I miss having a toilet.

Downstairs, that is.

Anyway, we're in the midst of a bathroom remodel, by necessity.

The sink didn't drain (we've had that fixed now), and the toilet was about as bad as it could be.

It sucked, but only figuratively.
It rocked, but only literally.

The toilet had to go. And since the floor around it was soft, we ended up in the "while we're at it..." mindset.

Now, everything will be new except the medicine cabinet. I can't wait.

Nine Years Ago

...

I married Bob.

July 7, 2002.

I blogged a little about the wedding weekend last year. And followed it up with a (not comprehensive) list of why I married him.

This year, I'll show you something Bob's doing for me.

I've learned that one of my love languages is home improvement. Bob's speaking my language:


In case that's unrecognizable in the picture, Bob's working on our downstairs half bath. Our friend Fritz has been gutting it, and now Bob's working on eliminating the texture from the walls. (We really love smooth old plaster walls.) And he's working with a toddler in his lap, who desperately wants to be involved.

I love this man.

Happy anniversary, Bob. Nine years, and I pray for many, many more.

I am in love...

with these house numbers.

And, lucky for me, Bob bought them for me for Christmas! I can't wait for them to be "installed" ...

When we bought the house, there was a cheap plaque on the wall of the front porch. It had the four digits of our house number, but off-center, like perhaps it had been purchased, on clearance, and had originally had five digits, and they knocked off the last one? Maybe they just installed them off-center. I don't know. But this is the third house for which I've itched to get nice house numbers, and actually attach them to THE HOUSE.

At our first house, we did replace the house numbers, but Bob put them on a (painted) piece of wood which hung by our front door. I really wanted numbers that were big enough to be seen easily from the street, and that were intended to be screwed into the wood over the front porch, or wherever.

After we had this house painted, the plaque has just been leaning on the front steps ... tripping people as they walk, unsuspecting, down the stairs, and confusing the UPS guy, who doesn't come here frequently enough to know our house number. I've seen him slow down, peering at the neighbors' houses on either side, trying to discern what our house number might be.

We can no longer direct people to our house by saying, it's the house after the curve, with the plywood on the side. Soon, we'll be able to simply tell people our address. What a luxury!

Soon, and very soon.

(The house numbers are available from Rejuvenation.)

The Sunroom

We're not done with it yet; Bob does not like the color I chose for the room, so it will probably get repainted, but it's still progress. I did not like the yellow.

Here's the before:

And here's the after:

Next up: changing out this light fixture. Not my style.

Surprise visitor

I was just sitting at my computer, and I happened to see some movement out of the corner of my eye.

Looks like we have a new guy in the neighborhood.

Well, hello, Mr. Possum.

Yes, that's a hay bale. Yes, I live in town. It's my neighbor's, and I'm not sure what its purpose is, but hey, my neighbor probably wonders why we don't do something about our garage.

I'm not sure this picture captures how much the garage leans. It does seem to capture the ugly insulation "curtain" on the door, the unlandscaped foundation, the drooping downspout and gutters, its unpainted siding. (It is painted, of course, but we didn't paint it when we had the house painted. It makes more sense to straighten and reinforce the building first, then paint it.)

Projects, projects. It's very difficult to prioritize.

Crunch Time

So we've asked our priest to come bless our house tomorrow. And then, we decided to make it a house blessing/open house. We've invited people from church, people we work with (or in my case, used to work with), former neighbors, other friends, etc.

I really thought that hosting such an event might give us added motivation to finish some projects. And it did -- just not the ones I was hoping for.

I tried and tried to find a rug for the foyer. Without a rug, it really feels unfinished. And it is. Actually, it's unstarted. While my parents were here, we went to TJ Maxx (thanks for the tip, Allison!) and found two rugs I liked. I bought them and brought them home, knowing I could return them if Bob didn't like them. And he didn't. But he was willing to live with them if a) we agreed they were temporary, and b) I liked them. So we agreed to live with them. But then, all through the night, the rugs kept coming into my dreams, and I was stewing over them, and finally I realized that I wasn't as wild about them as I'd thought. You know how sometimes something you didn't like grows on you? (Awkward sentence, I know.) Well, I experienced the opposite effect with these rugs. They shrank on me, if you will.

Sorry to talk so much about rugs. There are so many things more important than rugs, and yet, in my Project Coziness, I'd like to get this "right." And no, I don't mean to imply that there's one rug that's right for my foyer. One of many, I'm sure, I just need to find them.

I fell for this PB Kids rug. I really like it, and Bob likes it, too. And if we decided it was too bold for the foyer, it would be a great kids' room rug.

Cute, right? Except then I discovered that the rug is not one even height. It's textured.

So that rug's out. It's just not the one for us.

Anyway, so we won't have a soft rug in the foyer tomorrow night, but we will (drumroll, please) have a bath/shower that's no longer missing a tile! Thank you, Bob. I don't know how long that tile has been missing, but it was missing when we moved in (13 months ago), and hallelujah, Bob fixed it last night. The tile doesn't totally match (it's a slightly different shade of white), but I told Bob that what might be an eyesore to other people is beautiful to me.

Other projects to finish before tomorrow night at 8 (and if you're local, you're invited!) include installing some kind of lock on the downstairs bathroom door. It freaks me out when there's no lock on the bathroom door ... except in my own house, of course. But for everyone else, I'd like for them to not be worried that someone might walk in on them. Because that's never fun.

Kitchen progress: there hasn't been any. I did fill two holes with a product called Great Stuff. (Should I be in marketing? Because even I could replicate that thought process. What should we call this stuff? It's really great stuff. Oh, I know, let's call it Great Stuff!) And I did do some sanding. But there's a lot more to this kitchen project, so even though Bob's in Chicago today, I'm not going to surprise him with any more house projects when he comes home.

I did set up a table and chairs in the foyer, and I can't make up my mind about it. Does it look good? Bad? Weird? I think Bob's leaning toward weird. But I don't like having an empty room for people to walk into, especially when we have some furniture to work with in the basement and attic. So, there's a table & chairs in there.

Is this too weird? Is it okay? I don't know.

Kitchen Progress

I'm not sure it's fair to call this "progress." It seems misleading.

Bob was out of town today, at a meeting in Chicago. He left early, and he'll get home late. So I took the opportunity to start destroying (I mean improving!) our kitchen.

Here's my arsenal.


We have this horrible (HORRIBLE) fake tile that is glued & nailed to the wall, and it goes up six feet from the floor. Have I mentioned that it's horrible?

Well, it's gone. And now I have to repair the damage.

This is mid-way through. You can see 1) the glue I still needed to scrape off. 2) The fake tile on the right. 3) The real tile backsplash and countertop that I despise. I hate the stuff. Hate it. 4) The peach-painted fake-stucco that was applied to mask the poorly installed drywall that doesn't quite sit flush with the drywall it's next to. They applied this stucco to much of the room. It scrapes easily off of drywall, but not so easily off plaster.


Here's how it looks now. I've scraped all the fake stucco that I can get off, and the next step, Bob tells me (when I confessed over the phone what I've been up to today) is to use a drywall screen on the rest of it.


Now, the challenge will be to follow through and finish the project. I like the big-results tasks, like pulling something down. The scraping, patching, priming, etc., are not so fun for me.

Do you think Bob will just swoop in and finish it for me? Probably not.

New Year's Resolution

I hereby resolve to post on my blog more frequently than every three months. Happy 2010!

In other news, we celebrated our first Christmas in our current house (we had moved in by Christmas 2008, but we spent the actual day in TN with my parents), and it was great fun. I got up at the crack of dawn ... well, actually, before the crack of dawn, to make cinnamon rolls, and Bob got up when they were almost done baking so that he could build a fire in the fireplace.


We had two Christmas trees this year, about ten feet away from each other. A little silly, maybe, but tree #2 was on clearance, and I really wanted one of the trees to be visible from the street. I love white Christmas lights, and I enjoyed making the house look festive: icicle lights on the front porch, wreaths with red bows & white lights on the dormer windows of the attic, and two Christmas trees. (Note to self: try to take a good picture of the house in the evening when it's all lit up.) (Yes, the house is still fully decorated for Christmas. As fun as decorating is, un-decorating is not so much.)


House progress? Well, when we moved in, just over a year ago, three of the four windows on the landing of the stairs were broken. And now ... they have new glass, and Bob installed them this past weekend. Hallelujah! Who lives with broken windows for a year? Well, apparently we do.


We also, apparently, are the sort of people who live with holes in the wall, and gaping holes in the ceilings. And a bedroom door that's missing the panel right at eye level. It's funny -- these defects are glaringly obvious, yet when you live with them for a while (like, a year), you start to forget they're there. Until people come over, and then you start hitting yourself in the head and thinking, good grief, why haven't we dealt with these things yet? Oh yes ... because these things cost money. While there seems to be no limit to my imagination of things we could do to our home, there are distinct limits to what we can pay to do to our home, at least for now.




I feel obligated to post these embarrassing pictures of my home, since I received some really nice comments about how the house looks on Facebook. Here's the way it really looks.

Progress

So, when we bought this house last December, this is what it looked like:



And, finally, the siding is all one color! (Or mostly; there's one small area that needs to be patched and repainted. But still, it's so much better!) (Oops, I just realized that the dormer window on the attic is only primed. It still needs to be painted, too.) Next up: painting trim, soffits, windows, etc. That will be a big job -- and it probably won't happen anytime soon.



Please note: new shingles on roof, new gutters and downspouts, new chimney. And, of course, new siding, where there once was only plywood.

Future project: the kitchen. I love this kitchen. I really do. But the canary yellow? It's not really my style. And tile countertops -- do-it-yourself tile countertops -- are not so good for my style of cooking and baking. As in, I like to roll out pie crusts, cookie dough, biscuit dough, etc., right on the counter. That doesn't work with a tile-and-grout countertop. Plus, it's hard to clean. And we have a fake-tile backsplash that goes halfway up the walls. Gag. Puke. I really don't like it.


And... they didn't finish the edges! Yuck. Nothing like a tile countertop with raw cut edges of tile, and the visible plywood underneath.


What I love about the kitchen is the space, and the potential for my dream kitchen. Other than that, there's almost no detail I like. The cabinets are low-quality, and we're pretty sure they were salvaged from some other kitchen. (Not that I'm opposed to that ... if it works. These are jury-rigged.) The vinyl flooring is scratched, stained, ugly, and unfinished. And it's pretty irritating that the floor doesn't look good, even minutes after sweeping and mopping. I do like the windows. This kitchen gets good light, and that's really important to me, as a SAD-sufferer.

What I have in mind is something more like this:



The good news is, the kitchen is totally functional, so I can make my grandmother's bread recipe and make the house smell fantastic. I'm satisfied.