Now that the holidays are over, I really feel like I can turn my focus to preparing ourselves and our lives (HA! like that’s actually possible!) for the arrival of our baby. And holy cats, is there a lot to do!

My house is cluttered. I will admit this. I’m not a packrat, but Paul and I like our stuff. Well, this has gotta change. Currently we have a guestroom with two twin beds, a dresser and a bookshelf. We also have an office/storage room that serves as Paul’s workspace, pantry overflow and general storage. It is frequently a disaster area. And then there is our garage. We’ve been meaning to have a garage sale for *years* and just haven’t gotten around to it.

The time is nigh, my friends. The office will become the nursery, so everything stored in there has to go somewhere else. The guestroom will become the guestroom/office, with the focus on being Paul’s workspace. The current guestroom gets used for guests about 5% of the year. So why should it be configured as nothing *but* a guestroom 100% of the time? We’ll be replacing the two twin beds with a twin trundle bed, and adding a desk/workspace for Paul where one of the beds was. The guestroom will still accommodate two people, just in a somewhat cozier fashion.

The garage will be cleaned out. This is gonna be a family effort, since Paul’s parents and grandmother have been using 1/3 of our garage for their storage for a couple of years now. We had to give them an eviction notice… cuz we can’t spare the room anymore! So once their stuff is out (hopefully soon) we’ll begin sorting through the garage with a focus on getting rid of at least half of what’s in there. A garage sale would be best, because cash is good (and cribs aren’t cheap from what I’m reading….) but I don’t know if I want the hassle. Maybe a huge tax-deductible donation to Goodwill or Shadetree would just as good and easier/quicker on us.

Pantry storage will move from the office into the garage, along with just about everything else that was/is stored in the office right now. It’s a really daunting task, but it’s kinda exciting at the same time. I’m sure it will be cathartic to Paul and I to unburden ourselves of a lot of the stuff out there. (We’ve been wanting to do it for a long while, but when it’s 100+ even at midnight several months outta the year, and there’s no place to actually sort the stuff… it gets easy to put off.)

But maybe even before all of that starts: Carpet. We have got to replace the carpet in at least the front half of the house. The contractor cheaped out on everything possible when building our house 10 years ago, and the carpet is really, really showing it. (Also nearly 7 years of an indoor/outdoor dog traipsing around doesn’t help.) Even when freshly shampoo’d, I wouldn’t want to set the baby down on the carpet, even on a blanket.

So we’re looking at replacing the carpet. A good friend of ours (Sibyana) is an insurance adjuster with lots of experience, so she’s going to help us with measuring and whatnot to make sure we’re getting a good deal. Sibyana also swears that we can pull up the existing carpet ourselves and save some money there on installation. (I wonder just how much we’d save vs. the headache and mess of doing it ourselves.) So that’s exciting and terrifying. At first glance, this carpet thing doesn’t look cheap at all.

And once the carpet is in (which we gotta do sooner rather than later so it can air out for a few months, right?) we can talk about painting the nursery. No, I have no idea what color. We haven’t even gotten to the point of talking nursery design/decor. Neither of us sees the point in “what-iffing” ourselves to death before we know the sex. Once we find out what it is we’re having, I’ll go off the deep end, I’m sure. Right now, I’m leaning towards not having a central “character” or anything. No Winnie the Pooh or Noah’s Ark. But who knows, maybe that will change when we find out. (I’m hoping to find out at the next appointment, at which I’ll be almost 14 weeks along.)

And all that is just physical prep for the house! Then there’s classes we really should attend. But that’s another show.

This is a huge list. It’s stuff we’ve wanted to do for a long, LONG time. But now we have a really good reason to do it all, and a deadline. I’m a little worried (OK, a lot worried) that I’ll end up on bedrest or something horrible at 8 months and won’t be able to do anything else. So I feel like I need to set an artificial deadline of like 3-4 months to get all this done. Which means we’re gonna set a whole new definition of Spring Cleaning at the Gorman house this year!