Brian and I have been meaning to update the bathroom since the day we bought our house, over 7 years ago. It was papered, which I don't really care for, and the biggest challenge was finding time to take all the old paper down and all of that. Plus, we had several rooms to prepare first, like the nursery for Irene--yeah, that's how long ago it was--and painting our room.
Wanting to update the look of the bathroom turned into a real necessity to remodel pretty quickly. The closer we looked at the room, the more problems we found. In the end, now seemed like a good time to dive in. Here's the issue: we only have one bathroom. Uh-huh. That's right. Family of five. And I'm not talking only one full bath, but a half bath downstairs. Oh no, I'm talking just the one. You can imagine that with three smallish children, gutting your only bathroom isn't an easy feat. We needed to do it, and we needed to do it fast. Clearly, sending the kiddos "to visit" someone would work well. It had to be before school started, so we would have more than a weekend. That only gave us a couple of weeks. Time to find a taker...
Enter my In-laws. (Imagine a flourish of Superman-esque music here)
They agreed to take all three kids for a long weekend. For sure we'd need Saturday and Sunday, and I figured realistically we were talking into Monday and Tuesday as well. There was a ton of work. So we left for the beach house Friday night after Brian got home and slept over there so we could head home Saturday morning, first thing. I kind of laughed when Suzanne seemed surprised that we weren't staying for the day, or at least lunch. But seriously, we had a ton to do, plus a two hour drive home to Rhode Island.
Here's what the kiddos had to look forward to for the weekend:
Here's what Brian and I had to look forward to for the weekend:
It looked pretty grim. I'll show you the progress, but I'm happy to say it was worth all the dirt, grime, and hard work. I'm not as happy to explain the title of the post. Yup, you guessed it...we're still only about 85% complete.
Note in the pictures the mildew and mold around the ceiling. The weirdo ceiling that was falling down. The nasty old 70's light without bulb covers. The worn out vanity complete with a hole in the floor we found when we had to move it over. Ah, the site of the door rebuild. (Who puts a folding, accordion-style door in a bathroom?)
Brian truly is very handy, and he can tackle some projects that are pretty impressive. This bathroom was one of those projects. And he did a great job, and working together we accomplished a lot in a very short time. (Ok, it really took 5 days, but that's for another post.) He's super capable and I'm so appreciative that he can do what he does.
That said, somehow, my sweet Brian isn't able to finish a project without serious and continual prodding. He does MOST of it, and then...well, I don't know. Somewhere in the vacinity of 85% through a project, without fail, the work kind of stops. And that's about all I get. Rooms are painted, except for a piece or two of trim. A folding door is replaced, the doorway re-framed, and a new door installed and primed, but the trim doesn't go up around the doorway for maybe a year. (Yes, for those of you who haven't experienced this phenomenon, that means that you could see through the space between the door frame and the wall around the door for an entire year.) Things do eventually get buttoned up, like in the case of the doorway. An impending birthday party of a massive scale motivated Bri to install the door trim. Also, possibly my threats made an impact, too. And no, it's still not painted.
So there you have it. The bathroom is almost done. We worked our arses off for 5 days straight (seriously--like, I didn't even knit!), probably 60-70 hours of work, and then we hit the roadblock phenomenon.
I am remaining hopeful.
Or trying to.
