Walking into the remodel this week, it feels rather bleak. It’s been cloudy or raining, which doesn’t help any. The progress seems stalled. Everything smells sort organic, like sawdust and drywall mud. There are wires dangling and pipes poking out.

It’s all the underbelly stuff, raw and exposed, and just waiting for life to take root.

It kind of reminds me of another raw, exposed point in our lives when Mike and I were deep in the underbelly of the IVF process and, likewise, waiting for life to take root.

It was also that germinal stage, where the boys had been conceived (under the guidance and care of contracted experts). My uterus had been scraped and prepped and chemically insulated, and I was lying there in the stirrups, plumbing exposed, tubing and wires hanging out, waiting for the transfer. Waiting for the professionals to come swooping in to fill my interior with life. The life we’d planned and prayed for.

And that’s where I feel like we’re at with our house — in that germinal stage where all the ideas have been conceived, the prep work completed, the progress multiplying — although almost invisible to the untrained eye.

But the professionals tell me the progress is substantial.

And tomorrow — tomorrow! — the connective web of visible changes begins. Tomorrow, one after another, the replicating pattern of tile will take hold in the bathrooms, doubling and tripling and breaking ground for a whole host of physical changes developing over the next few weeks.

The basic structures are in place, but in the next week, the kitchen cabinets — like upper and lower chambers of the heart of our home — will be installed. The painting and flooring will happen soon, too, adding pigment and personality to our sweet girl. And then, finally, the fixtures, sprouting like appendages from ceilings and sinks.

We’re about two-to-three weeks out now — so close! (but it all still feels so far!) — until we can finally introduce our girl to the world.