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This weekend we found out our kitchen reno will cost $5000 more than the last quote, which was in turn about $3000 more than we had originally thought. What we had originally thought was a number plucked from my backside, though, based on no experience whatsoever, so perhaps it's not surprising that we were so badly wrong.

This new cost is the cost of ripping out half of the wall between the kitchen and the living room. It's not a load-bearing wall, so I figured it wouldn't cost all that much to remove, but I guess between the electrics and ripping it out neatly and finishing the ragged edges and carting away all the crap and putting in a new bar-top, it adds up to $5000.

My first impulse was to just abandon that part of the project. In one way, removing that wall would be the most significant part of the reno, since it would open the kitchen up to the living room, and let in the natural light. But if I had to choose, I would rather make the cosmetic changes to the kitchen; replace cabinet doors, put in a tile backsplash, change the countertops. Compared to those things, removing the wall is kind of esoteric.

However, Blake came to the astounding conclusion that we don't have to choose, that we can actually do it all, if we wait a little longer to do it, and save more money.

See, my original thought was to get on with the reno as soon as possible, so we can get it done before the baby comes. But that would mean maybe doing some things before we have the cash on hand to do them, and putting the rest on credit, or just forgoing some changes altogether. With Blake's way, we probably won't be able to get started before the baby comes, but we could proceed with the reno without worrying about going into debt. And I really don't want to be in debt when I'm on maternity leave.

The next steps are to find out how long the quotes we got are good for, and to start saving money in earnest (which will be a clever trick considering all the stuff we need to buy for baby).

I got my hair cut on Christmas Eve, as I might have mentioned. The idea was to go to a good hairdresser and get him to give me a new style using his years of experience with different types of hair and face shapes. They do it in magazines and TV all the time, when they give people makeovers, right? All I asked was that I not need to blow-dry it.

What I actually got was quite a lot of thinning and hardly anything off the length, meaning that the next day I had basically the same style as before, but rattier. The "no blowdrying" thing is a big joke; if I don't blow-dry it looks revolting. If I do blow-dry, I can get it to look almost as good as Martha Stewart's hairstyle, which isn't quite what I was going for.

Clearly, I will never darken the door of this particular hairdresser again, and I won't try that "do what you think will look good" thing either. Pointing to the style I want in the Big Book o' Hairstyles works much better, and then I have no-one to blame but myself.

Normally I go at least six weeks between haircuts, just as a matter of principle, but I'll have to break my rule this time, for two reasons: first, this is just a horribly bad haircut and I want it to go away. Second, TorontoCon is coming up and I want a spiffy, funky haircut for it. So I'll probably get a new cut this weekend, or sometime next week. I'll get it good and short so I can go longer without getting it cut next time. That works, right?

The first part of my organizing initiative went very well. I tackled the linen closet this weekend: I put about 20 napkins and 16 placemats in the Goodwill bag, along with a dozen or so pillow cases and some sheets. I'm not sure if anyone buys that stuff second-hand, but I'll leave that up to the Goodwill people. Oh, I also threw out a bunch of half-done sewing projects which I finally admitted I will never finish.

With the space that cleared, I emptied out all but one drawer of the five-drawer dresser in the second bedroom, the one I hope to use for baby stuff. It had been storing bedding for the guest bed, which I fit into one of those plastic zippered bags you buy duvets in, and put it into the bottom of the linen closet.

The final drawer of the dresser contains a whole lot of wires and a keyboard, which I am leaving in Blake's capable hands. Once the dresser is empty I can start putting baby things in it.

The other big thing we did was to move the little bookcase into the middle of the living room, to act as a partition between the dining room/living room and the office area. Because it's a really deep bookcase with no back, it can now be used from both sides, doubling its capacity. With that extra book-space we were able to clear the books off the top of the bookcase, and I reshelved the books which had been living next to my bed, and we have space to spare.

The next step of that particular project is to move the big bookcase from the east wall to where the little bookcase used to live, and put a entertainment centre on the east wall so that we can move the TV out of Delphine's room and have some place to hide it. That won't happen for a while, though, unless we come across a ludicrously cheap entertainment centre (see saving for kitchen reno, above.) But that's okay, because Delphine's room won't actually be Delphine's room for at least another nine months.