Weekend Project

Not too much progress got made on the house this weekend because there were two big projects to tackle before moving forward - painting the nursery and building a desk. Before you ask, no, the nursery is not any super fun color, it's cream. We're renters and we just wanted to freshen it up a little in there since it was pretty dingy. But don't you worry, thanks to her black crib (which my father lovingly referred to as her Baby Jail) and her hot pink accents, she'll have a lovely nursery... one day.

So the nursery got painted on Saturday while I was out of town at a small baby shower and that made Sunday into Desk Building Day. B got a little wrench thrown into his grad school plans when he found out that the original date he was going to take the GMATs was sold out and he has to take them this Saturday instead. You can get into graduate school with a week's worth of studying, right? Shut up - sure you can!

The problem is that the room we're using as an office/man room/guest room has a very problematic layout. Every wall has an obstacle and therefore there is no room for a bed or a desk. Two walls have doors, one wall has a closet that houses the boiler and cannot be blocked, and one wall has the radiator (with a wooden topper).

We gave up on setting up our extra bed and are just storing the mattress in a closet, but having a desk wasn't a negotiable feature for someone about to start his MBA, so we had to get a little creative. And since this week is Cram Week for the GMATs, we had to get creative right away.

Thankfully my mom just redid her kitchen and had an extra 4' piece of counter top around and thankfully B is surprisingly handy given the fact that he owns exactly one tool - a circular saw. So $35 worth of wood and spray paint later and voila! We have a desk! You'll see that the back of the desk has legs that are only about 8" high so they can sit on the wooden topper to the radiator and the front legs are standard height. You'll also see that B was very excited to be building something even though his resources were limited.

Before/During

After!