All in a Day

These are not mine, although that is an impressive collection.  They actually come from here.

On any given workday around 1:45 p.m. my manager makes the rounds down to our cubes to check and see if we need to make a last minute run to the cafeteria before they close at 2.  This “last call” is what generally prompts the very unnecessary purchase of some kind of king size candy bar or some other such thing that I definitely don't need.  Today, I got water.  Not only am I trying to undo a little damage brought on by one too many sandwiches (and candy bars apparently), but, water is good for you.  Me.  I mean everyone.

Standing up, my manager makes a comment about my being very tall today.  As he looks at my shoes in one of those “how does she walk in those things” looks, I say something about a summer in flip flops making my feet wussies and it’s not that the shoes are hard to walk in, my feet just don’t like anything touching the tops of them because they’ve gotten used to flip flops.

Check out my fellow Blogger!

Meet my childhood friend Jesse over at Buckhouse!  She's brilliant, witty, charming, beautiful and exceedingly talented. Who would have ever known at the ripe old age of 14 (her) & 16 (me) that we'd both be bitten by the reno bug and take on projects of massive scale and actually conquer them.

There's just something about getting your hands dirty and creating something amazing that you never knew you could that gives you an overwhelming sense of accomplishment.  It kind of makes you feel like you could take on the world.

Check her out, bookmark her, she's got lots of great ideas and great stories written in a way that you can easily imagine sitting with her at her very own Trestle Table sharing a bottle of wine, a few laughs and some great conversation.

Adventures in Remodeling - This is Gonna Get Ugly

So when you buy an ugly house, it can only get uglier before it gets better right?  Right?  Ok, so maybe not in all cases but certainly in mine.  This is what my super ugly house looked like when I bought it.

The photo is from the Spokane County website, taken in 2004, not much had changed in appearance when I bought it.

I’m not entirely sure why out of the many many potential homes I looked at, I settled on this.  But, one reason is that I had owned it when I was married and had lost it when I divorced because I simply couldn’t afford to keep it on my own.  It was a sad day, I had so many plans for my home then and now it looked like I was getting another chance.

I sealed the deal in February of 2007 and with keys in hand, started making plans without a clue as to how to do ANY of it or how much it would cost.  I had planned to live there for a very long time so I wanted it to be to my liking but still remodel in a way that would be appealing to a lot of people if I ever had to sell it.  So, with what I wanted and what I thought of as “timeless”, I opened the front door.

After working on some pretty major projects indoors, I thought it was time to move outdoors, sort of backwards, but I needed a place to come home to that was comfortable and functional.  Once I came home from work/school and shut the front door behind me, I cared very little what the outside looked like.  I had my little oasis behind the ugly exterior.

Paint colors.  Oh. My. God.  How I can make something so difficult or why I feel the need to obsess over the PERFECT color, I’ll never know.  I tend to choose colors in shades of green and gray.  And yes, I obsessed about the perfect grayish/greenish color for what seemed like and probably was months.  Every weekend I’d bring home a new sample to try out so I could stare at it for a while and decide if I liked it.

Adventures in Remodeling - Bathroom #2

The arbitrary bathroom numbering system is based on the order in which the rooms were remodeled.  Number 2 & number 3 kind of got torn apart at the same time because of, well, read on...  Number 3 didn’t get finished until almost the last week or two that I lived in the house.

So, on to bathroom number two!

The Elvis Sink after I painted it so I could deal with it for a while

When I purchased the house, lovely bathroom number two was fitted with what I called “The Elvis Sink”.  I called that because of its likeness to the era in which fat Elvis would have lived.  It was awful.  Awful is an understatement.  It sparkled and had swirls that were supposed to look like marble I think, but really just looked pitiful.  Not only was the lovely Elvis sink attached to the wall, the walls themselves looked like exterior stucco and since it’s small, these little stucco fingers would reach out and grab you every time you turned around.  Stucco Fingers got sanded down and the walls painted until I could come up with the money to do anything else.  It just had to be usable.  Bathroom number two also had a pocket door that didn't work, or worked sometimes but then came off the track and was impossible to get back on so it eventually just stayed off the track and we proceeded to tear it and the wall apart every time we opened or closed the door.  Oh yeah, it was also a hallow apartment style door that was fitted to a pocket door so never even right to begin with.

The day finally came when I’d had enough of bathroom number two and decided it was its best interest to be torn out.  In order to get the bathtub out, part of the wall had to come out but before that the toilet had to come out.  Since the toilet was fairly new I decided to keep it, clean it and reuse it.  After all, anything that can be reused in a whole home remodel is valuable.

There has to be SOME modesty in remodeling!  That grate looking thing was a "vent" that opened to the downstairs bathroom and was more of a "intercom" than anything of actual use.  It was weird.