nursery anyway, for P's Mum to visit from Germany and my parents to visit once the baby arrives. The nursery work will be pretty similar - insulation, new lights, new wardrobe, new linings, paint etc. I'm determined that we will have a warm home for the baby to live in when he or she arrives in mid-winter.
We nearly choked on our cookies receiving a quote for some new kitchen cabinetry 'necessary' to house a dishwasher, we were assured. In a kitchen that will be demolished at some point in the next 2-4 years, they thought we'd be happy to spend $6k, just for the cabinets. No new benchtop, no new fit out, just some new cabinets capable of housing a dishwasher. I'm pretty sure with a saw we can achieve largely the same result in the existing cabinets. Time for some more quotes, methinks. I'd like a dishwasher to make life a little more easy in a tiny kitchen once the baby arrives, but not at that kind of price before we've even bought the damn dishwasher.
I'm not much help with renovation, this time round. I picked up the demolished bits of lining (discovering newspapers from 1992 pasted across the walls to form a lovely backing for a bit of wall paper, over which plasterboard had been slapped in 1995) and carted them to the skip out the front. That lasted until the new neighbours started having a Saturday morning sesh on their deck. I don't really care if people want to smoke weed; I just really don't want my child in-utero to get second hand stoned. I call and arrange quotes etc. I cart drinks to P and hold the measuring tape, do the rest of the household chores like laundry. His wonderful father is going to lend a hand, and rope in my 16 year old step-brother in law as labourer.
Ugh neighbors who smoke anything drive me bonkers, someone in our building will smoke cigarettes inside their apartment occasionally which due ot the ventilation means we smell it in our bathroom.
ReplyDelete