I’ve already blogged here and here about the room makeover that my sister, other family members, dear friends, and the incredibly kind folks from a wonderful organization called Special Spaces, have been working on for G and C.

Well, today was phase 2 of The Big Reveal, and it TOTALLY KNOCKED MY SOCKS OFF!!!!

Check it out:

First, here is the room before these crazy-nice folks got hold of it. As you can see, it was awful – just an oversized junk closet with dirty white walls, ugly BLACK trim and terrible lighting. We had no furniture or curtains, etc. It was seriously fugly. Here is some photographic evidence of just how nasty it was.

And here is a little video tour of the pre-renovation room that I made last fall for my friend Heather because she had offered to give me some design inspiration on what to do with the space. (She did give me some great ideas for what we might do in the room, but of course, at that time I had no idea that I would soon be unexpectadly pregnant with G, or that our family’s whole world was going to shift on its axis, meaning that the last thing we had time or money to do would be to renovate a bedroom.)

Now, here are some pics from today’s BIG REVEAL. The room is now mostly complete, minus the rug – which has been ordered but hasn’t come yet – and a few other finishing touches like the glider and the window seat, which is being built. But everything is pretty much done. The previously dirty white walls full of holes and badly patched drywall are now a wonderful robin’s egg blue, while the old black trim is now a sweet, pink-hued white. The 1950s canopy bed was a hand me down from my mother, who recently moved and gave my sibs and me quite a bit of her furniture. The dresser and changing table were second hand and each was its own kind of awful-looking before J and E’s stepmother, M got hold of them and painted them. Now they look like something out of a Pottery Barn catalog. M also found the sweet bedside table for the room at a garage sale. Last, but certainly not least, all of the custom fabric work in the room – drapes, comforter, pillows and shams, bedskirt, new canopy for the bed, etc – was made up for the room by the sweet folks at Special Spaces, using fabrics and design picked out by my sister and our friend B (who happens to be a wonderful pro photographer – check out these pix she did of my sister’s children.)

Isn’t the room AWESOME???!!!! I was so excited when I saw it. And C loves her new room so much that she spends every free minute in there, including sleeping in there on her own.

Here is a shot of the room with the drapes closed. They are insulated, which will really help to keep the room’s temperature stable, since those giant picture windows have been huge energy sucks.

Freshly painted dresser with gorgeous, hand-painted mural hanging above it.

NC checks out the new canopy bed. She gave it her unqualified stamp of toddler approval.



Atwork for the girls created by their 11 year old cousin E. The frames were also garage sale finds from M.

Another view of the room.

The glass door with the transom above it will be covered by a custom Roman shade, which will match the rest of the fabric. The shade isn’t quite finished yet though.

If you had told me last Friday that by THIS Friday I’d be home with a new baby, I would have scoffed. Sure, there were definite signs that pointed to the baby coming early, but somehow I just couldn’t wrap my head around the possibility. I was focused on the 13th as a delivery date – which still would have been 2.5 weeks early. But of course, my body had other plans. And here we are!

Bringing G home was as momentous and joyous as it always is when you carry that new family member across the threshhold for the first time. The sun was shining and the sky was blue as Jon slowly drove us the five minutes home from the hospital, with me riding in the back with her to make sure she didn’t flop completely over in the car seat. As you can see, at only 5 lbs, G hasn’t quite grown into her carseat. (The eagle-eyed among you will also notice that in my exhausted state, I fastened the leg straps completely wrong, but thankfully, Jon caught my mistake.)

When we arrived home, my mother and MG (my three older kids’ wonderful stepmother) were there to greet us. They had cleaned our house from top to bottom, and MG had filled the rooms with fresh daisies and hydrangeas. Big hugs were exchanged all around, and we went inside, where I quickly became overwhelmed by emotion: gratitude for G and her safe arrival, sadness over the family member who is now missing from our home, and a sense of profound relief that after nearly two months of being inside of hospitals (or anticipating being inside a hospital again), I was home.

My new mantra: NO MORE HOSPITALS.

The first thing I did when I got inside the house was beg to be allowed to look at the newly redone bedroom that my sister, MG our dear friend and neighbor JR and numerous other little helper elves have been secretly working on for weeks. The bedroom was a first floor junk room (understatement) that attaches to our bedroom through the only full bathroom in the house.  Ever since we bought the house in 2006, we have intended to renovate this rundown, junk-filled room into a first floor bedroom for C. Once we found out we were expecting G, we REALLY wanted to get the room finished in time for the baby’s arrival – thinking that C could then transition to a big girl bed in a real bedroom before the baby moved into our bed. Also, at this point, C has a lot of toys and books, etc and without a room for them, they have just been scattered all over the house. However, time and finances prevented us from doing a single thing to make the room liveable during my entire pregnancy.

Then, while Henry was hospitalized, and it looked like we would be bringing home a child with major physical disabilities, I began thinking about how I would instead get that room cleaned out, painted and made handicapped accessible before Henry was released from rehab. As the only first floor bedroom other than ours, that was the logical space to prepare a room for Henry. Plus, since it’s attached to our bedroom, I wouldn’t have been far from him at night, which would have been reassuring for me.

My sister and I began talking about what would need to be done to this room in order to make it wheelchair friendly, etc. before Henry came home, but then Henry got worse…and then he died. After May 31st, even thinking about doing anything to the room just made me sad and seemed overwhelming. I gave up on the idea of doing anything to it until some far future date; I certainly saw no way to find the time or resources to do a single thing to it before the baby arrived.

But it turns out that Betsy was secretly getting folks organized to renovate the room for us before G arrived. She quietlychose paint colors, fabrics for the curtains and for the canopy on the vintage canopy bed that my mother had given us when she moved from her house, etc, etc, etc. She quietly asked family members and friends to give her Target and Lowe’s gift cards as baby gifts so to pay for all the work the room needed. And then, while I was in the hospital for four days after my c-section, our dear friend and neighbor JR, along with my older kids’ stepmom, MG, worked their TAILS OFF cleaning the junk from the room, scraping and prepping, painting, repairing a broken window and so on. MG hit garage sales to find an end table to match the bed that we had, and she painted the old, ugly dresser and changing table that we had used for C. Betsy continued getting things measured for fabrics and choosing accessories.

By this time, I knew that something was happening with the room, but I had NO IDEA of the extent of the work that Betsy, JR, MG and various other friends were putting into it while I was hospitalized with the baby. Trust me, this room was a terrible wreck before I left the house on Sunday to give birth, and the idea that it could be transformed so completely in less than one week was inconceivable to me.

But when Jon and I got home from the hospital with the baby yesterday afternoon, I was dying to see what they had done. Suffice it to say that I was TOTALLY unprepared for how radically changed this room was. When they opened the door and showed me, my jaw hit the floor. This formerly junk-filled, dirty, rundown room with peeling paint and holes in the walls had been made over into THE most beautiful, peaceful little girls’ room that I’ve ever seen. The walls are a gorgeous robin’s egg blue. The trim is a beautiful, high gloss white. The windows were repaired and the closet was cleaned, freshly painted and organized with beautiful new wicker toy baskets. The new canopy bed was set up and the other, previously banged up and ugly furniture had been made over into shabby chic adorable with MG’s mad decorative paint skillz. I could NOT BELIEVE how gorgeous it was, and this is before any of the fabrics are finished for the canopy, curtains, bedding, etc. It’s a magical, amazing room for C and G to share as they grow up, and I can’t believe that my wonderful friends and family pulled off such a makeover miracle in less than one week.

Here are a few photos of the room that I took when I first had the big reveal yesterday. They aren’t very high quality because I took them with my BlackBerry. I will get some better ones as soon as I get a few minutes. And my sister keeps reminding me that it will be even prettier once the new wall sconces and light fixture are installed, the rug she’s ordered arrives, and the curtains, canopy etc are all up. But I have to say that I think it looks pretty amazing now. I can’t believe I have a nice place to change G and such a beautiful, peaceful space for C to play and (eventually) sleep. The room is so lovely and the transformation is so radical that I can’t stop going back in there just to look

C and NC already loooooove the new room.

In the week following Henry’s death – a week I can’t really remember at all and during which I only rarely left my darkened bedroom – some good friends and neighbors of ours ripped out the mess of shrubs and weeds that had been in this spot in our yard and replaced it with a gorgeous garden for Henry, including this beautiful Japanese Maple, which I love.

When I emerged from my bedroom on the day of his memorial service, and actually came outside again for the first time, seeing this beautiful new life in my front yard made me smile, and it’s made me smile every day since.

Thanks y’all. Love you – Katie

Along with the other furniture that my mother gave me as part of her big move this weekend, my great grandmother’s piano is now at home in our house, as of this afternoon. It took a huge effort by my family & Dr. Neighbor to pull this off; moving a piano 250 miles without professional help is no small thing (and the piano is actually bigger than it looks in this photo). I feel very loved that they made this happen for me in the midst of everything. Thanks, everyone

Snapshot # 1 – Jon is at the convenience store at the end of our street buying something when the cashier, who is exceptionally friendly, asks him if he might also want to buy a Chihuahua puppy. He declines,  but while she finishes the sales transaction, she explains that the reason she has puppies for sale is because her mother’s pet monkey kept opening the male Chihuahua’a pen and letting him out, giving him access to the female Chihuahua, from whom he is supposed to remain separated.  Yes, she says, the monkey is a good pet, except for this pesky habit of freeing the Chihuahuas. Oh, and the monkey also bites people, except that’s not a problem since they had its teeth removed…  Now he just gums people.

Snapshot #2 – Me, checking out at the Fellini Kroger, two or three blocks from our house. As the check out guy bags up my purchases, he complains vociferously about the raw chicken juice that apparently dripped all over his hands from the last customer’s leaky meat purchase. As he complains, he alternately wipes his greasy hands on his shirt and then runs them through his hair.

Anna Laura, who cleans for us, spent THREE HOURS on our main bathroom today.

I don’t know whether to be thrilled that it’s now so sparkly clean or frightened by the fact that it took THREE HOURS to get it that clean…

As I have no doubt mentioned before, we live in a very large, 100 year old, wooden house. It has been clear since we first moved in that we have the occasional rodent lurking about. This was mostly clear because our two cats, Mingus and Moses would find mice, and then leave them – bloody and gutted in our front hallway. As disgusting as this was, I found it gratifying to think that the cats were doing their jobs, and keeping the nasty, disgusting rodents at bay.

Fast forward to fall, 2009, Mingus and Moses are now outdoor cats (actually, Mngus is indoor/outdoor) due to intractable bladder control issues (yes, we did try the $40 special Web-order only cat pheremones. Yes, we did take them to the vet. Yes, we did have enough litter boxes…blah, blah, blah) It came down to my furniture and rugs…or the cats enjoying the sunny outdoors. My rugs won out.

So now that the cats live mostly outdoors, the rodents have moved mostly indoors. We have mice. The evidence is overwhelming…and disgusting. Jon has been setting traps in the basement, but he didn’t believe me that he needed to set them on the top floor of the house as well, He apparently held the belief that all rodents who needed to be killed would happily migrate to the basement to do so. It is my opinion, however, that the rats and mice who are CLEARLY living on the top floor – where H, J and E have their bedrooms – have never and will never visit our basement, which is located approximately one MILE below them.

Tonight J cleaned her room and closets better than she has in a year. And suffice it to say that this thorough cleaning made it oh-so-apparent that my daughter has a family of rodents visiting her room on a not-infrequent basis. I was horrified. In fact, I am so grossed out – even after even more cleaning took place – that I know for certain I will have dreams tonight where I am old and alone, and rats are gnawing off my face.

We will certainly be putting lots of traps and poison on the top floor tomorrow, but maybe we need an exterminator? Or those electronic repellents from As Seen on TV commercials? Anyone have any fantastic ideas for eradicating rats and mice in a multistory, still half un-renovated, giant old Victorian house?

Because I don’t want to have my face gnawed off …in my dreams…or in my actual sleep.

We had a very odd evening around Casa Hickju on Friday night. You can read all about it in my latest Babble blog post.

Check out this incredible, amazing house that’s just gone up for sale on our street. Our little corner of the ‘hood is full of more good and wonderful neighbors than you can shake a stick at. It’s a great place to live, and this house is a terrific bargain that hasn’t been on the market for decades. Some lucky family is going to get a real deal on a 130 year old house, mere steps away from a city park and greenway, and with a fascinating history.

The house is located in a neighborhood full of mature trees and real sidewalks, and within walking distance of things like Three Rivers Market and everything that’s happening these days in the rapidly redeveloping wonderful Downtown North Arts District, including the Glowing Body Yoga Studio and Cafe, and Magpies Bakery (who wouldn’t want to be able to walk to Magpies?). Our street is also only about 1.5 miles (maybe less than that) from Market Square.

As I have said many times since we moved here three years ago, living in a half-revitalized, truly urban neighborhood isn’t for everyone. A lot of folks would hate it, actually, and I know of at least two young families who have moved or are trying to move from our neighborhood because they found it wasn’t the right fit for them, and they didn’t want to deal with the issues specific to an inner city neighborhood like this. But I can honestly say that our street is improving all the time since we moved in (now if I could only say the same for our actual house, which needs A LOT of work that we seem to have trouble finding time and money to get accomplished, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.)

So if you are the urban pioneer type, and you like the idea of being part of a community of progressive neighbors who like old houses, city living and each other, I think our street is one of the undiscovered gems of Knoxville’s historic neighborhoods; we probably fly under the radar somewhat because our sub-neighborhood is technically part of Old North Knoxville, but the rest of ONK is on the other side of Broadway. We are actually much closer to 4th and Gill, but they don’t claim us.

If the house that was just listed doesn’t interest you, there are actually several others for sale on our street right now as well, and they are all at quite attractive prices because the market is so slow. So your historic bargain and friendly neighbors await!

The weekend that was…

Thing One is, of course, away at boarding school for the summer, and Thing Two was away on a mission trip with her dad’s church. So that left only Things Three and Four at home, and they had a lot of fun together.

We bought our first outdoor cooking device – ever – (Otherwise known as a $34 charcoal grill from Kroger), and E had a great time teaching me to use it, since he is apparently the grilling assistant over at his father’s house. We did steaks on Saturday and ribs (with significant oversight, including on the shopping part, from Dr. Neighbor).

We ended up having very fun, impromptu parties at our house on Friday and Sunday nights, with numerous friends and neighbors. It was lots of fun. I am so happy we live in a walking neighborhood, with front porches, where people I really, really like actually drop by and end up staying late into the evening, playing mandolin on my front porch as various children and dogs run around the yard.

We have one family in the neighborhood who, while hanging out with us on Saturday, shared their experience recently having their house investigated by some professional ghost hunters after they had experienced some very weird goings-on. The ghost hunters caught strange, glowing orbs and weird muttering on their recordings. If D and F release any of the recordings online, I’ll link to them so you can judge for yourself.

Anyway, here are the photos from the weekend, including an adorable one of my nephew, a sleepy little N, returning from the petshop, clutching his new fish.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.