Hellooo, Friday. It’s been a weird week with the ongoing spread of coronavirus in our area and the schools where both my parents work closing for the foreseeable future. Will and my brother Camden are both working from home in the midst of our renovations so it’s been a little chaotic, but we’re all healthy and feeling very grateful for that. I shared a few thoughts on how I’m feeling about everything here and hope you’re all hanging in there and taking good care of yourselves. Hoping that everyone gets a little break from refreshing the news this weekend and praying that there’s good news on the horizon. Sending love!

1. How was it to go through the mortgage approval process as a self-employed person? Any tips or tricks?

I would say it’s certainly more involved than submitting a series of pay stubs from a traditional employer, but not insurmountable by any means! I’m sure every situation is slightly different depending on where you live and the nature of your work, but for me it required providing additional bank statements demonstrating the historical cash flow of my business and asking our accountant to provide data showing that transferring funds from my business account to cover part of our down payment would not jeopardize the future viability of my business. It might have felt more overwhelming to me if we didn’t have such a good team of people in place to help walk us through every step of the process (accountant, lawyer, mortgage broker, and my dad who is a former mortgage broker!). 

2. Best and worst parts of being a mom?

There are so many best parts! Right now getting Teddy to laugh is practically my raison d’être. He smiles constantly but really makes us work for those giggles so when I get him laughing it feels like my heart could actually explode. And seeing how his face lights up when he sees me or Will never gets old to me. And “worst” feels like too strong of a word, but I shared some of the things I’ve struggled with at the end of this post.

3. Did you get a push present?

No, I talked about this a little bit in this post but I’m really not a big gift person so this just wasn’t something that was important to me. But no judgment to moms who do! You do you. 🙂

4. Would love your car seat and stroller recommendations! How are you liking the Doona?

I mentioned this in this post but we’ve been loving the Doona on the two trips we’ve taken Teddy on! It’s so nice to have a combination car seat and stroller so we don’t have to lug around two separate pieces. We have this car seat and this stroller for day-to-day life at home and love both of them. The stroller is a tank and I couldn’t recommend it more highly!

5. How did you like your long engagement? Mine may be two years and I’m a little nervous!

Will proposed on Christmas Eve in 2015 and I had specific Nantucket venues in mind for different wedding events that couldn’t be booked for that first summer so we wound up being engaged for 21 months (married in September 2017) instead of 9 (if we’d somehow been able to pull it off in September 2016). Honestly we benefited from having some extra time to plan a somewhat destination wedding where many vendors are essentially offline for half the year (plus we moved from Dallas back to Connecticut halfway through our engagement!) but we were definitely ready to just be married by the end of it. But our wedding day was the happiest culmination of so many months of planning and I wouldn’t change a thing! I think it depends what’s dictating the longer engagement, whether you’re in a hurry to start a family after your wedding, etc. — it’s such a personal call so I can only share that our experience with it isn’t something we regret at all!

6. Do you have any concerns about your parents having to go up stairs to the loft space at your house as they get older?

Thankfully my parents are both very active so this wasn’t a concern of theirs, but they’re also in their early sixties and only planning to live with us for several years before they decide where they’d like to retire. We would definitely have to come up with a new plan if their physical health changed or they decided to stay indefinitely!

7. How many architects and builders did you meet with before deciding who to work with?

Our realtor recommended our architect, who recommended our builder. We briefly contemplated working with one of the contractors we’d worked with on our first round of house projects over the summer, but we instantly hit it off with these builders and knew they were really the ideal people to help us execute our vision. So the meetings we had prior to signing a contract were less about finding the right people and more about agreeing on a budget that felt doable and understanding what would and wouldn’t be possible within that budget. We got really lucky in meeting them and getting such a good vibe right out of the gate, but I would have gotten more recommendations and scheduled as many meetings as we needed to find the right fit!

8. Did you hire an interior designer to help you map out everything for the renovation?

We worked with an architect to draw up plans for each space and she consulted with an engineer to determine what was structurally feasible, but we’ll do the actual layout, furniture placement, and decorating ourselves!

9. Are you keeping the yellow exterior of your house?

Yes, for now! Will would love to paint it white at some point but financially it wasn’t feasible to repaint the entire exterior as part of this round of projects and we agree that it’d be a nice-to-have and that there are other more pressing projects we want to tackle before we make more elective changes.

10. Did you decide on kitchen pendants?

All the feedback on this post had me as confused as ever, haha. I actually think I’m now going to go a different direction (not one of the three options I shared in that post) because just when I thought I’d seen every light fixture on the internet, I stumbled upon these pendants and felt like they were just meant to be. Thoughts?!