Our Biggest Project Yet!

If it wasn’t obvious from the image above, our biggest project yet isn’t actually a renovation project, but in fact, a baby!

Yes, I’ve been growing a tiny human for a while now, the due date is getting crazily close, I’m already on maternity leave and I felt it was about time I shared this major life news with you all.

It still seems somewhat unreal, but I guess soon we’ll be trying to work out how to change nappies and wondering whether we’ll ever sleep again. It’s definitely going to be a learning curve, and yes, I’m somewhat terrified!

I’ve waited some time to share this news for a whole bunch of different reasons, but at some point I decided I just wanted to make it through to maternity leave first.

My job isn’t exactly pregnancy-friendly – it’s fast-paced, involves being on your feet all night, constantly lifting, bending and quite frankly, knackering on the old knees/back at the best of times. In the end, every shift felt like an endurance test just to make it through the night and my back has genuinely never hurt so much!

I’ve been counting down the weeks and now I’m out on maternity leave, I finally feel like I can relax, take it easy, and actually celebrate and enjoy pregnancy. This will also be the first time since I was 16 that I’m not working over Christmas week and I can’t tell you how excited I am for that!

If you follow me on Instagram you might have also noticed that DIY and renovating have been pretty non-existent over the last several months. Being pregnant has definitely meant there’s been less and less I can do as the months go by, and if you followed the work we carried out at the allotment, you might have noticed it was Grant doing the bulk of the work – thanks, Grant!

This year has also been a funny one though, and so pregnancy hasn’t been 100% to blame for lack of progress. Unfortunately, we just haven’t had the money for the renovations we’d planned to do.

We’re both really fortunate to have key-worker jobs (thankfully giving us job security throughout 2020), but as Grant hasn’t been able to car-share like usual this year, our petrol spending has been something like 5x higher each month. A significant rise we weren’t prepared for at the start of 2020! Grant is also earning a little less too, but I’ll explain more on that next year.

Of course, both of these things are nothing compared to the financial struggles others are going through right now, but it has meant we’ve had to re-evaluate our budgets and put less money into the DIY/renovation fund.

And alongside that, I know lots of you might be wondering what’s in store for the nursery/baby’s room too, but unfortunately, there isn’t one! This may be somewhat controversial as I’m told I will never have time to create a nursery once the baby arrives, but it’s the route we’ve chosen to take.

We’ve obviously spent quite a lot on baby supplies this year (albeit we’ve mostly purchased secondhand) and although we’d planned for this, spending on decorative furnishings or a whole room a baby won’t even appreciate, didn’t really seem like a priority to us right now. Especially given some of the other renovation plans we haven’t been able to achieve.

The baby will be sleeping in our room for the first six months anyway and we simply feel that there are far more pressing jobs to deal with, before decorating a nursery. So I’m afraid there will be no baby room updates anytime soon!

You can, however, see the room which we hope to turn into a nursery below. It’s *mostly* been renovated anyway, but we’ll need to sort out the leaky water tanks in the cupboard, finish fitting the skirting, patch the walls where we’ve installed sockets, replace the electric radiator (which never worked – I don’t recommend!!) and then make room elsewhere in the house for the spare bed, desk and my PC.

On the whole, though, the room is nothing like it was when we first moved in and requires re-decorating and re-furnishing, rather than full-blown renovating. You can see all the work we’ve done to the room over the years here.

As for the future of our DIY home renovation, well I’m sure it’s going to be slower than it’s ever been before. I have no doubt we’ll continue to have less money moving forward and even less time as well. Everything will become a huge juggling act – but we’re in no rush, there’s no deadline and this isn’t a race for us. Our house is definitely a labour of love and I’ve always said that it’ll take as long as it takes. So there are no plans to stop DIYing anytime soon, don’t worry!

It’s been almost 10 years since Grant and I bought our first doer-upper and it’s been 10 long years of constant renovating ever since – with nearly 7 years in this house alone! I know we’ve worked bloody hard over the years and I know we’ll continue to do everything we can to keep pushing through.

Our house may still be far from finished, but our lives now are more than anything I ever thought we’d have 10 years ago. We’ve learnt to live amongst the chaos and having spent years slowly building a home, we’re incredibly grateful for every bit that is done.

So whilst it’s certainly going to be a juggling act trying to continue with our renovations whilst raising a baby – I’m pretty up for that challenge! I’m not saying it will be easy, but we’ll evolve somehow!

So that’s an update on our life news for you all. 2021 will be a very different year for us and things are gonna change slightly around here – but I hope you’ll continue to stick with us on the slow lane and who knows, maybe there’ll even be some baby orientated DIYs along the way!