"New" prairie-style front door

After languishing in the corner of the living room for about 2 years, my mom paid for the 9-lite, prairie-style front door we had found at the ReStore to be installed.  Our carpenter has turned out to be a bit flaky, and it's been 4 months since he picked up the door to flip the hardware.  But today he came by and installed it!!

I'm so excited.  It just absolutely makes the living room.  The 60's-style door is gone, and the prairie-style door feels like it's been here forever.  I'm especially excited because the carpenter managed to keep the original hardware.  We still need to refinish the door so it matches the woodwork, but for now, I'm ecstatic just to have a door that suits the house.

But boy does it make our screen door look awful....

Oh. My.

I was hoping my next post would be about how I worked through my family vs. career issues in a sane and rational manner, providing hope and insight to women everywhere.  Yeah.  Not so much.

I went for an ultrasound on Monday, after becoming extremely worried I was going to miscarry.  I had been horribly nauseous, but it suddenly vanished.  That's about what happened when I did miscarry, so I was concerned.  My midwife was very understanding, and after talking to me about it on the phone, managed to squeeze me in for an ultrasound that afternoon.

I went there prepared for the worst.  But once there, the tech immediately found a little 7-week-old nugget with a perfect heartbeat.  Everything looked great, and I was so relieved.  "Oh, but wait," the tech said, "there's another one!"

Twins.  I'm pregnant with twins.

I think I've gone through every emotion imaginable in the past 5 days.  I'm totally shocked, excited, terrified, and disappointed, all at once.  I'm so very glad that the babies appear healthy, but worried about what two babies are going to mean for my future.  I know it sounds terribly selfish, but we just weren't expecting this at all, so all my plans have suddenly flown out the window.  I'm definitely a planner, so I feel very lost now.

I don't know if I'll go back to work.  I enjoy my job, but with two newborns and a toddler to care for, I'm not even sure if it will make financial sense.  We'll easily spend one of my paychecks just on a nanny.  And a part time job would be able to make up the difference and allow me to stay home and raise my family.

So... Everything is still way, WAY up in the air.  Maybe we'll figure out where we're headed sometime soon, but I think it's going to take a while.  Like I told Shayne when we first started talking about moving, "I think we're going to live in this house a long time."

Priorities...

I've found myself very confused lately. A lot of things are happening all at once, all of them are good, and they're all things I want, but I'm still not truly sure how I feel about everything as a whole. If you've read anything I've written, you know that I put a high priority on obtaining a greater level of self-sufficiency. We were on a mission to fix up our home, put it on the market by next spring, and then either build or buy our forever home on 5+ acres of land.

One of the ideas we have toyed with was buying fairly inexpensive land, building our own home from as much salvage as possible, and then quitting work to stay at home with our kid(s). We only have one now, but we wanted one more. I am interested in homeschooling and it's important to me to "free-range" our kids. I want them to grow up playing in the woods, not playgrounds. I want livestock and to garden. I want us to eat humanely raised, home-grown food, and for my kids to participate in that. Because of the high cost of land in our area, building our own home is the only way that we could own acreage and still afford for me to quit my job.

But I like my job. I work with a great group of people, and I find a lot of fulfillment through helping people. I don't kid myself that I'm super-cop or anything, but I DO make a difference in people's lives. Recently, our department began a hiring process for K-9 handlers. Having a working dog is something I've always been interested in. I'm a dog person, and I enjoy training and working with our family dog. I also like patrol work, so having a dog to assist with drug detection and tracking is pretty much everything I ever wanted out of my career. I went through the process, did very well, and am in line to get a K-9 partner next spring (which will be the next dog our department adds). I'd have gotten one sooner, except that...

I found out I'm pregnant.

This wasn't a complete surprise. We weren't doing anything to prevent pregnancy, but we didn't expect it so quickly. But obviously I'm very excited about the new addition to our family, and I can't wait for Ethan to have a little brother or sister.

And I guess what it all boils down to is that my priorities for family and career are conflicting in a way I never imagined they would. If I get a dog, it's an 8 to 10 year commitment to the department. Obviously they can't keep me from quitting if I decide to, but I take that commitment very seriously. I'd be making a deal, and I would make good on it. I'm also in a position to realize one of my dreams. They're willing to work around my pregnancy and maternity leave, which I think is awesome. This is a chance I may never have again.

But I feel like I'm giving up my dreams for our family. Obviously we can still move to a new home with more property, and we'd be able to afford more property and/or a nicer house (or just more savings and a greater financial cushion) if I was still contributing a paycheck. But the possibility of staying home, farming, and raising children would be taken off the table. I could do some of it, some of the time. I know I could homeschool in the mornings and work in the afternoon. We could still have animals, a garden, and learn to be more self-sufficient. But we'd need to hire a nanny. Our current sitters have a home business and cannot take care of a super-busy toddler and an infant. Having a dog means I wouldn't be able to switch shifts at work. I'd be on afternoons for the foreseeable future. Eating dinner at home every night would not be a reality. Shayne and I would almost certainly stay on separate shifts in order to maximize the amount of time our kids spend with us instead of a caregiver.

I'm not sure if I'm okay with this. But I'm not sure I want to give up my career goals. Right now, it doesn't seem like there's a compromise. I was planning on working another 4 years anyways, because we are vested in the retirement program after 8 years. It seems silly to give up a pension. But before the K-9 position opened up, I had also contemplated switching to first shift so that DH and I could have more family time. Ethan would spend more time with a caregiver, but DH and I would see each other more. We could have dinner together every night.

I don't know how to figure out what is best for our family. I don't know how to figure out what is best for me! I feel like I would forever regret not realizing my career dream, but I don't want to achieve my personal goals at the expense of my family. I was raised by a single mom, and I know it doesn't damage kids to have a caregiver instead of mom or dad 24 hours per day. But I also never imagined I'd want to give up my job to stay home and raise babies. There are so many ways to look at this equation that it makes my head spin.

I don't know if I'm looking for advice, BTDT stories, or what. But if you've read this entire "book", I'd appreciate hearing from you!

Salvage score: cast iron bath tub

I was driving around at work a few days ago and noticed that there was a company clearing trees around a few abandoned houses.  Correctly assuming that this meant the houses would be demolished, I stopped and asked the driver of an excavator (who was conveniently the company owner) if I could check around the house for any woodwork, windows, or the like that I could salvage.  He said it was no problem, and to just let him know what I might like.

The house was something of a mess, and almost all of the woodwork, windows, and flooring were water damaged.  The cabinets were falling apart, though they looked to have been cute once-upon-a-time.  But then I walked into the bathroom and saw a nice, deep, old tub, just like the one in my mom's house.

I went back and talked to the company owner again, and he agreed that we could have the tub.  I then mentioned that I had no way of getting it out myself; I was obviously working, and my husband was at home watching our baby.  Since the house was being demo-ed the next morning, I didn't see any way to remove it.  He (very generously!) said that his crew would take it out and set it off to the side for us.  Awesome!  He also mentioned that they were contracted to demolish a duplex in Mishawaka, and would we like to look at it before they took it down?  You bet we would!  He said there were old kitchen cabinets, woodwork, doors, and windows in it.  He took my phone number and said he'd call me when they were a little closer to the demolition day.

I'm going to stop back by the destruction site today and offer him some cash for his time and effort.  Cast iron doesn't have a high scrap value, so I'm confident it will be more than he would have gotten for the tub at a scrap yard.  I'm hoping that maybe we can establish a good working relationship, and maybe we'll call us before he works on any old house.

Maybe my Aunt Virginia is right and I should have been a Sheeny Man instead of a cop (though I seem to be doing okay at both at the moment!)...

I'm still hoping that if/when we build our "new" house, that we can do it with as much recycled building material as possible.  I don't want a new-looking home; I love the character and quality of old houses.  It also saddens me that when old homes are demolished, so much usable building material is just wasted and tossed into a landfill.  Maybe "sickens" is a better description.  Our society and culture place such a high value on all things new, that I think people forget that there is nothing wrong with things that are old.  Old things still work. Old things are much easily repaired by the layman.  Old things often don't require electricity to do the same job.  Many old things are crafted with much more attention to detail and with a higher standard of quality, and are often beautiful as well as useful.

I like old.  I like knowing that other people have used and found joy in the same things I use.  I like when items have a story to tell, or when I can tell a story about where I acquired them.  It's so much more interesting than just going to the store and picking something out.  I like knowing that I saved just one more thing from the landfill.  Recycling isn't just for cans and bottles!

Kitchen mini-reno sneak peek

New floor, new fridge, new dishwasher!

We're winding down on phase 1 of the mini-renovation in the kitchen.  The floor is no longer scary, and we have a working dishwasher and a fridge that actually fits in the space designed for it.  I'm happy with the way it looks, and it completely changes the character of the room, even though the cabinets and countertops are still the same.  Removing the cruddy wallpaper and paneling wainscot will help even more, but we won't do that until it's warmer outside and we can open the windows to ventilate.

We went with SwiftLock Sierra Slate laminate tiles from Lowes.  I had my doubts, since it got iffy reviews, but we bought 6 boxes and figured if it didn't work out for us, we'd just return it.  The semi-cruddy reviews were due to the planks being bowed.  Even after letting all the flooring sit for about 10 days, there was a noticeable curve to each plank.  But as we slid the planks together, we found if we tapped the long edge with a hammer to help engage the tongue and groove, we had no problems.  The seams are not even visible.  It's so much nicer than the el-cheapo temporary laminate we had in there before.  The planks don't slide around; they all fit snugly together.  It was more difficult to install, since we had to line up the "grout lines" in order to make it look like tile instead of a haphazard mess, but Shayne and I are both very happy with the results.

The only issue I have is that it's more modern than the rest of the house.  It's not so modern that it's jarring to walk into the room, but it's obviously newer than the 1920s.  I knew that was a hazard when we started this project, but creating a more period-appropriate kitchen by replacing the cabinets and unearthing and refinishing the wood floor just isn't in the budget now that we're going to move.  I wanted to do something that was appealing while being totally reversible by a future owner (if desired).  While it's not the kitchen this house deserves, we didn't ruin anything either.  And it does look nice, and I think it's the best we could do while working with the existing cabinets.  It's just not the kitchen I had dreamed of for this house.

In the next "phase", we're going to add baseboard to match the rest of the house, remove the wallpaper and paneling, paint the walls, and install toekicks.  It should be warm enough to open the windows during the day for a few hours within a week or two, so we'll be moving right along.  In the meantime, Shayne is going to install the molding in the upstairs bedrooms, and I'll get busy sanding and staining the few bits of woodwork that are still painted in the hallway.

Oh house, how I want you to be finished....