and so am I in this picture.
So what have I been up to the last couple of weeks while not updating my blog? Well I have been nurturing a kitten:
There was no coercion for her to do this at all. She chooses to lay like this because she is the baby, who happens to be a four-year old cat.
We have also been planning, and preparing for my sister Erica's Birthday Bash, which will be held at our house. I can't believe she will be 13. I mean I can believe it, I was there when she was born, but it's so weird to think of AmErica as a teenager. Mostly it's been the normal buying candy, making invites type of stuff, but today we broke out the slip'n'slide to give it a test run before the big day. It was a lot of fun! Here is a video of Erica trying it out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idHenvxSgUE&w=400
But the majority of our time has been completing a very daunting task which seems to have taken five months to complete, but in reality has only taken about two weeks, and that project is......(pause for dramatic effect)........... THE BATHROOM.
When we first moved back to Hiawassee two years ago the bathroom was the first project we took on. A lot of the work was shoddy at best and I never really liked it, but was un-willing to redo it, especially after just having finished the basement project in March. That is until I started smelling mold. Every time I would take a shower I would smell mold, so I thought it was coming from in the shower where I had tiled. So after finding a $50 shower surround at the big orange which had been marked down from $500, we decided to take down the tile. This was a process in itself, since the old plumbing wasn't long enough for the new shower surround and we had to call in reinforcements to sweat the pipes to make it longer. Look Honey, I'm using plumbing lingo.
So we took hammers to the tiled walls and beat the crap out of them, cut ourselves with broken tile, revealed the backer-board and NO MOLD! Cue Paul's triumphant "I told you there was no mold" gloating, and after that whole drama we called it a done project.
Then a few days later we decided that while we had some steam left we should go ahead and re-do the bathroom floor, since we bought tile for it back in September '10. So we borrowed the tile cutter from my parents and cut the 12x12 tiles down to 12x8 tiles because we wanted to create a subway tile look. Don't worry the additional 4x12 pieces are not being wasted they are being cut down into 4x6 pieces for above the newly installed shower surround. This part of the project, which we were dreading actually went quite quickly. I think it only took us 1-2 hours. After cutting the tiles we did a dry run (well actually two) just to make sure that we liked the tiles and also it helped us decide whether we wanted to run them horizontal or vertical in the bathroom.
So then all we had to do was break up the floor tiles, lay down the new tile, do a little Irish jig while singing *yay we finished the bathroom* and be done with it right? Yeah, not us.
We somehow talked ourselves into ripping down the luan which was at the time covering the top half of the wall, which revealed 40 year old dry-wall. WHAT? Our entire house, every single room is done with wood paneling. Dry-wall in the bathroom? What? I will say it was a welcome surprise because we figured with a little bit of patch work and some paint it would look really nice. But then we looked at the bead-board we had put on the bottom of the bathroom and guess what, we no longer liked the height of it. So that came down next which revealed more dry-wall. Then as we were standing in nasty 40 year old dry-wall dust in 98 degree GA heat with no air, Paul said the following, "I'm thinking we should just rip it all down and get moisture resistant dry-wall to put in here." I had to agree. So we started ripping out the dry-wall, and as we got to the lower portion of it we discovered mold. Good choice made. Paul and Michelle: 1 Mold: 0
Anyway our very short simple bathroom project turned into our very long, two week bathroom project where one of those weeks we had no toilet or sink upstairs. There was not a surface that we didn't touch and everything in the bathroom with the exception of the bath tub is new, including a vent fan which Paul did all the wiring for. He also replaced a couple of wonky light switches and added a junction box for the light above the vanity because there wasn't one before, it was just wires sticking out of the wall. Yeah scary, messy stuff.
Here are the 99% completed bathroom pictures:
Oh and one other really big change was made in the bathroom. We turned our sink 90 degrees so it now rests on the same wall as the toilet. To do this we changed no plumbing and honestly it was done as an after thought after the floor and dry-wall had been finished. All we did was drill holes in the side of the vanity and buy new supply lines. If you never saw our bathroom before, this won't be a big deal, but if you did see the vanity before you know how wonky and out of place it felt. Well now it fits in:
I know this is kind of a bragging post, but what can I say my husband who did most of the work by himself does an awesome job!
