Nine Months Pregnant, Crazy and a Renovation Update

I can't speak for all crazy pregnant women; ones who are smart enough to know not to mow the lawn and things like that. I can actually only discuss the crazy things I do, and actually I haven't been that crazy lately. I'm too tired.

I had really hoped that before the baby arrived, the upstairs of our house, which was originally an attic, built out in the 1960s or 1970s and gutted by us, would be completed and the kidlets sleeping up there. We're very, very close, but it isn't looking likely to happen now.

For a long time, one of the major things holding us back was a railing on the upper half of the stairs and around the landing. When my dad came a month or so ago, he and Justin built that and solved a major safety issue.



After my father left, Justin put the base shoe in one room and then set about working on the attic access doors. Because the roof on our house is a pyramid shape, there is attic space around the sides of each room. When we framed and drywalled the rooms, we weren't sure what we were going to do with these areas exactly, so we left them open 60" wide and ignored them for a while.



Then Justin framed out the space for a 30" doorway, drywalled the rest, built jambs, doors and hung them up, and put up trim.



My dad is back helping us out again and standing by should the wee bairn decide to arrive. While Justin was working on trimming out the doors, he's been putting up more base shoe. We had enough for 2 1/2 rooms, but we needed to buy more for the last bedroom and half of the bathroom. Yesterday, during all my errand running, we bought the necessary trim and last night started putting shellac on them.

You can get into all the enviro reasons to like shellac, but mainly I find it very handy for things like this because it dries fast and adds color to the wood at the same time as the finish. I'm all about being lazy. Today, I gave the trim a light sanding and put on a second coat. That's where the crazy pregnant part comes in, although I worked outside and finished up quickly, so I don't think it was that crazy.



The trim for everything but the last part of the bathroom (that trim will be painted) is now ready to put up. We're waiting on our final HVAC and electrical inspections. We've passed the final plumbing inspection and I think all we have to do for the final, final inspection is get all the doors hung. Of course, hanging doors isn't exactly what one would call simple when one is dealing with old doors and not pre-hung ones, but we are awfully close.

As much as I'd have liked to be finished before the baby arrived, at this point I would rather be done with pregnancy than have the upstairs finished first. Physical discomfort can change your mind like that.