Extreme Home Makeover- Nesting Edition

So after the Fourth of July, we began a small project to paint the baby's room.  I had already decided that I would pick out a paint color for our bedroom too since we had never painted it in nine years.  We called Hector, the guy that remodeled my parent's home a few summers ago.  He painted the baby's room on Monday and was coming back Tuesday to do our room.  We went ahead and had Cole's room done too.  What's another $150.  Stephen knows that I always wanted to take down the wallpaper in the two upstairs bathrooms, so he told me that Hector could do it if it would cost less than $1,000.  Hector came in a $950 (with new baseboards) so we moved forward with that too.  Meanwhile, Cole and I moved in with my parents for the time being so we could stay out of the mess and the fumes.  I went ahead and bought new fixtures and mirrors.  No since in putting up the long flat mirror of the 1990's.   We also decided to put up two fixtures in the master bath, so an electrician had to be called.  One week later...and it was all finished. 

 Onto project number two...In addition to painting the baby's room, we had already decided to replace all the flooring upstairs.  Ideally, we wanted to put hardwood on the stairs and game room and new carpet in the bedrooms.  This process took much longer than a week.  Once we picked out the hardwood, our contractor came back and said it had been replace with a new/similar product.  He needed my approval to move forward, so he brought the new sample by school so I could check it out.  At this point, I was already back to work.  My goal was to have all of this finished by the time the other teachers started back to work..August 20.  The hardwood went down and few days later and we ran into a problem with the stain color for the trim.  Not sure who picked it out, but it was all wrong...way too yellow.  After they came back and fixed that they were onto the carpet...another bump in this long road.  The carpet wasn't ready when they went to pick it up.  Somehow it wasn't there and it needed to be made. That's right...made not ordered.  About a week later they got started on the carpet.  It only took a day to install and when all was said and done it looked great. 

Now we needed time to put everything back, clean, put up wall hangings, etc.  I had also purchased new bedding for the master, new mats and shower curtain for the boy's bathroom and the baby's room was yet to be put together.  After teachers had been back a week, my mom, aunt and I were able to spend a long weekend getting it all together.  We still needed a few finishing touches in the baby's room...like the letters for his name (he doesn't have a name yet).

I didn't think to get before photos so just imagine really old beige carpet and plain eggshell walls.  Both bathrooms had hideous wallpaper and long flat mirrors with Hollywood bulb lighting.  Yuck.

"Crackers" Room

Howdy!  We finally finished the baby's room...minus the name.  Here are a few pics.

And after he was named we added...

Maternity Pictures

I decided that since I didn't have maternity pictures taken for Cole that I wanted to have some maternity/family pictures done for "Crackers."  A friend at church has a photography company so we decided to give her a try.  We went to a park in Friendswood.  Nothing special really, but the pictures turned out great.  She does natural light photography, so we went at 6:30.  It was pretty hot, but the sun was starting to come down and we were in a pretty shady spot.  The first place in the park we went was infested with mosquitos.  We didn't get any good shots there. We brought along my mother-in-law to help wrangle Cole.  That was a big help for shots that didn't include him. Here are a few of my favorites.