Projects

There's been a lot of stuff going on here these last few days, which is why I haven't been writing much. But it's time I started telling you about it!

The oldest thing is probably that we finished working on our downstairs bathroom (for now). It's still a very small and claustrophobic little bathroom, but at least it is no longer scary and dirty and claustrophobic! Now it feels very clean and functional. I'll put up the before and after pictures to prove my point...


So this is the original ugliness:

Why, why, why in a bathroom this small would you use such busy wallpaper? It's just awful! And it looks like a Subway restaurant. I like Subway, but it's not how I want my bathroom to look...

(It's hard to see, but trust me, that shower was disgusting. But nice of them to leave their shampoo and soap behind for us, don't you think?)

Anyway, Craig ripped out the wallpaper, replaced the toilet with a slightly smaller one, replaced the broken tile in the shower, cleaned the shower like crazy, and painted the bathroom white. I helped with the painting a little, when the kids were napping, and also cleaned the sink and the inside of the medicine cabinet (which was really gross-- why would there be little tiny hairs inside a medicine cabinet? Was someone trimming their mustache inside it??? Ew, ew, ew!). And then Craig put up new towel racks and stuff like that.

So here it is now:

Oops-- forgot to use the flash for this picture... It isn't really this yellow.

Whew! Doesn't that just feel better somehow?

Anyway, so that's one project done. For now. Some day we need to bump out one of the walls, and possibly move the toilet closer to the wall, but that requires a whole lot more work than what we wanted to bother with right now. We just wanted it functional.

The other project was a bit unexpected: our oven died on Saturday, so we suddenly had a rather more urgent project to take on. (Thank goodness for my crockpot, since we were having company on Sunday!!!) But Craig was able to find a new oven on Craig's List (gotta love it) for less than half the price of what one would have cost at Home Depot or Lowe's. We picked it up yesterday (which, thanks to DC traffic took three hours, but that's a different story), and then after the kids were in bed, Craig installed it. I did help hold it up while Craig was connecting all the wiring, but it was pretty much his show. And I think the entire operation of taking out the old unit, carrying the new one into the house, and installing it took less than twenty minutes.

Who does that? I would have had to hire someone!

Anyway, I was impressed with Craig. And it's nice having a new oven, even if it is just as small as the previous one (that's the problem with wall units-- you can't sporadically change sizes, it turns out!). If you'd seen what the previous owners had done to the oven, you'd be glad, too. When my mother-in-law cleaned it out, she found old chicken bones inside it! And I'm not even going to tell you what was climbing around inside the control panel. (Shudder.) That's probably why it stopped working, though...!

But no more! We have a lovely new oven, and I made bread in it just now, so it works wonderfully!

So check those two projects off the list.