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It's hard to believe that it's only been 2 weeks since we moved into our new home. Feels like forever and a day ago, with all the non-stop work that we've been doing. Well, it was mostly Matt doing the majority of house-related work, while I looked after Whitney.
Moving day was a bit of a disaster. We were not prepared for it, as we had never moved with a baby before. Needless to say, it's a day we'd all like to forget about. And I don't think we will be moving anytime soon, unless we came into some big money and were able to hire all the help we needed.
We are still surrounded by boxes on the main floor, but a lot less than there were the first week or so. Matt's parents came up on Thanksgiving weekend and helped us out here and at our old place, as we had to finish moving stuff and do some major cleaning to stage it for selling. Even though we still managed to make time for a delicious Thanksgiving dinner, I felt like it sort of came and went without a proper acknowledgment for all that I'm thankful for.
So a big, big thank you to my dear parents-in-law and to my dear, sweet, hard-working love!
We would not be where we are today, if not for all of your time and effort. Just take a look at some of the pictures of our sparkling clean and staged loft.
Pictures of the new home are coming. My camera was m.i.a. until a few days ago. And I've been busy running after an ever-curious and mobile 9 month old, so it's not easy to get much unpacking done, much less anything else.
Toodles for now.
That's a bit of what I've been up to recently. Since we live in a loft, the open concept requires a bit more planning for a baby and we've been racking our brains on how to divide up the space. Right now we only have these curtains as a room divider.
I am leaning towards enclosing our bedroom to keep the cats out - where baby will sleep for the first year, most likely - but whatever we put up has to still let light in, be relatively lightweight but sturdy, be easy to install and affordable! Yeah, wishful thinking. Matt wants to build shoji screen sliding doors himself - I took out the book below from the library for him - but without a proper workshop and tools, I'm wondering how easy this diy project will be. Those of course would be ideal (except who knows how they would hold up with the cats loving to scratch wood?). We've got less than 4 months to come up with a solution.
{Oh yeah, we found out it's going to be a girl!
I've kind of just been savouring the news and telling a handful of people so far. We'll see if the results hold up, since I've already had my share of surprises with the pregnancy so far}
We've been making room for our new addition in there over the past several months and finally acquired a lovely new dresser for all of us on our last trip to Ikea.
Most of my clothes have made their way onto the other side of our bedroom and I am badly wanting to finish my walk-in closet plan for them, since it is kind of a sight for sore eyes at the moment.
The Stolmen system from Ikea is what I have in mind for our personal clothing and also for my shop stock, as it works well in places with high ceilings. So I'm on craigslist daily searching for that and numerous other Ikea pieces at reasonable prices.
And speaking of making room for baby, unintentionally, this past week we had to throw out almost everything we had stored in our building's basement storage locker, due to our own and someone else's ignorance. Apparently every time it rains - and this summer has been a wet one for sure - the basement in our building tends to flood. We only found this out recently. Well, combine that with someone not speaking up about a broken pipe in her storage locker and our choice to store stuff in cardboard boxes, and you get damaged goods. Plus, since we didn't try to salvage things right away, mold started accumulating and for our safety and our baby's safety, we - well, Matt mostly because I shouldn't be moving heavy things right now - had to toss out everything that we thought had been contaminated and wasn't utterly important.
That included all of his childhood mementos, albums, artwork and his most prized toy, a stuffed rabbit - his mom had gathered it all to give to him when she and his dad moved out east several years back. For me, I had to let go of a box full of old journals and sketchbooks, which had me a bit ill at ease. I don't want to imagine someone else reading those or going through my personal things. But oh well, if that stuff had meant such a great deal to us, we probably wouldn't have put them down in storage. That's what I've tried to tell myself.
As well as rearranging stuff in our home, I tried out the new rearrange shop feature on etsy the other day and colour coded all my items. I don't know why, but I tend to do that with things. My clothes are like that and when I had my own section for clothing in stores, I would do that. Our bookshelves are like that too.
Right now, red is on the first page. I will change that up probably every so often. At least you can still change the view to select "most recently listed".
Other than that, I've been pretty busy screen printing for others and getting together my own Fall stock to send out to various shops. This is one of the images I printed, which is also one of my favourite new ones available through Oddbird Designs.
I'm also working on a new design featuring an owl - yes, not just a puttytat! - and will hopefully have it ready to unveil and print in a week or so. And I've got a new custom portrait keeping me busy too, which I'll post about another day. So all in all, pretty busy and happy for it.
This month's giveaway will be another good one, with 3 different winners chosen, so be sure to check back on the 15th!
I am loving these:
and these:
which I got from this lovely shop.And I'm loving this:
and this:
I know, I know.
I'm such a bad kitty mom, putting things on my kitties when they obviously don't appreciate it. But this is just payback for all those times that I've been woken up in the middle of the night or way too early in the morning by Dex meowing his head off, which then gets Suki rattled and they proceed to chase each other up and down the stairs...
You see? It's payback :)
Plus, I just thought they would look so much cuter modeled on the cats!
They are really for me, of course. I spoil the cats enough as it is, so from time to time I'll treat myself.
image from modern cat
And speaking of spoiling the cats, a recent customer mentioned this awesome site through which she found me. I'm flattered to be linked to such a great site devoted to "cat owners with a modern style."
Check out this image from a former blog post:
Now Matt is wanting to build something like that for the cats in our place. I told him, maybe we should think about treating ourselves to some new furniture/decorating before we go splurging on the cats.
I wasn't kidding when I said in one of my previous posts that I've been obsessed with decorating ideas lately. While Matt has been devoting much of his spare time this past week to building a new camera rig, I've been brainstorming on how to make the most of our living space.
So I was thrilled to come across this book at a new bookstore in our hood yesterday. Lots of gorgeous photos to give me ideas of how to decorate and reconfigure our loft space. Open concept living can be tough when you have (a lot of) stuff that starts to
s p r e a d
all
over
the place!
Must be Spring fever. That, and I tend to like to rearrange furniture every 3-6 months or so. I always have.
I'll be back in a few days with photos of my work space and more.
