Little Jack's CornerThe Life & Times of Jack-Evan and Family

I have been throroughly entrenched in the “nesting” stage for the past few days.

Or, as my Grandma would have called it – “Getting Smart”.

The nursery and closet are finally done, with all of his clothes arranged (in neatly catagorized-by-age rows nonetheless).  His blankies, diapers, toys and bathtub stuff is neatly organized.  AND his hospital bag is packed and in my car (along with the now-installed carseat). 

Go me.

Ever since I saw Father of the Bride, Part 2 years ago I knew I wanted a yellow nursery.  And yellow it is!  Painting was the first thing that was completed.  I always tease that Kevin had it painted within 20 minutes of learning I was pregnant (and that’s only a slight exaggeration!).  Our trim colors are seafoam green & light blue, with older-style Winnie the Pooh as the dominant character portrayed. 

The organization and cleaning of the nursery took a lot longer than the painting did, however.  It’s amazing at how complex setting up a functional nursery & closet can be!  As much work as we’ve done to change this room, there’s still room for improvement.

But I do so love our nursery.  Being the sentimental sap that I am, you can catch me sometimes just sitting in the rocking chair (a lovely old one that belonged to my Granny), getting misty eyed thinking about the little boy that will be occupying this room for years to come.

(Although I doubt the Winnie the Pooh will stay that long).

On occassion I’ve even found my husband stealing some time in there himself.  Yesterday I caught him batting playfully at the little bears hanging from the mobile.  Sweet man that he is.

As I mentioned yesterday, my hubby and I were headed to the Floor It Now to pick out a new floor for our home.  We’ve been wanting one (and badly needing one) for nearly 2 years, but since we do not use credit we needed to wait until we saved enough money up to get one.  And finallly the time came!

We weren’t sure at first whether we wanted new carpet, hardwood, or laminate.  We have 2 indoor dogs, a ferret, a parrot, and a baby on the way in 2 months so we debated the pros & cons of each.  Finally we came to the conclusion that we simply did not want to deal with the hassel of carpet care over the next 5 years or so – especially considering how hard we typically are on carpets anyway.  So that left us with hardwood or laminate.  Our #1 top priority right now is “easy to care for” and “doesn’t show too much wear and tear”.   With large dogs with paws and a wife (that’s me, yay) that hates floor upkeep and does it drudgingly, we thought a true hardwood may not be our best bet right now.  We could just imagine all of the scratches it would endure in the upcoming year.  Plus, with the lower price of laminate we could do a bit more than we originally planned on.

So with that settled, we headed off to Floor It Now with the intention of getting laminate “hardwood-looking” flooring.  The one thing we agreed on the most is that neither one of us wanted a very light, light colored floor (famous last words).

Upon arrival, we liked the store set up immediately.  It had all of these different flooring down throughout the warehouse that we could walk upon while looking through the laid out samples.  It was pretty neat and gave us a feeling of “realism” and how the floor would feel at home.  The very first flooring that we both said “oh, I like that one!” ended up being the one we finally picked - even though we spent 40 minutes looking after that.  What’s that saying about you should always go with your first gut instinct?  It would have saved us time.   

After we had our choice picked out, the sales rep began working with us and the dimensions we brought.  The first price he quoted was a wee bit out of our budget so we scaled back a bit (we originally wanted to do every room except for the 3 bedrooms).  We also scaled back from the thick padding to the basic padding, which saved a pretty good bit per square foot.  I hadn’t even realized laminate flooring needed padding so I hadn’t figured that in our budget when we first started out.  Another thing I had not figured in was the small wood molding that needs to be placed at the bottom of the baseboards to allow for floor movement and stretching.  Kevin didn’t even think to mention it to me until we were halfway into the purchasing process…haha.  So that was another hit to our budget.   Luckily professional installation wasn’t too bad.  (Yeh, I know, we could have saved by doing it ourselves – but we are not the do-it-yourself type.) 

After all the details were hammered out, we set up an appointment with the guy to come out tonight to finalize our dimensions, and we’ll call him when we’re ready.  To save money (about $200) we decided to do one thing ourselves – and move out all the furniture and have the flooring ready for when they came.  It’ll take us about 2 weeks to get everything cleared away, and then they’ll be out and have our new floor installed in one day!   We’re so excited, although I’m a bit more anxious than my hubby.  I’m always anxious about huge purchases like this.  Fears about whether we made the right decision, chose the right company, chose the right floor, and made all the right moves creep up in me.   I guess it’s the old perfectionist in me.  I know in my head that everything will most likely be fine, but my emotions try to take over and make me worry.  My hubby just thinks I’m silly (although he said a beautiful prayer to the Lord about blessing our decisions yesterday after he realized how worried I was).

And guess what.   After all the decisions were made we laughed over the fact that the floor we ended up with (the one we both LOVED due to it’s styling and details) is a very light colored knotty pine floor.   It was pretty funny for both of us because we had swore we didn’t like light colored flooring and would “never” get that color.   I guess that’s what they mean when they say “never say never”.