making a house a home: overview

this is an overview for a series i intend to do about getting my house cleaned up, getting necessary repairs done, actually decorating/designing a bit instead of just having stuff be "good enough" to live with, and maybe even doing some real upgrading.

over the next week or two, i'm going to be working on sorting through some of my junk and hauling stuff either to the dump or to places like goodwill. i know i have a LOT of clothing and craft supplies that i need to get rid of, and i plan on getting rid of pretty much all of the furniture currently in my living room. it makes me a little sad, because i really really love one of my couches, but it smells and really needs to be reupholstered in order to be at all nice again. i don't have the knowledge to do that myself or the money to have someone do it for me. i looked into it once and it sounded like i could buy a new (clearance or sale) or a good used one for less money than i could have this one redone. plus it's huge and heavy and has already punched a hole through my living room floor (just a small one from a leg).

which brings me to the next part of this project. my house has several soft spots in the floor throughout the house. i have wood laminate flooring in two rooms - one bedroom and the bathroom. all of the other rooms (two bedroom, living room, kitchen, and the hallway) have a major soft spots. there are at least two actual holes. so, as the cleaning progresses, i'm going to be moving things out of my living room until it is completely empty. this is part of why i'm going to get rid of my furniture. i don't really have room to store very much of it, plus i know i have a loveseat and a couple swivel rockers in my (very full) pole barn so if i end up not having money for new furniture later, i can bring those in.

once the living room is empty, we're going to rip up the carpet (at least 2 layers - classy, huh?) and fix the subfloor. then we can move things out of the other rooms (kitchen and bedrooms) one or two rooms at a time to repair the subfloor and lay new floor coverings. i want to do wood laminate in the living room, and i figure we can put that down once the rest of the floors are done so we don't wreck it by moving a bunch of stuff in and back out. my house also has three doors - one that we use and two that we can't. one that we can't use has been calked shut because it was leaking; the other, the layers of the door and casing are actually splitting apart. it got so bad that we couldn't get the door to latch, let alone lock, so my husband nailed it shut. here's hoping we don't have a fire. ;)

the decorating part is pretty self explanatory. i really love the light, airy feel of cottage or country style decorating so that's what i'm hoping to do. i may have to convince my husband to set up his projector and his game systems and all that stuff in one of the bedrooms. it can be like a guest bedroom and man cave all in one. ;) the other bedroom i'd like to set up as a craft room and office.

the unnecessary upgrades i'd like to do are removing the entryway that's been built onto my house and replacing it with either a real room complete with insulation and heating or a big deck and add an overhang over the door and doing something with my kitchen cabinets. i'm not sure exactly what we would do with them (or what we'd replace them with) because i've never really looked into pricing for that sort of thing and i don't know how much money we could spend on something like that. i just know that the cabinets we have now are ugly on the outside and dingy on the inside.

so that's the plan in a nutshell. if you'd like to follow my progress on this, just watch for posts titled "making a house a home". part 1 will be "getting my house cleaned up", part 2 will be "getting necessary repairs done", part 3 will be "decorating and designing", and part 4 will be "real upgrades". there will probably be more than one post for each part, so think of an outline: part 1:a, part 1:b, etc. :) wish me luck!

sorry it's been so long...

(warning - this is a sorta TMI blog)

i've been really out of it and lacking motivation to work at my weight loss in the last couple months. most of the time, i'm still thinking about making healthy choices as far as food, but i haven't been counting my calories and i've definitely overdone it with junk food several times. i think the biggest thing holding me back right now is that i don't have any desire to go outside and do things. i try to convince myself, but i just don't get anywhere. i just feel so lazy! i really don't want to do ANYTHING most days and it bugs the heck out of me.

i think the problem might be that i've quit taking my antidepressant. i realize this maybe doesn't sound like an awesome plan, but hear me out: i was on the lowest dose prescribed, i forgot to take it half the time anyway (so i effectively was on half of the lowest prescribed dose), and the thing that actually made me decide to quit taking it - reports of it causing birth defects when taken by pregnant women. that may sound like a "well duh" but when i started taking it, i was under the impression that the only significant risk in pregnancy with this drug was a slightly increased risk of miscarriage. maybe it sounds bad, but i'd rather have a miscarriage than have a child that has a significant birth defect that will directly affect their quality of life or expected lifespan.

i'm not pregnant yet, but my husband and i have been married for eight years now and have used birth control off and on, but overall have probably had at least five years worth of unprotected sex under our belt without getting pregnant. i'm sure my weight is a big piece of why we haven't gotten pregnant since i have an irregular cycle and most info points to my weight keeping me from ovulating at regular intervals.

sometimes i blame my husband for us not having a child yet because if he doesn't feel like sex, he will refuse every advance i make (even the dressing up sexy and trying to be all seductive thing that EVERYONE suggests) and, if i push the issue once he's said no, he gets mad and flat out ignores me. even if i tell him i think i may be ovulating based on my fertility signs. but i have no proof that we would have gotten pregnant even if he was more cooperative because no doctor i've been to has been willing to do any testing to really see, definitively, whether or not i ovulate. they've suggested i take clomid, but i don't see the point in taking it when there's a good chance my husband won't feel like sex during the couple days leading up to ovulation. the blood tests i've had done always come back normal and the doctors i've seen say they think i likely ovulate most (if not every) cycle, just not every 4 to 5 weeks like most women seem to.

we've had the "are you maybe just not really ready to try for a baby?" discussions and i've gone back on the pill once and offered to use condoms and all those things. nothing has made a difference and he insists that he'd be ecstatic about having a baby ASAP. but i always feel like he isn't willing to hold up his end of the deal to make it happen. we've talked about him going in to have a semen analysis done, but he avoids the topic and, at the very least, won't make the appointment himself. i suppose if i made an appointment for him he'd probably go, but somehow it doesn't seem right for me to push him to do it. i dunno.

i guess i need to commit myself to getting healthy in case it happens and try to not worry about making it happen. but anyone who's ever spent any length of time trying to get pregnant knows that's WAY easier said than done.