bathroom mudding

Yesterday Doug told me one of his friends was coming over to work on our bathroom, um, yes please! Doug has been doing all the mudding, I haven't done anything yet! So for the mere trade of some breakfast, and we're getting pizza for lunch, our bathroom is getting the 2nd (or 3rd) layer of mud as I type.

I used some kale from my garden

made an omelet from eggs from my nursing school friend's chickens and side of oven potatoes

Yes ladies, he's single.

But seriously, he is one of Doug's friends I really like and is super friendly and a nice guy. Unfortunately he's in between jobs now (hope he can find something soon!) but the good part of that is he's spending the morning working with us out of the kindness of his heart, thank you!

And good for me as I maybe can skip this mudding step, and then I'll be back in for priming/painting. We still have a ways to go with tiling the floor and replacing the toilet, then all the little things like re-trimming everything, but maybe 1/3 done?

This afternoon sometime Doug and I are headed up for a quick camping weekend. I just want to get away for a little bit. So some sitting by the fire, sleeping out under the stars, and plain ol' sleeping in, sounds wonderful. There is some kind of hot air balloon festival thing nearby tomorrow so we might do that too, or a little kayak, we'll see! Kinda nice having no plans :)

let there be light

Doug has been working putting up the drywall in the bathroom, and this last weekend he installed our new light fixture.

I really liked these clear seeded glass shades, except you could see some 3-4 inches of the lighting element, so I didn't really like that look

so we took those back to Lowes and got different shades, let there be different light!

(apparently I have different wattage bulbs in there)

I'm almost done with the repainting of the bathroom cabinets and we got a new top for our vanity. I had planned on saving the old one, but when we put it on the newly painted white vanity, the top looked really off-white, creamy colored and it had some dings that were bugging me anyway. So we found a new top at Menards.

The next step is the mudding and sanding of the drywall, we are planning to follow this YHL blog post, but let me just say I am not looking forward to it!

Other things around here, Doug and I went with some friends to the dream cruise this weekend, it was a HOT day! But we had fun with friends.

I have a sunflower bloom at last!

So tall! (our fence is about 6 ft and it is still taller than that) It actually looks a little droopy now though, hang in there sunflower!

I picked this cucumber, I had been waiting weeks to see if it would get bigger. Then I cut it up for Doug and I and it was so disgusting, I think those weeks I waited for it to get bigger it was just slowly rotting inside. It tasted sour and rancid, EW!

It finally is growing some more little friends, so this time I will pick them asap.

I had some time to relax in the hammock this weekend with this fancy chocolate Liz got me for my birthday. I finished my book club book, The Historian. It was good in the way that I did want to read and see what would happen, but when I was done I wasn't super happy that I'd invested all that time reading a 600+ page meh book. Not worth it.

Also for my birthday I got a new Jillian kickbox DVD and I did it this morning. Mixed feelings... I liked the music, I liked that Jillian wasn't super annoying and yelling as she is in her other videos, I liked that this time a "20 minute workout" was actually 20 minutes instead of 5 mins warm up, 20 mins workout, 3 min cool down. Plus one of her other dvds makes you watch this unskippable intro EVERYTIME. So that was good. I didn't love that it was only 20 minutes. I am a half hour exercise kinda girl. So I did 2 out of the 3 workouts together. I also didn't like that there are 8 some extra girls in the background. All I need is Jillian, and a beginner modifier girl and advanced modifier girl. I don't need all these extra back ups who are sometimes doing things wrong and just yelling and shouting unnecessarily. The last thing I didn't like about this dvd is that she doesn't switch legs at all! She does 2 sets of exercises so it seems like set 1 should be right leg, set 2 left. But she does both sets on the same leg. I hate that. Overall, the workout seemed pretty decent, seriously, how hot does she keep that room that those poor girls are dripping in sweat?! But I did feel a good hammy burn after all the kicks, and it was ok cardio.

(found those ratings online)

bathroom remodel stage 1

This weekend our bathroom remodel began. I like a lot of stuff about our little house, but I have never liked the bathroom. Especially the shower and walls in the room.

There was a cave-like shower with a dropped ceiling in there.

here is the before (besides that hole Doug bashed in to see what was behind there)

the workers

tear down that wall!

more open already

looks like there was a window once upon a time in there

what was under our grey vinyl floor? another vinyl floor of course!

dad hard at work

oh hey! you guys are doing something in there!?!

whatcha guys doing?

what's in there?

would ya look at that

peek a boo!

I can come in?

As with any home project we ran into some problems. We knew there was mold in our crawl space, Doug hired his brother this spring to go down there and spray some mold chemical. So that worked, but right under the tub his brother found a spot that had water/mold damage and needed to be replaced. So we were thinking that was going to be super expensive and were trying to figure out how to jack up the tub to get under there. (we planned on keeping the tub, just getting a new surround). But Doug and Dad figured out they could cut a chunk of the floor out and just replace that section. So that was great news!

oh hi!

Dad even had a section of some old pipe organ pipe he could use for the wood so we saved money on that too :)

this is what I always wondered about our ugly weird plastic-y walls. Mystery solved- they had just painted over the strange wall tile! well it's coming down

new drywall

they spent the entire holiday weekend on this project, including the 4th while I was at work

One of the days was spent almost entirely working on this plumbing issue. I don't know the details, but it was looking like we had to call a plumber. But then Dad and Doug went over to Lowe's and I guess problem solved with them until they figured out something that would work! Right now there is a tiny drip by the elbow joint, so it's not perfect yet, and we ran out of time. Now both mom and dad, and me & Doug are going on vacation, so the rest of the project will have to wait! At least we have a somewhat functional tub, no shower tho.

to be continued....