May 2005

May 23, 2005: Well, we kind of managed to somehow miss most of May, too, apparently. Awfully sorry about that. We always try to update regularly, and we keep promising not to leave you all hanging for long, but somehow time manages to get away from us.

Though you may think we've been complete and total slugs for the last couple of months, nothing could be further from the truth. We've been doing lots of stuff... just not stuff that has anything to do with our languishing hall bathroom renovation. So here's what we've been doing for the last eight weeks instead of working on our bathroom:

-- We catered a three-course dinner for 70 as a fundraiser for a local non-profit organization

-- The Kilted One served as auctioneer for another fundraiser for a local school

-- I served as MC for a 150 seat religious ceremony

-- We took our daughter to lots of birthday parties, a spring May Fair, and her dance recital

-- We had lots of dinners with friends where we ate a lot and drank even more

-- We opened our pool

-- We ran a 10 K trail race through the nature preserve down the road from our house (I was slow, the Kilted One got lost)

-- We took a long weekend to eat and drink ourselves silly and party it up in Chicago

and... and... and, well, that's about it. It looks so much more substantial when it's written down as a list like that, and so much less a string of excuses to avoid working on, or even talking about, our Horribly. Dreadfully. Boring. Bathroom Renovation.

Because really, that's the problem. The bathroom renovation is Boring. Just like our six year old daughter says about her spelling homework-- it's BoringBoringBoringBoringBO-ring!

Maybe it's us, maybe we should know better than to do two bathrooms back-to-back, maybe we've just got spring fever and don't feel like working inside, but these days, it seems as if we have to spend one more minute in that bathroom, we will ultimately end up locked in a very small room, writing letters home with Crayolas.

We have made some progress, in small increments. We finished up the plumbing, built the tub surround, set the tub, and got the drywall and Hardibacker up:

In small chunks of time on succeeding weekends, we finished the drywall, got the waterproofing membrane painted on up the tub surround, and got the walls primed and painted:

The walls look good, and the sky blue paint color we chose for the bathroom looks great. Of course, the next step is tiling the tub surround, and just our luck, right when we'd rather be anywhere but in this bathroom, we've planned a very fussy diagonal layout with a dual stripe detail two-thirds of the way up.

We started working on it very briefly Sunday afternoon:

And though nothing went dreadfully wrong, we just were not in the mood for cutting and placing itty bitty tile pieces in bizarre little geometric configurations. Blame the state of public schools and the general quality of tenth grade geometry classes, but our brains hurt from the effort, the weather was beautiful, and friends of ours were having drinks in their backyard.

Hmmm... what to do... What To Do? Difficult decision, we know, but since our brief foray into the start of the tiling job rendered us tethered with only the slenderest of strings to normal, well-socialized behavior, we bagged the tile to go have a beer.

Eh. The beer was good, the company was even better, and there's always next weekend to drag us kicking and screaming back into that 7 x 12 hellhole that is the bathroom. Alternatively, there is the perfect late Spring weather here in the MidAtlantic, sunny, breezy, crystal clear skies in the 70's, and... the exterior of the house still needs a massive amount of painting.

Stay tuned to see which project wins out...

return to journal index / continue to next month

home / about us / gallery / journal / links / mail