SETTLING AND UPROOTING

Remember how I said we were settling on our new house in July? Well, scratch that. We just confirmed that we're settling on May 22 -- just 3 days before my due date. (If we've learned nothing else from our adventures in this house, it's that, in true gluttons-for-punishment fashion, we tend to bite off way more than we can chew.)

Our house will officially be on the market tomorrow! The realtor and photographer came yesterday, and we've been in a tizzy lately trying to get camera ready. I did what I could to purge, declutter, stage, and deep clean a little bit every day over the course of the past few weeks. Whenever I overdo it, I pay for it with a sleepless night of hip pain, so it's been a long process just to accomplish little things, but thankfully this final push has coincided nicely with my nesting urges. Ez was still finishing up installing the master bathtub when the realtor pulled in the driveway, but we made it! The effort has been worth it though, and the house is finally looking the way I've been envisioning it all along.

Though we still have some tiny details here and there, we can officially call this house DONE. Can you believe it? I'll try to post lots more photos over the next few days, because the vibe in here is just so good.

Lately I've been trying to find last minute "staging" items like lamps and mirrors that will both cozy up our rooms for showings and that we know we'll use in the new house as well. Last weekend I did manage to score this beat-up old mirror at an antique store for $18 for our entry.

I'd been all over town -- Target, HomeGoods, Pier 1, etc. -- and hated everything I saw. (How can things that cost as much as $250 still look so cheap? And when did I become such a lamp snob?) As a last-ditch effort, I popped into the local antique barn and tried to home in on any mirrors I saw, ignoring all the other cool stuff I would normally look at. (So hard!) I found this at the end of the first row, 10 minutes after walking in the door. Mission accomplished, even if it reflects a slightly hazy and distorted reality -- which is really why I like it anyway.

As predicted, the dining room remains one of my favorite spots in the house. Though a little controversial at the time, I maintain that the planked walls were a good idea. (It helps that Joanna Gaines sings the praises of shiplap on every episode of Fixer Upper!)

It's weird to finally be at the settling in and decorating phase of this project, knowing that we'll be packing it all up in settling in somewhere else in a matter of weeks. It's simultaneously feeling more and more yet less and less like home.