home improvement

Joe and I are both experiencing the nesting drive in very different ways as we settle into our new home and prepare for our new baby. None the less, although Joe may try to deny it, he too has been nesting. And as some of you may remember, nesting to Joe is a very dirty, no good word full of hidden and mysterious meaning.

For me, the need to make this new apartment a home has manifested itself in a number of ways. I have been much more diligent about cleaning now that I have such a lovely grime-and-dust-free slate to work with (we'll see how long that lasts... come back to me in a few months or so...), and also since my mother was kind enough to introduce me to the wonder of the 360 Swiffer. I have re-organized the closets since they were basically just convenient dumping grounds upon moving in and there was no floor or shelf space left in the nursery closet at all... I'm not sure, but I figure the baby might have some stuff that needs to go in there eventually. But the farthest my need to nest has led me so far is to Home Depot. I had seen some kind of home improvement show when I was in Augusta (that magical place where they have cable television) where they kept some existing counter space in a breakfast room and just stuck some tile on it to make it look fancy. This got me to thinking about the cheap little Ikea tables that we got to replace our chewed up coffee table. While I love having two smaller, moveable tables, they are not the sturdiest of things and were already getting scratched up by our laptops. In a flash of HGTV-inspired brilliance, I decided that I would tile said tables. And what is the most miraculous thing about this story is that I ACTUALLY DID IT. I went to Home Depot and batted my eyes at the tiling dude. He walked me around the flooring department tossing things at me and telling me what to do with them (Acryl-Pro, pre-mixed grout, scrape-y tools and smear-y tools, sponges, etc.) I laid out my little tiles squares on the tables, stuck them in place, grouted and cleaned them, and then stepped back and by golly if I had not pulled a friggin' Tim Allen or Martha Stewart or something. There might have a little extra white tile goop around the edges, but I'll be damned if those things wouldn't be selling for 50 bucks at Pier 1. (I'm a trifle pleased with myself...)

Now we come to the Joe part of the story (I know you've all been waiting, but I had to get my self-tiled-table story in here somewhere). While I was watching HGTV, Joe was hunting in his parents' house for his idea of the perfect addition to our home: a dartboard. Complete with fancy two-door wooden case with chalkboard score charts on the inside. Because I am a kind and loving wife, I agreed to to let Joe find a place for the dartboard in the living room. While some people might just pick a wall and hang the darn thing, Joe got on Google and found all of the appropriate measurements for a regulation dartboard: how high on the wall, how far from the throwing point, etc. Of course, being a man, he did not take into account what other items occupied the wall he chose and thank goodness I stopped him before he hung the thing right smack-dab up against a bookshelf where one of the fancy little doors couldn't even open all the way. Then, out came the measuring tape to figure out where the appropriate throwing spot would be in relation to the board. Fortunately, the place where our linoleum entry way meets the carpet is less than two inches off from regulation distance. Perfect and convenient, right? WRONG. Regulation is LAW, folks. And that means, silly wife, that we put TAPE on our new clean floor. For a DART GAME, we put TAPE on the FLOOR. I will let you deduce whether or not that happened.

So here we are, a few days later. The dartboard hangs in its place of honor and the tiled tables stand proudly in front of the couch. And while I am considering the layout of the nursery furniture, Joe is wondering if there is some kind of wall-mounted storage system for the hacky-sacks he has pulled out of their long hibernation.