Sage – Author at Plaster & Disaster

As I mentioned in our mid-year goals update last month, this year I’ve had some medical things going on that have taken a lot of my attention physically and emotionally, and it’s definitely slowed me down on the home improvement front. I wasn’t quite ready to share the details of all that yet here, but I figure it’s only getting harder to hide…. Case in point, here’s the behind the scenes of us painting our bedroom a few weeks ago:

The short version is: we’re having a baby. Yay! I’m now a little over 24 weeks along, due in early November, and we know the baby’s sex but we’re keeping it private until the birth. It’s been a pretty easy pregnancy, but during the first trimester especially I was exhausted all the time and had very little energy for anything besides going to work and occasionally doing strenuous things like moving all the furniture in my basement and then putting it back together again. The second trimester has been a lot easier, but hauling around an increasingly large bump is tiring especially given that I’m pretty small (I’m 5’3” and was ~115 – 120 pounds pre-pregnancy). Now that I’m moving into the third trimester in a few weeks, I don’t know what to expect!

I would say something gross like “this is our greatest DIY project yet,” but the longer backstory is that we had lots and lots of professional help – in the form of many AMAZING people at the Mass General Hospital Fertility Center, where we did IVF (in vitro fertilization). Thus in addition to the normal fatigue of pregnancy, conceiving this baby was a bit of an undertaking. We feel incredibly fortunate to have had success and I could never complain about how things have worked out for us. Still, the reality of the situation meant that even prior to the first trimester I was pretty tired and distracted for awhile, both because of the actual IVF process and the preceding period which involved a lot of trying and failing to start a family, specialists, tests, an infertility diagnosis, etc.

Celebrating our 10-year anniversary by waking up at 1:30am for Sam to plunge a giant needle into my backside in order to prepare for surgery 35 hours later. Making a baby is just as fun and easy as they warned us in high school health class!

At some point I may do a longer post about infertility and IVF in particular because it’s an interesting topic and personally I found it so helpful to hear about other people’s experiences when we were considering it and then going through it. But for those not familiar with it, the basic idea is that you stimulate egg production way more than usual via hormone injections, then have surgery to harvest all those eggs, then the eggs are fertilized in a lab, then an embryo (or more than one, depending on your age and history) is put back in, and then you see if it implants to start a pregnancy.

The exact combination and dosage of hormones is tailored to each person; in my case I was lucky to have pretty low dosages, but a single cycle was still 100 at-home injections (1-3 every day for 11 weeks in my thighs, stomach, and upper butt), about a dozen blood draws and ultrasounds, and several procedures. (An unsuccessful cycle would be fewer injections and shorter than that because if you’re successful, you continue daily progesterone injections for 6 weeks after getting a positive pregnancy test.) Because of all the medications, it is very expensive ($15-20K+ for a single cycle), but in Massachusetts health insurance companies are required to cover it if a doctor indicates it’s medically necessary in order to conceive. We didn’t pay anything more than co-pays for it, one of the many things we are so lucky for.

Anyway, that’s a bit more about why my home improvement projects have slowed down the last six months, and are likely to continue at a much-reduced pace as I get bigger and then eventually have another human life to care for. We’re excited, nervous, and grateful for the wonders of medical science!

Today I have a two random small projects for you, loosely connected in the category of “things you hang on your walls.”

First up, I bought some new curtains for the bedroom. As you likely know, we recently painted it white after three years of dark blue/gray.

I plan to keep the overall color palette pretty neutral, with black doors on the closet we’ll build across the wall that faces the foot of the bed. The quilt (which my mom made) will be the main source of color in the room, plus we still have the leaning mirror I made…here it is from when the walls were still dark:

With the colorful quilt and mirror and black closet wall, I want the rest of the room to be fairly light. Thus I didn’t really want to re-hang the gray curtains we’d had up before painting. I didn’t feel bad about making a switch — I may reuse the gray curtains elsewhere, and even if not they’ve had a good run for the last 7 years (they came from our apartment to our house with us) and I made them on the cheap out of shower curtains.

Anyway, I felt like simple white curtains would do the trick, so I looked at Target since they often have pretty affordable, basic options. Pretty quickly I came across these, which had good reviews and I liked the additional detailing around the edge, which give them a little something special while still being very neutral.

Rather than laboring over the decision like I often do, I just went for it and ordered the 84″ size (which is floor-length for us given our low ceilings). They arrived and I was very pleased with the color, weight, and texture; the only thing I didn’t like was that I ordered what I thought was two pairs, only to have just two panels arrive and realize that these are sold as single panels. It’s hard to fault Target too much for that because they do explicitly say that each order is one panel (you can even see it in the screenshot above in the “highlights” section), but in my defense why would you sell a single curtain panel? Don’t people usually want pairs? In any case, I ordered a second batch of two for in-store pickup, and grabbed them the next day. (While being annoyed that I was tricked into falling for curtains that were twice as expensive as I’d expected.)

They were incredibly easy to hang, since they have tabs along the top that make a nice, pleated look and somehow the existing height of my curtain rods (which I mounted almost four years ago) was perfect for these panels to just touch the floor despite the fact that the curtains they replaced were a totally different length.

Here they are in action:

And a close-up so you can see the detailing on the edge:

You can also see I have a “new” nightstand for my side of the bed. Since the bed is in front of the radiator and window on my side, I knew I’d want something lower profile and less chunky.

Fortunately I had a pair of these simple wood and glass nightstands that I got for our guest room when we first moved into the house (from IKEA). I just grabbed one of them and left a small table in its place (something the seller had left when she moved out). I don’t care that the guest room nightstands don’t match (in a room that is bright green and pink, mismatched nightstands are the least of my decor worries), and I like the low and minimal look in our bedroom.

The throw pillows I just grabbed off the couch for this photo to make my bedroom look a little fancier to you…in real life we do not use throw pillows, I get why people like how they look but functionally they are not only useless but a nuisance because you have to take them on and off the bed every night. We don’t have space for useless decor in our bedroom that is only for looking good in photos.

Anyway, I really like our new curtains. I’m going to wait on hanging anything on the wall behind the bed until we build the closet (toward the end of this summer) because that will give us a much better feel for the overall aesthetic of the space, so for now this is pretty much what the room will look like. It’s not the most pinterest-worthy, but in person it feels light, simple, and happy. Not a bad vibe for a bedroom.

Also in the category of things you hang up, we put up some outdoor lights above our deck. We don’t have any outdoor outlets or lights on this side of the house, so I’ve long been at a loss of how to light it at night. Also there isn’t a natural place to hang lights above the whole deck, and something like a pergola would never work because our house is essentially 1.5 stories in the back (the basement is half above-ground) so a pergola would either cut off our first floor windows at the middle or be ridiculously tall.

Recently though we were at a friends’ house and they had hung bistro lights in a triangle shape and cleverly run the power through the window from their bedroom, and I got to thinking that we could do the same. To give it a shot, I ordered a 100′ string of well-reviewed globe lights from Amazon (affiliate link – read our policies). The one thing to know about these lights is that they come with the bulbs packaged separately, so it takes a good 30 minutes to screw all the bulbs in — just don’t wait until you’re 100% ready to hang these and your partner is standing outside with the ladder to open the box and realize there’s a bunch of prep to do.

Normally this is the sort of thing I’d do myself, but I decided to be reasonable and enlist Sam’s help — it’s a lot easier to have one person up on the ladder directing the other person about what looks best from the ground. Of course I like directing, so Sam got ladder duty.

We just used simple cup hooks in the siding, which frankly may or may not hold long term. The lights just use anchor points on the two sides of the house that we have to form a triangle, and they run into the house for power via our bedroom window. We have double hung windows, so we were able to crack the top just a tiny bit and run the end of the lights in — that means we don’t have to have our windows really “open” all the time, and the top of the window is high enough that you’d need a ladder to reach it so it doesn’t feel like a big security risk.

Here they are during the day:

And at night:

Note: the windows on the right of the photo that are open are to our sunroom, that’s not the bedroom window needing to be cracked like that to run the power. You can’t even tell the bedroom window is open.

I’m pretty pleased, and just regret it took us this long to figure out how to do this effectively.

Anyway, those are two unrelated projects we did inside and outside that required hanging things up. I hope you thoroughly enjoyed this groundbreaking update.