Productivity in any form

Yeah, it's been a while since my last post.

The reason, or so my husband believes, is that the "nesting urge" has hit me in full, terrifying force, even though I'm only at the beginning of my second trimester. But there is so much to do before this baby gets here that I absolutely had to start now.

The thing that's driving all this is that we eventually need our younger daughter to move out of the nursery to make room for the baby. We have a four-bedroom house, which makes it sounds like this should be a fairly easy task...until you realise that the bedroom-which-isn't-currently-being-used-as-a-bedroom (i.e. DD2's soon-to-be bedroom) was functioning (or not) as our "workroom": crafts, computer stuff, general crap repository...you know, stuff like that. So it all has to move out. But where? The basement, of course! Which...has...even more crap...in it.

Yeah.

So basically, getting all this done is like solving one of these puzzles:

And the task list looked like this:

1. Clean out the basement.
2. THEN move the workroom to the basement.
3. THEN move DD2 into the workroom.
4. THEN get the nursery ready for the baby.

I took March Break off so that DD1 would have adult supervision during the day, but what DH and I really wanted to do that week was break the back of this mammoth project.

I discovered fairly quickly that we had to expand the project beyond the initial specs, because the available space in the basement for workroom stuff was smaller than the actual workroom. So some of the workroom contents had to go somewhere else. This meant that we needed to do organization projects in the rest of the house, as well. We decided to turn the living room into one big toy storage/playroom, and also make a household organization centre in the kitchen.

Yowza. And all this when I'm pregnant, so more prone to tiredness and less able to lift heavy objects.

Amazingly though, by the time the week off ended, I had an almost complete workroom basement:

There was a big toy storage area in the living room:

(The kids are actually using it, too! It's amazing how much more willing they are to clean up when they can do so easily. And they love being able to access their toys easily, too. They're getting so much more out of playtimes now.)

There was a partially completed household organization centre in the kitchen:

And the workroom was slowly, but surely, emptying out:

(Lots more work still to be done, obviously, but most of the crap lying around actually has SOMEWHERE TO GO now, which is huge. Plus, we got rid of an unbelievable amount of stuff.)

What doubly amazed me was that I still had energy to spare after all that! DH (bless him, he did wonders all week) was collapsed on the sofa and I was still humming with the need to go upstairs and sort through a few more boxes. I think he has a point with his nesting urge theory.

Then this weekend, we grabbed another shelf for the living room, which gives us even more storage, especially for super-important stuff like (among other things) the dollhouse:

I feel sooo much less stressed about getting this all done in time, now.

(Incidentally, we have been getting massive deals on all this new storage stuff through Kijiji and Craigslist. Perfectly good furniture for hundreds of dollars less. Gotta love it.)

Oh, did I also mention that DD1 is going to a Harry Potter party this weekend? So in the middle of this, there was a robe to sew, a tie to make, and a stuffed Errol owl to knit? (Owl = the birthday boy's present)

I finished it all. I had to stay up really late last night to do it, but it's ALL DONE. I feel very triumphant. Here's the robe earlier this week, before I finished the final hemming:

(You'll notice DD1 is wearing the Gryffindor vest I made a while back, also for this party. The scarf was crocheted by my mom, who also got into the spirit of things as she is a big Harry Potter fan herself.)

And here are the tie and the owl:

I also went shopping with DD1 yesterday to get a white button-down shirt for her Harry Potter costume. And last night after her bath/hairwash, I put little tiny braids all over her hair so it would dry all kinky like Hermione's. We'll be taking the braids out in a few hours to finish the whole costume look and I will absolutely be taking pictures and posting them here soon.

Hear me roar.