Eating Zingerman's Challah at the Pitt

Baby Grand Piano Room? Check.

Even with a babe on board, we've been really busy continuing renovations at the Pitt. I really didn't think that we would do much this year, but apparently the babe lit a fire under our butts. We moved out of the bedrooms and into the living room/baby grand piano room. The plan was simple, replace drywall tape, replace ceiling, mud everything over again, install new floors, cut a whole in the wall, install built in bookcase - all before the end of 2012. Success? Not quite, but close, oh so close.

This is our before:

 

Here's our during:

Which color do you think we picked?

Super Dad!

 The afterish:

OK, so I'm really showcasing a great kid picture here, but look the floor is done! In fact, all the floors are done. It seemed that the whole room was done. But in my head I saw a beautiful built in book case on the end of our living room. There was a book case there when we first moved in, but it was so ghetto. So my dad is building us a floor to ceiling wall to wall shelf. Here it is in process:

As soon as it's done, we'll show case it.

How much wood, would a wood chuck chuck?

Anika arrived 3 weeks early. Early enough for us

• Not to have the car seat installed
• Not to have any nursery room furniture assembled
• Not to have the bedroom part of the house done
• Still have all the boxes of hardwood sitting around the house

See we thought we had plenty of time, and I was in quite a bit of denial about the coming baby, even in the last trimester, but time was up. I went into labor and Bob immediately went to install the car seat. We came home from the hospital and the next day Bob put together the changing table. Two days later dad arrived to start working on the hardwood.

We selected old mission maple from Chelsea Plank Flooring, a local company, and went with variable lengths (3", 4" and 5"). And here's what it looks like:

 

I love the floor, it's beautiful and we'll probably put the same thing in the living room.

And what our living room looked like for the first 8 weeks of Anika's life:

Talking

OK so this is not home improvement related, but we've been busy with this little beast the past few weeks. We've finally reached a point of laughing/talking not fussing/screaming. I call this a parenting success.

Changes..

Some things have changed at the Pitt - as the new header indicates, we've got a new family member, and it's not a dog. (Thank you Karie Anne Photography for the new header picture!)  Lots of changes have happened and a lot of home improvement projects are taking place, but finding the time to post has been hard, but hopefully in the next couple of weeks we'll get the updates up on the blog.

Until the home improvement updates let me introduce you to Anika Dezsi Marinier, born June 2, 6 lbs 15 oz.

Two Weeks Old

Crafting - My Star Trek Quiet Book

This Christmas I decided to get crafty with Bob's Christmas gift. I am a quasi crafty person, basically when I like something I decide to try it. So when I saw this I couldn't resist but to try to make it. I took some short cuts, got the help of friends, cursed a ton, but finished it. And here it is in all it's glory; My Star Trek Quiet Book

And this ladies and gentleman, was probably the last crafting project I'm going to do for a while. It took a lot out of me.

Yuppies

We've done a lot of adult things over the past couple of years, bought a house, embarked on crazy renovations, spent Saturday afternoons at the Home Depot and Lowe's, caned food, joined a farm share and the list goes on. We've adapted to our Ann Arbor lifestyle quite well; vegan diet, geothermal heating/cooling, not shaving often, again the farm share, composting, recycling, general crunchy granola earthy type stuff.

We've been talking about replacing the old Cavalac, Rosie, for a long time now and have spent hours on the web searching for the right car. If it were up to me, I'd get an old school station wagon with wood paneling. Surprisingly, there are not a lot of station wagon's, or as the young kids like to call them, sports wagons, or just wagons out there. Cars that call themselves station wagons, are actually SUV's. I've always wanted a Subaru Outback, but the new models are way too big (SUV) sluggish and I just wasn't really impressed. I had two major requirements for a new car, 1) all three dogs can fit in the trunk 2) all wheel drive 3) a manual transmission. I quickly gave up on the all wheel drive because all I got was large SUV's (even the midsize ones are too big for me). In the end we narrowed our choices to two, the Mazda 5 and the car we bought.  So we traded in this:

Communists Make Better Lovers

The front side

 

 

For this:

Ladies and gentleman, we bought a Prius V. A hybrid station wagon. As if all the Ann Arbor things I mentioned about us wasn't enough, we now have hybrid to add to the list.  We test drove it on a whim, not really expecting anything out of it. In fact, I doubted it would be big enough. But the Toyota people were really nice and let us test drive the car with three dogs. Yes, all three dogs jumped into the brand new Prius, and the good news? They fit!! All of them.  So why not?

It was hardest to give up the manual transmission, however, the car has been pretty awesome.

Our first real ride in the car was a road trip to Canada. We pulled onto the freeway, listening to NPR, with a soy cappuccino in the cup holder and I thought, "Yup. We are total Ann Arbor Yuppies now."