It's a boy!!

Luke Conley Langenkamp, welcome to this crazy, wonderful, spectacular world we live on that whizzes through our universe at 872,405 miles per hour!

He arrived a few weeks earlier than his due date (but not earlier than expected, at least for me), weighing in at 6 lb 8 oz and 18" long - he's a tiny little thing!  But cute as a button, of course.

The labor and delivery was a nicely relaxed venture, progressing slowly but steadily through the day.  Kristen was a champ and had a smile on her face the entire time, and we got to meet Luke at 6:09 pm last Wednesday 7/29/15.

We've been preparing Liam for Luke's arrival for some time now, and he's been spontaneously saying things like "When my baby brother comes, I'm going to help feed him, and rock him, and read him stories."  Well Liam didn't disappoint - right from the get go he's been a wonderful big brother, and one of his favorite things to do is hold baby Luke.

 

Clearly I'm biased, but Luke really is a cute little newborn - not nearly as alien-like as I expected ;)  He's also pretty pensive when he's awake.

I need to work on getting some more photos, but he hasn't changed all too much yet.  Making the transition from one to two kids has been challenging but good - I really love seeing how Liam interacts with Luke.  Liam has been really wonderful throughout this whole crazy ride - he's always helpful, grabbing me or Kristen wipes, blankets, clean diapers, or whatever else we don't have right at hand.  And he's always super sweet to his baby brother, giving him kisses or holding his hand in the car.

We're all at home, happy and healthy, and Kristen and I are fully into sleep deprivation mode - especially Kristen, what a trooper!  I'll try to get more photos and updates soon.

Pregnancy makes me use power tools

Summer is here!  I got spoiled by this amazingly cool, mild spring we had - it seems like the normal summer heat is making up for lost time these last few weeks.  That, or maybe I'm just not used to it this year.  At any rate, it's hot!

So we're at the 2 month mark for us to meet Liam's little brother!  I know, it's nuts.  I actually think we're a little inside the 2 month mark personally - Liam was 2 weeks early to the day and it wouldn't surprise me at all if baby brother follows suit.  The official due date is August 17, so I'm planning on August 3-ish.  It is really insane how fast the time has gone, although I'm not sure Kristen would entirely agree with me.  This go-round has been a little rougher than the first, but she's been a real trooper, and looks amazing to boot!

I find it really interesting to see how I'm affected by the impending arrival of a new baby.  You hear about women getting a strong nesting instinct - I definitely get my own version of that, in the form of home improvement projects.  I've been knocking out a ton of them in the last few months, partly from this nesting instinct, and partly because I know I won't be able to work on any for a while once bambino numero dos gets here.  What projects have I worked on?  I thought you'd never ask.

Back Porch Expansion (a.k.a. Defeat the Swamp)

Our house sits about halfway down a slight hill, with the highest point behind our rear fence, sloping down continuously to the front of the property.  The grading of the ground around the back porch was never perfect, so every time it rains the water backs up from the fence, around the porch, back into the yard.  Between that and our dogs trampling the area, the grass never really grew too well, and it was a super swamp every time it rained.  We had put a small pad of pavers right inside the fence a few years ago, so I came up with a plan to extend the pavers in the area, and in the process hopefully fix the grade as well.  Here's a few before shots:

As you can see I had my best helper ready to work too!  Liam and I ran to Lowe's and picked up all our supplies.  That's around 400 pavers if you're wondering.

Once an engineer, always an engineer.  Can't do this without some kind of plan.

Time to dig!  We had to remove all the grass (don't want that pesky stuff growing up under our pavers) and then remove a fair bit of the native clay to get the grade right.  Digging is hard work!

Finally we had everything cleared out, ready for the next steps: putting down a layer of top soil, followed by a layer of paver sand.  Aunt Hannie was over and snapped some pics of Liam helping me tamp down the soil and sand - I absolutely love Liam's stomping.

Fast forward a solid 20 or so man hours and a lot of sweat, and my base is finally ready for pavers!

So here we go, paver setting time.  Compared to getting the area ready, this part went ridiculously quick - I had all the non-cut stones down in about 2 hours.

Now the fun part - cutting all the pavers to go on the edges!  I realize now that I didn't get a good photo of my little tile saw - I bought a little wet tile saw from Lowe's for around $80.  I've gotta say, that little dude was a beast - I ended up doing probably 60 or so cuts and it didn't miss a beat (though I did chew up a few blades).  So once I got all the edge pavers cut and placed, I filled in with this cooler polymer sand I discovered a few years ago.  It's kind of like concrete or mortar but better for this type of application, I think.  As the name implies, it's sand mixed with some kind of water-setting polymer.  All you do is sweep it in and wet it, and it sets rigidly in around 24 hours.  The cool thing is that it doesn't expand much (unlike concrete), and it's also porous, which is really nice because the water can seep through for drainage rather than just sheet off completely.  So, the final result:

Well, almost final.  I was super happy with the way this turned out, but you can see that the ground right in front of the edge is still really low.  So I got even more top soil and some sod and spent a Saturday fixing the grade and laying sod.

That sod might look rough there, but it blended in really quickly (all the crazy rain we got helped quite a bit).  That was fun - on to the next project!!

Liam's Chalkboard

Kristen found the inspiration for this one - we wanted to build a magnetic chalkboard for Liam's newly designed big boy room.  I knew about chalkboard paint, but she also found magnetic paint (seriously).  This stuff is so cool - you just roll it on like any other paint, and makes the surface magnetic.  The quart can of this was about 2-3 times as heavy as a regular quart paint can, I figure this stuff has tons of magnetized iron filings in suspension or something.

I didn't really get too many photos of construction, mainly because there really wasn't all that much to it.  I cut a big sheet of plywood for the main board, put about 5 thin coats of magnetic paint on it, followed by a coat or two of chalkboard paint.

Liam got really excited about the nitrile gloves I bought for this one :)

Then I just cut, sanded, and painted some 1x6's for the frame, screwed them on, and voila!  Chalkboard fun begin!

Closet Shelf Expansion

Ok, so this won't be exciting to anyone besides Kristen and me, but it was still fun.  We're always in need of more storage (who isn't, right?), so I decided to put in another shelf at the top of our overly tall closet.  There was one shelf already there, but quite a bit of room above that:

A lot of cutting, sanding, routing, and painting later, and I'm ready to install the new shelves.  By the way, there is nothing that can beat a good pneumatic nail gun for this kind of work.  It is just silly how easy and fun it is to install shelves with a good nail gun.  After install, spackle, and touch up:

It's really funny how it works, but having that extra shelf way up high actually makes the closet seem a ton taller when you're standing in it.  Go figure.

Bedroom Crown Molding (a.k.a. I Hate Wavy Ceiling Lines)

I had successfully installed crown molding in our small office and Liam's new bedroom, so I figured tackling crown in our bedroom would be no problem.  I was about half right.  Installing crown would be about a thousand times easier if walls and ceilings were as straight in the real world as they are in my head.  I put the first piece of crown up against the ceiling and realized that the deceptively straight looking ceiling was in fact unbelievably wavy.  But no matter, I still prevailed (no mere ceiling will defeat me!).

I'm technically not still done with this one - I just finished installing the crown today, and still need to fill in all the nail holes and touch up paint.  But here's a shot of part of it:

This project could have also been called Vaulted Ceilings are Ridiculous.  The double transition in ceiling and wall angle here is pretty ridiculously hard to get right, and I don't mind saying that I'm pretty damn proud of how it turned out:

And Some Random Adorable Photos

Ok, ok, everyone's tired of project photos.  Here are a random sampling of some of my favorite from the last few months.

Some big news, and little boy room remodeling

So if we haven't gotten to tell you yet, we've got some big news from our family.  A picture is worth a thousand words and all that, so...

Snap, is that what I think it is?  Yep, Liam is going to be a big brother!  Here are the quick stats: 

• Kristen is right at 18-19 weeks
• The due date is August 17, but it will likely be born August 3 if this one's anything like Liam
• It's still an "it" to us for now, but we find out the gender on Monday (3/23)
• Kristen and I completely don't care if it's a boy or girl
• Liam is 100% convinced it's a girl and won't hear otherwise
• Kristen and I are about equal parts excited and terrified, Liam is all parts excited
• We haven't even begun to think about names, but even if we had one picked out we wouldn't tell

So partly because of the new baby (and partly just because we wanted to), Kristen and I decided to give Liam a new room, a little boy's room instead of a baby one.  So we started with a blank slate - what was the guest room, which we hadn't done anything to in terms of paint.  Here it is in all it's blank slate "stone wheat" goodness:

We had actually already painted two of the walls the off white you see there, I forgot to take a true before pic, but that's pretty close.  So the entire room was the creamy beige to start with, and we painted two opposing walls (and the ceiling) white.  What's going on the other two walls, you ask?

Ooh, yeah, hello beautiful.  The remaining two beige walls were painted with this gorgeous navy blue, and voila!

Is that it?  Pfft!  Of course not!  What else could we have planned?

That's right baby, stripes!  Alternating navy and white stripes, to be exact, on the other two opposing walls.  We have a cool wall of stripes in Liam's old baby room, which, if I do say so myself, is pretty freaking awesome:

However, the intervening fog of years and sleep deprivation made me forget what a serious pain in the ass it is to paint stripes on walls as textured as ours.  Even with the amazing frog tape, I had to paint the blue stripes on top of the white, then go back and re-tape over the blue, just leaving the ragged edges exposed, and paint white on top of that.

But ultimately my persistence to stripedness (stripenicity?) was rewarded with the sharpest paint lines you've ever seen.  Go ahead.  Zoom in.  I dare you to find a blot, a smudge, anything besides perfection.

By the way, I got smart on the second wall of stripes.  On the first one, I laid out the tape lines using a long 4' level and a measuring tape.  It was pretty good, but not perfect.  Then I remembered that I have one of the coolest tools ever invented: the laser level.  This thing has paid for itself so many times over in saved time and amazing alignment.  It helped out later on, too.

I think it took me about 20 minutes to lay out the tape lines using the laser level.  The first wall probably took at least an hour.  I'm still smacking myself about that one.  I digress.  

Stripes complete, this concluded the painting section of the remodel.  Now, along with my trusty 4 year old helper, I got to put together the next big thing for Liam's new little boy room: a brand new big boy bed!

Kristen found this cool bed (of course - she finds all the cool stuff) which has drawers underneath - ridiculously handy, and cute to boot.  And she also located The Cutest Little Boy Bed Blanket Ever.  Liam helpfully tested the mattress strength.  Here's the bed with awesome blanket sans jumping bean:

Next addition, an awesome star night light mounted to the wall, and this great bedside table and lamp.  All found by Kristen (as if you had to ask).

A few more smaller touches: awesomely quirky shelving (currently proudly displaying Lego builds), fun wire bin for holding all things bouncy and lightsaber-y, and cute-as-a-button growth chart.

Oh, I almost forgot - we also added some crown molding to the room (or is it moulding?  I'm gonna go American on this one).  It's a small touch, but it really adds a little something.  We went with a nice narrow one since the ceiling is pretty low.  Liam's new room actually had a number of fun little angles to challenge me - no 4-corners-at-90-degrees-each boringness here.

But without a doubt, my favorite thing we've done in Liam's room is the array of airplane prints.  Kristen found these amazing hand drawn water color prints of vintage aircraft on an Etsy shop that are just spectacular.  We picked out and got 6 of our favorites and put them in white frames with a white matte, to be hung on the solid blue wall right above Liam's bed.  

Wait, I have to hang an array of rectangular frames in a precise geometric grid?  Best day ever!  And yes, you guessed it, laser level to the rescue!

I mean, really, it's almost criminal how easy this thing makes it.  Need them all the same height?  Mark the height you want, move the laser level up to the line and bam!  Instant horizontal alignment.  Now you need the next line to be level and line up vertically with your top holes, too?  Bam!  Done - with one measurement only!  I love this thing.  Here's the final result:

I know, it's amazing.  I give 90% credit to Kristen, 5% to myself for handyman work, and 5% to my laser level for sheer awesomeness.  I might need to name this thing.

So that's it for now.  We have plans for some really cool shelving to put on the other wall of stripes, which is currently sitting bare.  We're probably going to change out the ubiquitous ceiling fan/light for a cooler light fixture as well, and then I think we'll be done.  

Drop us a comment below or email, we'd love to hear from you!