Thirty-four weeks and back in hospital

This weeks Flo's been much better. She's obviously pregnant and therefore gets tired in the afternoon and heads off to bed for a quick snooze, but other than that she's been quite perky. She managed a couple of light yoga sessions this week and we've been on some small grocery shopping outings and went to the cinema for a matinee on Monday.

Today we returned to the hospital for a routine check up with the midwife. Flo's weight and blood pressure were fine, but when it came to measuring the baby's heart rate, it was a bit on the high side at around 190 bpm (beats per minute). This concerned the midwife a little so she rang the gynaecology ward where Flo was once again hooked up to the cardiotocograph machine. One and a half hours later, a trainee gynaecologist came and interviewed Flo and after the proper one came and had a look Flo had some blood taken to test for infections (again). An appointment with one of the hospitals senior and specialist gynaecologists has also been made so that he can take a closer look at the baby's heart on the ultrasound scanner.

During the one and a half hours of monitoring, the baby's heart rate returned to a normal 150 bpm and Flo and I are both pretty confident that the elevated heart rate is simply a function of the baby being so active, since she was kicking and thumping around quite a bit all morning. However, it's better to be safe than sorry so, despite being a bit frustrated with having to spend another couple of hours in the hospital today (although we did get a free hospital lunch out of it!) I suppose it's worth it just to ensure that the baby is fit and healthy.

Flo received a phone call from the gynaecologist late this afternoon to confirm the appointment with the specialist next Friday and also informed that the results from the blood tests were negative, so nothing has been identified wrong with Flo at least. So now we sit tight 'til Friday...

Otherwise, things seemed to be going well. If you can ignore the sensors in the picture here, you can see that Flo's belly is developing nicely and is now a lovely, full bulge. It's funny watching it in the evening and seeing movement inside of it... a bit alien-esqué. Our little girl can certainly be pretty active... this morning when we were waking up, Flo pulled my hand onto her belly and within thirty seconds I felt a little limb moving around inside her... which made me smile as I still find it a bit unnerving! It's such a weird idea, the thought of a little human inside another.

It's not all been babies this week though. We've recently noticed a wet patch emerging under the paving stones in the back garden after using the bathroom and/or toilet upstairs. When I initially saw it I was feeling pretty proud of myself, since I'd done an enormous poo (I blame the healthy food that Flo's been feeding me) and thought I might have plugged up the plumbing. Anyway, Flo gave the builder a call and to his credit he was pretty efficient at getting a plumber to come 'round and have a look and give the house a colonoscopy. Turns out our one hundred year old plumbing had finally had its day and a section of it needed replacing with some modern PVC stuff. So, that's another thing sorted on the house!


Boris and Boika seem to be very happy that we've been spending so much time at home. In fact, I think they're getting a bit too used to it and starting to take a few liberties... like expecting food and water from the tap on demand and copious amounts of attention (only when they want it of course). Boika seems to be struggling to adapt to our more leisurely morning rise, not failing to wake us up at 7 a.m. every morning for her biscuit breakfast with a barrage of meowing at our bedroom door. But they still like to indulge in each others company occasionally and snuggle up together on the sofa. In fact this fleece blanket that my mum gave us has become Boris' comfort blanket... he gets upset if he can't find it to lie on since he loves to cuddle up to it! Anyway, in the picture above you can see him giving a mighty kitty raw after I woke them up returning home yesterday afternoon. Don't you just want to give them a big hug!

There's a bat in the kitchen (what am I gonna do?)

Forgive the terrible UB40 pun, but when we returned home this evening from a trip to the cinema this evening, Flo walked into the kitchen and exclaimed "what the hell is that!?". My initial thought was "errr... there's a shit in the corner of the ceiling", but on closer inspection it turned out to be a tiny little bat!

From Bat in the Kitchen

Flo was a bit shocked and a little bit alarmed and I wasn't too keen to try and move it since I know they're protected species back in the UK and that they have sharp little teeth. So I asked Flo to look in the Yellow Pages or Google for a local pest control or bat specialist. She quickly found someone's number in Den Haag and called them, leaving a message on their answer phone. They got back immediately and Flo had a five minute chat with the guy discussing what we should do.

Following the guy's advice, I used a tea towel and covered the little bat and removed it from the corner of the ceiling and placed it outside in the garden. Since it didn't move, I placed it in a box and left it half covered and I've left it in the little covered veranda at the bottom of our garden. I'll have a look if it's still there before we go to bed and if it is then we'll call the bat specialist again and ask him if he wants to come and pick it up.

I have absolutely no idea how it got into the house. None of the doors or windows are open, so it must have sneaked in some time. Strange thing is that most bats are hibernating at the moment, so it's strange that it's been flying around. Nice bit of excitement for tonight though!

Bye bye tables

Yesterday we said goodbye to our opium tables. Opium is not really a good prepation when you want to conceive. Oh no, we just thought they didn't fit in anymore with what we want in our house. So we sold them on Marktplaats.

We are not too sure about what we do want, so for the time being we put our glasses of wine and cups of tea on the floor. So far this has resulted in Jonny dunking his toes accidentally in the tea. But only once... :-)

Tractor maintenance

Industry aiding agriculture is a glorious task for the working class! Workers should follow safety procedures and comrades should keep the overall condition of revolution in mind and perform their duties well. Or something along those lines...

Today we hung the four vintage Chinese propaganda posters we bought in Hong Kong a couple of months ago. They look good on our wall, especially in the new red frames (we thought that was an apt colour). Now we just need to find out what they actually say!

Floor's delivered!

After what seems like an eternity, we finally got our arses in gear (actually, I can't take any of the credit other than for nagging Flo) and arranged for the floor to be installed. It's an epoxy floor, installed in three layers, which of course takes time. Three days in fact, one for each layer.


The timing was great... I was away all last week on a course, so wasn't inconvenienced in the slightest. Flo, however, had to spend three nights with her parents (thank you Flo's parents!) and the poor kitties had to spend three days locked in the back of the house! But it was a small price to pay... their toy mouse slides very well on the floor and they seem to enjoy skating on it, standing on it with their front paws while propelling themselves forward with their rear legs.

The house looks much fresher and much bigger now with the new floor... and it's given us incentive to continue and aspire to get the house finished this summer. That house warming party is starting to look like like a real possibility for the spring now...

And I can't finish this post without saying thank you to Jim for helping move the furniture out and back in again before and after the floor fitting... thank you! And Boris and Boika say sorry for making you sneeze and itch so much.

Bathroom almost complete

Yesterday, Flo and I actually managed to spend some time on the house! We did have a lot of incentive though, since, after about a four month wait, our medicine cabinet finally arrived! If that wasn't enough, the pair of wall lights we ordered before Christmas also arrived last week, so we were very enthusiastic to have some spare time to get them all installed in the bathroom.

And here they are!


The lights are designed to look like coffee cups, with little hanging tea spoons that can be used to switch the lights off and on... they make waking up in the morning that little bit more bearable, subliminally instilling thoughts of café latte to wake the weary mind.

I find the large cross medicine cabinet quite amusing and it adds a nice streak of colour to the bathroom.

We're just waiting for one more item in the bathroom and then there's only the painting left! That will likely wait 'til the summer though...

Curtains!

At last, out curtains have arrived (well, most of them). No more card board boxes in the windows, no more neighbours spying on us watching TV, just a warmer, friendlier feeling house!

Here's a couple of the pictures of the big doors at the back of main room, showing the curtains open and then closed. The curtains are made from linen and so are quite light, which continues to let in lots of light during the day, but should be sufficient to stop people spying on us during the night (I hope).


The lounge is where we've really been missing some privacy, but that should now be rectified. The curtains should also make the room feel much warmer and cut down the draughts caused by the window (but will still need a new TV Flo!).


And finally we've got rid of the boxes that were acting as curtains in the bedroom. The room feels much lighter and bigger now!


Just need to pain those pipes (and all the windows come to think of it).

The remaining curtains should be ready at the end of the month. Cool... it's got me excited about finishing the house again now! Can't wait to try out the curtains in the lounge tonight...

Happy New Year!

First of all, appologies for not adding any posts for the past few weeks... it's not because we don't care or that the novelty has worn off, simply a technical problem with Blogger, but I won't go into the technical details.

Fortunately, my smart, techie wife sorted it out today... after scanning through the internet she found a reference to try something that she hadn't done before and made one last attempt to sort the problem out... and it worked!

So, time to catch up on what's been going on over the past few weeks! First of all, we got our new kitchen counter top installed just in time for Christmas!


It's looking nice and new and shiny in the picture above, but already after a few weeks of use it is inevitably covered in scratches and marks... but this just adds to the character and soon it will look like it's supposed to look like that!

Also just before Christmas, we had some blinds installed in the upstairs bedroom, upstairs hall and bathroom.


The upstairs bedroom has now become the guest room, so the installation of the blinds was just in time for my parents coming over from the UK and visiting us for Christmas. They arrived the Saturday before Christmas, which was just in time to help us prepare for a large Christmas Eve dinner, with Flo's parents, her two brothers and their families... fourteen people in total! So the kitchen was put through its paces and to feed so many people we bought a huge 8kg turkey! Turns out that this was more than big enough, since we're still eating turkey curry now! We did a quick calculation last night and figured that we're going to get about thirty meals out of that bird!


We think the party turned out well... we enjoyed it at least and hosting dinners like this is exactly what we had in mind keeping the space at the front of the house big and open... one of my friends that saw the house for the first time a few weeks back commented that we have the perfect party house! We just need to make an effort to host some events over the next couple of years... the next one should be the house warming!

For Boxing Day, we took my parents to the Lucent Danstheater in Den Haag to watch the Kirov Ballet of Saint Peterburg perform The Nutcracker! We weren't so keen on the first half of the performance, but the second half is breathtaking and was well worth the visit. It felt like a very special way of spending Boxing Day evening and we felt very privileged to see the performance. We'd certainly recommend going and seeing it, if only for a spot of people watching, since there was certainly a large cross section of the people that attended!

Christmas turned out to be pretty busy this year, so by New Year we treated ourselves to a quiet night in, catching up on the second series of Prison Break whilst drinking champagne and eating fresh sushi from Simonis in Scheveningen (where my parents enjoyed probably the best fish and chips in the Netherlands on the day that they departed back to the UK). At midnight we ventured out into the street and watched the local inhabitants put on a loud and quite spectacular fireworks display on out little plein down the street.

So all in all we had a very pleasant and memorable festive period, so much so that heading back into work took quite some effort! But things are about back into full swing and both Flo and myself seem to be as busy as ever! But there's plenty to look forward to in 2007...

Seventy boxes down, ten to go

Or something like that... We have definitely unpacked a lot of boxes in the last few months and we are slowly getting to the last one.

The main reason for not having unpacked everything yet, boils down to simply not having enough space to put the contents away. Which really seems a bit strange, considering we live in a bigger house than we did before.

I contribute that to the lack of built-in cupboards and not at all to the fact that we seem to find other stuff to do than unpack boxes, organise the house and paint the woodwork... Add the fact that we seem to have a rather high tolerance for mess and you get the picture.

However, there are moments that we think that we really need to get a move on. The knowledge that we will have twelve dinner guests for Christmas for example. So yesterday Jonny installed the new glass shelves above our pimped dresser.

Beautiful glass shelves imported from England. Long live the internet and mail order. They hold all our cups, glasses, teas and drinks perfectly. It looks like we have a little bar in our kitchen. An organised little bar for that matter. We are well pleased with it!

Campari Light

Sounds like a sugar free, alcohol free aperative? No, it's the latest edition chezcorcutt!

After waiting weeks for delivery, they finally arrived on Saturday. We couldn't wait to go and collect them and I fitted them that evening. And here they are... courtesy of my parents who kindly donated them as our house warming gift. I hope that they will agree that they look better in real life than in the pictures... they light the kitchen perfectly and give a nice warm red glow to the rest of the room.


We're really happy with them (and so is Boris)!

Pimp my dresser

I am a big fan of Marktplaats. This Dutch daughter website of Ebay helped us get rid of a lot of stuff when we moved. I also really like the idea of recycling and making money doing so.

The first thing ever I sold on there were steel toed boots from Jonny. He had had those boots as long as we were together and some more, but never wore them. It turned out they never fit him properly, they were too big. Now Henk in the north east of Groningen is the proud owner of some vintage Reebok boots. He's happy, we're happy.

When we couldn't find a dresser to fit the kitchen wall, we decided to have a look on Marktplaats too. And last week we have acquired our first item: a semi-antique wooden dresser. I have since customised it with porcelain Delft Blue drawer handles. So now we have a lot more storage space in the kitchen and it was cheaper than Ikea!

Homely

I've been promising peeps an update on the house for weeks now... and finally... here it is. Well, sort of. The house is currently in a bit of a state of flux, still unfinished in parts and still with lots of unpacked boxes from the move. Slowly but surely, we're getting there. Boxes are slowly disappearing as we either throw things away, find places to store them or Flo manages to sell them on Marktplaats.nl.

Thanks to my Dad, we officially have a garden, since it now has plants. And Boris and Boika love it! They particularly enjoy grass, which shows that they've integrated well into Dutch society.


My Daddy will be pleased to see that we've hung the bird table (quite literally, with a neat, tidy, thirteen wraps hangman knot) and we've attached trestles to the wall to assist the climbing plants.

Inside, we've managed to remove most of the rubbish that had collected at the front of the house, which leaves us with lots of space to park our bikes and store unpacked boxes. And it's now very light at the front of the house, since the newspaper has been finally been removed from the front window and replaced with some semi-transparent foil, which lets some light shine through, but prevents people from being able to see in. Boris is particularly fond of this new arrangement since it gives him the opportunity to keep an eye on the world... I suppose it's his equivalent to the world wide web.


There's not a whole lot to report for the rest of the house. A solution for the floor at the front is being chased and should be closed out by mid January, we're waiting for a quote for blinds and curtains and the stainless steel counter for the kitchen should have arrived within a couple of weeks, but has been delayed until January. So, looks like the house warming party will turn out to be a joint Jonny and Flo birthday party too.

Despite the house not being completely finished, it already feels much more homely than our previous rented house. Despite the clutter and mess, we're able to get on with our day to day lives and as we'd hoped, the layout of the new house feels much more sociable than before, since we're invariably within eye contact or at least audible range, which makes us feel like we're together, even when we're busy doing our separate things.


The kitties appear to be settling in and relaxing in the new home. They particularly seem to enjoy the floor heating, since it means they're happy to slump pretty much anywhere on the floor and feel warm. They sit and stay close to us... so we're one big happy family!

Hormones in a bag

We have a lovely big new fridge in our house. Stainless steel, double doors, lots of freezer space, special vegetable drawers, the whole shebang. Really, it would make any domestic goddess proud! And, no, it does not have an ice-machine. It is really not that hot here in the low lands.

It has so many shelves and drawers that it could easily fit food for a family. To help us achieve that, I went out to get the new lot of fertility drugs today. A whole bag full of them. They now compete for shelve space with my homemade pesto and the delicious organic Cheddar my parents in law brought us. They have a different way of arriving in my tummy though!

Back to the future

We have now lived in our new house for just over four weeks. We manoeuvre around the boxes that remain unopened. We carefully tread around the tools from the work men that are still around every other day. We put up with the mess they make and the dust on our clean clothes. The curtains made of newspapers are very yellow by now and there are large pieces of garbage scattered around the house since we forgot the pick-up appointment with the council. The mess is infuriating at times and the amount of work still to be done daunting, but we love it.

Slowly everything is finding its place and the house is coming together. We have been large-scale users of bin liners and the house is looking better every day. Not in the last place because we had Jonny's parents staying over for a few days. That forced us to get a bit more organised quickly. At least cosmetically, since it mainly involved moving boxes around.

Jonny and his dad put the immensely heavy glass doors on our new Pax cupboard, his dad put the first plants in our garden and his mum got her hands on our dirty counter top after chasing our Polish builders away. Although born in England, Polish was my mother in law's first language. So she told them in Polish not to put their dirty things on the freshly cleaned surface. It must have quite shocked them, but it worked!

We are now still waiting for our ADSL-connection. For the last month we have been using a dial-up connection. It takes ages to load up pages with anything other than plain text and it feels like we have been catapulted back to the early nineties. Tomorrow we should have ADSL again so that will be a weekend full of serving the internet! Or would that be the internet serving us?

We have moved!

Last week we moved into our new house. Now we are not only camping in the bed room, but also in the living room, the kitchen and the bathroom. To say it is a bit messy is an understatement. But it is our very own messy house and it is gorgeous and lovely.

The internet connection has not moved yet unfortunately so we are not online at the moment. This post is costing me two teas in a bar with wireless connection. Nor do we have telephone. At night we play board games.

You can reach us on our mobiles though! As soon as we are online again, we will reply to your emails and update the blog properly with pictures of our trip to Copenhagen (what a great city!) and pictures of the house wíth furniture. Like the builder remarked last week: it now has a soul.

PS: the kitties are okay, they are still having fun exploring all the corners and finding new favourite spots to lie in. Funnily enough these spots seem to coincide with our favourite spots to sit!

Counting the days

I am counting the days before Jonny comes back: 2. The closer it gets to him coming home the more I miss him. That must have to do with how you adjust the internal clock to a certain number of days. There is enough to get on with though: organising stuff for the new house, tidying up the old house and throwing away stuff we don't need anymore. The latter by the way deserving a post of its own! How much stuff does one accumulate? Let alone two people...

I am counting the days before we move house: 7. Although a lot has been done, the house is not nearly finished yet. But we have a working shower, a temporary counter top in the kitchen and working heaters. We can live in it!



At the weekend I have painted the pantry, moving away from the still 'rustic' feel that was in there. We can now hang some shelves for our cans and containers. Today and tomorrow the wooden floors are being put in, the concrete in the front will get an epoxy coating later this week and my adorable new door stoppers will be attached too.

It is so exciting that we are now almost moving in to our new house. The first time that we will actually live in our own house! We can now happily fill the wall with nails (if we wanted to) and paint it any colours we like (in case we get bored of our carefully chosen palette). We have both done so much and are really proud of how it is coming together. It goes to show what a good team can do. Just waiting for my team mate to come back now! :-)

Camping in the new bedroom

After walking around with Farrow and Ball colour swatches for months, even sleeping with them under my pillow, I finally decided to use some completely different colours for our new house. This decision was mainly driven by the fact that our painter could not mix the F&B colours. In normal words that means: it would be too expensive.

Amongst the good things of the F&B paint were the names: Elephant's Breath©, Monkey Puzzle© and our all time favourite Cooking Apple Green© for example. Our new paint does not have super dupa names, but our palette consists of four colours instead: off white, off yellow, off beige and off grey. I am not being completely fair to the dark grey, since it actually does have a name: "tent".

Although nowadays I prefer a sweet little B&B or even a swanky hotel over a tent any time, I have fond memories of the tent I used to share with my sister over family holidays. I loved the sound of rain on the tent in the early mornings. I loathed the walk to the toilets in the rain though.

So "tent" it is. A suitably apt name for the colour of our bedroom. We are well pleased with the way the colour turned out on the wall. The bedroom will be warm and cosy and soon be full of fond memories too!

Painters and decorators

When we started painting the house a few weeks back, we were pretty confident that, despite taking a bit of time and effort, we'd be able to finish most of the painting ourselves, before it was time to move into the house. After spending a couple of weekends painting, the realisation of exactly how much work was required hit us with a bang and we unanimously decided it was time to call in the professionals.

 
We've been picking up some pretty good references and tips along the way... the company that installed our lights for us also recommended the guy to install our floor. So we decided to follow up their lead on the painter. After agreeing on a price, they started work early Monday morning. Even with two professional painters working full time, they anticipated that the work would take at least a week and a half. As you can see from the pictures, one week has gone already and they've not yet completed the front of the house and this is with three guys working! So we're anicipating them to finish at the end of next week.

But the timing is fine... with everything else that's going on in our lives at the moment, we've certainly become a lot less stressed about the house, simply because we haven't got the energy to! However, as a result, things seem to be ticking along quite smoothly and at a pleasant pace. As you can see from the pictures, the builders continue to be in and out as they've now installed nearly all of the doors. They were going to have the floor in the front finished this week, but decided to hold back and let the painters finish in the front before they come and lay the floor... which we're fine with.

The builders are also going to fit the kitchen for us. They've already lined it all up, but they need to make some modifications to the unit that is going to house the sink, since behind this unit is the manifold for the underfloor heating, which needs to be accommodated in the kitchen unit. But the builders seem to think it's no big deal, so we're leaving them to it!

 
It's been a couple of weeks since we made a post on the house... shows that our minds have been mostly elsewhere! However, this doesn't mean that we've not been busy on the house! The wooden floor panels have now arrived, as have the plinths, both of which I've committed to install, but I'll wait until the builders have finished before I start work. As you can see, colour decisions have been made for the painting, the doors have been installed and a decision has been made on door handle designs.

A quote has been received for manufacturing a stainless steel counter top for the sink... we're just waiting for another quote before we decide on preffered supplier! We've already fitted a washing machine in the cupboard in the kitchen (thank you Martin, Grada and Wouter, it fits perfectly!) and the rest of the white goods are waiting to be delivered.

So we're pretty confident that the house will be in an hospitable state by the time we need to move out of our current home, or at least I was until I discovered that my presence has been requested for a two week trip to the other side of the world... starting two weeks before we're due to move house! So, as is typical with life, just as things are ticking along nicely, there's a little twist thrown in to spice things up a little. I'm confident that Flo and I can keep on top of things though... I'm pretty overwhelmed with how smooth things have been maintained to date, which gives me confidence that we can handle whatever is thrown at us...

I've added some more pictures of the house to our growing photo album. I'll update this with some of the pictures of the house when we'd just bought it so that you can get a real feel for just how big a transformation has occurred!

Enjoy your weekend! 

Floor plan

I was just dimensioning a plan of the kitchen for Flo so that she can get a quote for the kitchen counter top and it suddenly dawned on me that I've never posted a plan of the house! So here it is...


And talking of the kitchen... it's being delivered tomorrow! A bit of a surprise, but the supplier needs to free up some space in his workshop... so expect some pictures soon!

Updated pics from the house

Flo and I intended to spend the day painting. To her credit, Flo managed to put a third layer of paint in two of the bedrooms, while I had to drive back home to pick up a ladder and some tools... the builders have almost completely cleared out! This means we can no longer abuse their equipment and instead have to use our own.

With all the builder's junk out, we're starting to get a completely different feel for the house. It feels much bigger in the front now, especially with the addition of an echo with no furniture to absorb the noise.


Most of the electric sockets and switches have now been installed, which means we can now switch on the spot lights... and I have to say that I'm really happy with them! As you can see from the picture above, the spot lights give real mood to the house... I like the way there's light and dark areas and the way the shadows are cast... using single sources of light to light the entire area would have really washed out the rooms.

If you'd like to see some more pictures of the house, I've posted another thirteen at the end of this house album.

It's been an interesting week... while walking 'round the house with the builder on Monday evening, we were bouncing on the floor in the study wondering how to tackle the problem of the uneven floor. We had been toying with the idea of pouring some cement on the floor so that it found its own level, but since we suspected the problem to lie with rotten floor beams, we figured that in the long run this would not be the best solution. So we decided to just pull up the floor there and then and take a look... a very empowering moment! And I'm so glad that we did... since indeed, the floor beams were rotting, but not half as bad as I expected. It seems that when the previous owners decided to plonk their new garden on top of the old one, they were in a bit of a rush or perhaps were unwilling to pay for a skip to remove all the rubble from the existing garden. As you might recall from a previous post, lots of rubble had to be removed before the new garden could be installed. Well, underneath the floor boards we found a whole lot more rubble! This, coupled with the fact that the garden had been previously raised and in the process the ventillation grills covered, had trapped in damp beneath the floor and caused the beams to start rotting. But fortunately, the beams were only rotten at the point where they are supported in the foundation of the house.

Although this is quite serious structurally, it meant that it was easily fixed by removing the rotten section and bolting on a new beam to rest in the foundation bearing. The builders also installed a new vent to allow air to flow beneath the floor to keep it dry and rot free in the future.

We met up with the building contractor this afternoon and he advised us to get on with the preperation for painting the walls and the wooden bits like windows and stairs. We therefore decided to pop to the builder's supply center and get some sand paper, a sanding machine and lots of acrylic filler to fill up all the gaps and holes before painting them up. We can then spend the weekend sanding and filling. The good thing is that it's supposed to be crappy weather this weekend, so at least we won't be tempted to spend the weekend at the beach or off on cycling tours.

After our not so hard day's work, we treated ourselves to a steak dinner since today we officially started our IVF treatment again (and so I get the please of finishing off Flo's previous post with "...GO!"), which meant that I got the pleasure of injecting hormones into Flo's belly. But I'm not complaining... I think I've got the better half of the fertility treatment deal, plus if it all works out we'll have a little fella (or missy) to share our shiny new house with (and smear banana all over the freshly painted walls).