Nothing is Finished, Everything's a Mess!

Well so, not much happened in the bathroom today, but they cut a giant hole in my hallway and I feel like this entire house is covered in dirt, and since there are doors open throughout the house throughout the day, there's bugs in here by the evening. GROSS. Everything is gross.

But my closet looks like this, all framed and drywalled:

Ellie's new closet looks like this:

They are going to take out the shelves and little curtain, but they can stay for now. As you can also see, we are taking her room down from double doors to a single door. We NEVER have both doors open, and I feel like it'll give her a few feet of extra space and make it feel more like a bedroom and less like an office.

She's thrilled because there's currently no door, so she expects the cats to come sleep with her. It should be an interesting night, because Lulu loves her some princess blanket.

Today was Auntie Sara's birthday, and Grandma Rosie arrived in town. We were able to pick the latter up at the airport, and have a nice dinner with the family tonight. Dinner AND dance party. The full shebang. Ellie is working Grandma Rosie like a show pony when it comes to play time. She announced that she wanted to play "little girl" and when Grandma Rosie agreed, Ellie goes "okay, so you're the little girl. You're three. I'm the mommy, and I'm sixteen." I quickly put a shut down on that. I told her that if she wanted to be the mommy, she needed to be 25.

She's already a pretty sweet big sister, and I'm sure she'll be a good mommy someday. I actually hope she waits until she's closer to 30.

Happy Birthday Auntie Sara!

Countered!

The cabinets and counters are in! And everyone loves them (including Adam.) I am starting to get really, really excited. A whole sink all to myself! I am going to brush my teeth so many times!

Also, I love the way Glen designed the counters. I know that most counters are higher than they were when our house was originally built and the majority enjoy that. But I am still only 5'4", and it makes it hard for me to lean in and gaze at my beautiful self in order to pluck my old lady wayward facial hairs and eliminate my young lady hideous zits. I am a treat! So the shorter part over the drawers is perfect for me.

I really love the sinks too.

So now we have a garage full of crap - the facets, the light fixtures, etc. No toilet yet. The guy was out today measuring for the shower and the mirror. And the crew was here demoing our closet.

I HAVE NOTHING TO WEAR!

Grouted.

I AM IN LOVE. I can't wait to see what it all looks like finished, which is actually going to be next week! Someday, someday we will have two new and beautiful functional bathrooms. I can't even imagine how nice it will be to use them while hiding from the kids!

Which reminds me of a funny thing - we are also redoing all of the doors in the house, and Grizz mentioned something about putting a pocket door on the door into our bathroom, and I said no. No one ever really closes a pocket door because it's a hassle. A pocket door is something you install when you MIGHT want to close the door sometimes, Our bathroom cannot have a pocket door for several reasons. One being that we are still a young married couple and like to keep some bathroom mystery (plus it's not like our bathroom is very private. You walk into our room and there it is.) The second is that I don't enjoy having an audience at all times, and so mama needs a real door that she can easily close and lock, when it's time to play hide and go seek a moment of sanity.

Our Princess Bride.

I'll just leave these here for your amusement.

Primed!

Well, the sheetrock is up, mudded, textured and primed. It's starting to look like a room again, instead of a desolate hole. They start in the shower tomorrow and then on to tiling. The good news is that the hall bathroom is going to take a lot less time, though obviously this entire project is taking more than the two weeks that Glen initially mentioned. It's worth it though, and especially worth being able to stay in the house while it happens - he says that it would be quicker if we could do both bathrooms at once, but trying to stay in a hotel with two kids for a week plus? And the cats? No thank you. I'll just live in this filthy hellhole for a little bit longer. It's a good thing I find vacuuming soothing.

Shower pan, all hot mopped and now filthy again

Kids Say the Darndest Things.

Things continue apace in the bathroom. The sheetrock is in and has been mudded and sanded, and if it's all dry tomorrow they will texturize and perhaps slap a coat of primer on. I am thinking of painting the walls gray, but I'll see how it looks with some tile in. Apparently they put up chicken wire and cement for the actual shower part. Fascinating!

In the meanwhile, poor Gigi is down with another round of grossness stemming from Thor biting her. Hopefully this antibiotic will help her kick it permanently. Or I will kick Thor in his stupid head. He's the biggest idiot.

Today St. Mimi stepped in and offered to have the kids hang at her house all day. I dropped them off in the morning, was able to run some errands, go running outside without having to stop to deal with stroller-bound pests, and then hung out and waited for the appliance repair guy to show, since apparently neglecting to change the filter on our fridge burnt out the motor in our ice maker. Yet another thing I have to remember to change on the regular. Change the oil, rotate the tires, put new batteries in the smoke detector, change the filter in the fridge, wear clean underwear EVERY DAY... being an adult is the worst.

I picked the kids up after nap time, where they reported having a wonderful day with their grandparents, and Ellie in fact whined for me to go away and leave them all alone. Except I had to take her over to check on Gigi, and eat tacos for Taco Tuesday. While we were there, I was able to dig out my wedding veil and so she made Grizz dance with her and be her handsome prince. When Tim arrived, she decided that they were BOTH her handsome prince and needed to get in the carriage with her so that they could go back to her castle. When they weren't dancing, of course. She also told me very seriously that since Gigi was sick, we needed to pray for her. Then she went and held Gigi's hands and stared VERY seriously into her eyes. She's such a sweet little thing.

Meanwhile, Adam is talking more and more every day. I especially love how he says airplane and how he points out the moon in the sky. The other day I told him to go over and say hi to Rocky, and he climbed up on the couch and started saying "hi wocky! Hi wocky!" Today he said it to Petunia as well, which is funny because he understands that our cats each have their own name. Apparently every cat who lives at Gigi's is Wocky.

Let There Be Light.

Things are moving on in our bathroom. They've taken down the beam and the ceiling, put framing in for the new ceiling, put in the new window (so glad we had the house painted less than a year ago, as they busted out the stucco!) and the electricity is ready to go. The plumber started today, getting set up for the new double sinks and all of the new plumbing, out of the slab.

Shower, now slightly wider

New window! Now centered in the room, and not actually in the shower area. Sorry neighbors, no more free shows of the top of Tim's head!

This is the sink that's going to be closet to the door. The other one looks much like this.

More important to me (at least) is the little things that we're doing to generally improve the house. Like having this total lunatic lamp put in our dining room, replacing the completely adequate chrome fixture.

I LOVE IT. It reminds me of this fantastic candelabra that my mom has. It's an antique (from the 60s, probably) called Italian tolle. And I bought it from an etsy seller in the Netherlands. It is so insane but also perfect. It makes a great statement (and that statement is, Meg is a weirdo.)

Another little fix. When we had the patio cover pulled down off of the side of the kitchen, we got a new fixture for the lamp on the left, and then very quickly realized that it doesn't actually provide enough light in the back yard, especially since the grill is right next to the chimney (and it's a gas grill, so we have to keep the grill near the hook up.) Quick trip to Home Depot (where thankfully, they still had the same matching fixture) and voila! No more excuses for overcooking the burgers.

Tomorrow, more plumbing. Saturday, hot mopping the floor. The idea is that once we get the master bath back to being operational (at least shower and toilet) they'll demo hall bathroom and start on the closets. It's nice to have one totally intact bathroom - we can at least keep all of our toiletries out of the way.

In For a Penny, In For a Pound.

That is my name for the bathroom renovation, currently going on in my master bathroom, and soon to spread throughout this entire house. The time had come for us to get going on it - our master bathroom was cheap and ugly and gross. And if we were going to do one bathroom, we might as well do the other one - worth it for the new plumbing alone. And then if we were going to redo the bathrooms, did we want new doors on them? And then, do we want new doors on all of the doors? And how about the linen cabinets - those should match, right? And new molding to tie everything together. Plus the brick around the fireplace is ugly, so why not get a remnant granite slab and fix that right up? And of course, then we'll need to paint and tidy.

In short, we might as well just burn the place down and start over! The good news is that the electrician found a big pile of loose wires jammed in the insulation in the attic, that they apparently just left there after the 1980s bathroom update, hoping nothing bad would come of it. Because the previous owners, not in for any more pennies than absolutely necessary. Why get something nice when you can have melamine cabinetry! (the good news in this situation is that our house has never actually started on fire.)

So, I am taking pictures all along the way. Yesterday was day one, and they ripped out the whole master. Today they've been putting in the new ceiling, the new wiring, and getting ready for the new window. Here is the bathroom as it was over the weekend:

Standing in the door way of bathroom. You can see that there is a long length of counter, which is taken up mostly by the high cabinets for storage. There is only one sink, so Tim and I are constantly waiting patiently/elbowing each other out of the way while getting ready for bed. Plus Thor really likes to drink from the sink, and spends most of his day shedding on the counter there. The red sink always looks dirty. The red handles do not really do anything, lookswise. Also, please notice the beam there - it's merely decorative, but runs all the way across the room.

Yup. Right across the front end of the shower. Tim's head just barely fits under it. But it's nice that if he wants to have a place to bang his head, he can. Plus, who doesn't want wood in their shower, just hanging out?

On the other side of the beam is a window that we never open. Also, in the rest of the bathroom the ceiling is dropped, because the code used to require a giant florescent light. For energy efficiency! So they built around the light and brought the ceiling down.

Toilet and more luxury bathroom fixtures. The funny thing is that apparently when they redid the bathroom, it was Mrs. Kay's "dream bathroom" and our neighbor told us that it featured a "red commode."

Yesterday when they started demo, they found the decorating scheme from the original bathroom. Unsurprisingly, they had just tiled over the old tile.

This is the sink area - there was once a small medicine cabinet, apparently.

Here's what's happening in the roof! Take down the ceiling, see into the attic! I found that particularly nuts.

The poor cats. Tim had the great idea of locking them in the pretty room and kitchen, because then we don't have to move their food or litter, and they're not in bothering the kids during nap time (Ellie is napping through the noise, Adam not so much.) Since there's really no place to hide in those rooms, I made them a blanket fort. Please notice Thor cowering behind Lulu. This morning I had to drag him out from under our bed. He completely ignored me trying to prod him out with a broom. Thankfully, when I carried him to cat prison, he didn't pee on me. The guys laughed at him though. Poor baby Thor, almost too stupid to live. Last night he kept meowing at the master bath, like "hey, I think it's time for you to brush your teeth and me to drink some water, so can you get it moving please?" So easily confused!

Some Videos.

Ellie loves watching cooking videos on YouTube, particularly ones called Nerdy Nummies (link HERE.) And recently I've caught her pretending to act out cooking videos on her own, and copying what she's heard Ro saying. Cracks me up.

Our other new fun this "holiday" season has been watching the Buddy the Elf musical cartoon. It's pretty cute - a claymation retelling of the movie Elf, complete with many many songs. So we've been watching it in the mornings, and then dancing to Mariah Carey when she comes on afterwards. Those two kids. I love them so.

Happy New Year!

The past week has been pretty relaxed around here, after the craziness of Christmas.

The kids have eaten a lot of meals outside in their new little house, ridden bikes, and run around like crazy people. We went out to sushi lunch and visited Ellie's apartment (JC Penny) and took down our tree, which means that now there are pine needles all over the house, which I will continue to sweep up until the next holiday season, when our new tree comes to join us.

Mostly we end up with nothing to do and all day to do it in, and so try not to go too stir crazy on each other. For New Years we hung out with some friends and their kids, and when we couldn't find a countdown either on live TV or netflix, we just started counting down loudly, told the kids it was the new year, and then stuffed them in their pajamas and headed home. This morning, the same group got back together to continue drinking (champagne, also great in a mimosa!) and the kids continued running around like loons. Ellie and Lex were very into the fact that they were the "big girls" and had to take care of the other kids. Happy New Year everyone!