I am sure most of you may have wondered where I have been and what I have been up too....I have been missing in action. I have been very busy the last couple of months and temporarily had a moment of insanity. Actually, work has been busier than ever and I have been going to conference after conference and going from one presentation to the next which has been great, but has kept me from blogging for two months. I also had to get my house ready for company coming for Thanksgiving and the week of Thanksgiving, began to deep clean, get rid of junk, and then while my husband was at work got the insane idea of redoing my bathroom....what was I thinking, I ripped it out with a neighbor friend and he said he could help me with the wiring once I realized that I had ran into trouble....truly, I was thinking I could finish the bathroom in one day HA, that is what I get for watching too many Trading Spaces....I will back up, Chris and I went out of town for my birthday on Nov. 22....I had gotten so busy with work and was sending out 1000 newsletters, and then 500 Christmas cards, so I took my work with me....and I think this is where the insanity took place....the morning that we were leaving to come back home, I awoke at 5am with the hair brained idea that I would do the guest bathroom as a surprise....not only for my husband, but for my family. I have lived in my log house for over 25 years and had gotten to the point that I was so sick of looking at brown walls, and I wanted color in my house....after having 6 kids and lots of renters for a 5 year period, I was really embarrassed of the way the guest bathroom looked, and wanted to destroy it....So I did it, I ripped everything out with such passion....once I did it, thinking it would be a one day job, reality hit and I realized it would be longer and that my husband would kill me, I lost it....I cried and cried and cried....my friend Kim came over and had to console me and let me literally cry on her shoulder while she was in her nightgown (Thank you Kim for being such a great friend), she had just gotten back from China and hadn't been gone long and still came to my rescue....she helped me clean the mess that I had made all over the house and clean up while I bawled like a baby.
My husband came home and had the reaction that I knew he would, he was in shock and couldn't believe what I had just done....but what could I do, they had already cut the bathtub in half t get it out the door and all of the wood was torn into and thrown on a trailer out front....he couldn't believe it....he did get over the shock and our neighbor Ryan has been a God send stepping in and helping with all of the plumbing, wiring and everything....Chris didn't know how to do any of it, so Ryan stepped in and became our hero....my husband was in awe of his kindness, and generosity to take so much time out of his busy schedule to come and rescue us....he was here everyday for a week, putting things together....we realized the wiring and the plumbing had been put in all backwards and if you look in one of the pictures, you can see that the electrical box was right behind our shower, what a fire hazard that was for 25 years had we had a leak, we would have been toast.
Here are just some of the before pictures. This is where the ugly blue tub was at one time.
This is the ugly stuff that was under the tub....if you can see in the dirt, little black specks, there are hundreds of crickets....someone tell me how they go there.
This is where the ugly vanity had set....and you can see where we started breaking down the mirror that had been stuck up there with liquid glue for 25 years, it was barely coming down.
Here is the vanity right before it is pulled out, the blue sink had already been taken out.
Can you see the electrical box right beside the shower pipe? Doesn't that scare you to death, well it did me when I saw it too.
The blue tub that was cut in half in order to get out of the door.
One of the reasons that I wanted to redo our bathroom is that it had three doors going into it, one from the kitchen, one from the hallway and one from the office....we were losing space in all three rooms. I was so tired of having to close all three doors every time someone was over....and I know that company was tired of it too....so I closed up the holes where the two doors were and just left the one in the hallway, now I will admit, it is hard getting used to not being able to cut through to take my clothes to the laundry room and I have to now walk all the way around if I want to put something in the washer and the trash, but I love being able to have one door now to the bathroom....what started out as a one day job (how stupid was that) turned out to be a 4 week job....one of the contractor's that I hired to do the sheet rock finished up yesterday and after I post this, I am going to paint so that our friend Ryan can come back tomorrow to help with the tub surround and then we will be starting on laying the tile....I had been scraping up the flooring as well and I can't tell you how tired and sore my body has been....especially between my shoulder blades, but here is the bathroom finally taking shape. It has doubled in size because of the two doors missing and now a couch will fit in it, not that we will put one in it, but we could if we wanted too, and for the first time in 25 years, I will have color and sheet rock in my house....it will be the only room in our house that will look modern and have paint. I will post all my Christmas decorations later and you will see what I mean by no paint....for any of you that may live in a log house or are thinking about living in a log house, talk to a few women that have lived in a log home for 25 years first before you make that decision. Most of the women I know need color and I am one of them. This is the new tub with green board behind it now and the toilet will go on the other side of the wall.
This awful linoleum that had holes all in it is what I am scraping up....I should have strong back and shoulder muscles after this is over with.
This is the toilet area, the window is covered up from the spraying of the texture. To the right of the toilet, is where one of the doors used to be....in fact, you could pull the door to the toilet and hide yourself.
This is where the other door was beside the tub. Doing this not only created more space in our bathroom, it created more room in the laundry room as well as the office.
This is the hallway door....now the only door that we have....YEAH!!!!
This is just a corner of the wall....when my dad built our house, he covered up one two of the sockets that we had in the bathroom and I had forgotten about it until I broke down the mirror into a million pieces, it is a good thing that I am not superstitious, otherwise I would have never taken down the mirrow and found the new plugs....for 25 years, we had no plugs for blow dryers, we ran a small extension cord from the office to the bathroom....isn't that sad....we did this with 3 girls and 3 boys.....I can't believe that we lived through that. Ryan created 3 new plugs for me and one of them is on the opposite wall for a vanity for the girls when they visit. They will cry when they see it and know that they could have had that years ago.
Before I close this blog, I wanted to say a HUGE Thank you to my blogging buddy Carolyn, from Diva's Purple Diary....she sent this CD of Casting Crowns whom I absolutely love to me for Christmas, what a great gift and so special, because we have never met....we have just gotten to know each other via the blogging and I love her....she is so precious....in fact, Chris is trying to qualify for his third World Championship race for next year and it is in Charlotte NC and I am hoping that he makes it so that I can meet up with Carolyn in person. You can bet that I will be listening to this CD everyday....I love Christmas music and I love Casting Crowns, they are one of my absolute favorites (did I mention that already). Thank you Carolyn
As if that wasn't enough Carolyn also sent me this goodie package for my birthday. I tube of candied almonds and I had already eaten half of them before I actually took the picture....I love them and they are my husband's absolute favorite candy and it has been so hard to keep them from him....so that is why I went ahead and ate the whole tube before he could get to them.....I think I am a pig. She also sent me the Christmas ornaments and I have the perfect place for them, and I will show you where I put them when I post all my Christmas decorations throughout the house....I love Christmas and I love ornaments even more....I go crazy in getting new ones to my collection every year....I am slowly building up my collection and can outfit 3 trees now throughout my house. One upstairs, one downstairs and a small one in the kitchen, but these were too special and they didn't go on the tree....I put them somewhere else and I can't wait to be able to post all of those pictures as well. She also sent a nice leather key chain and Lord knows that I need it....I think Carolyn has been to my house before to see how many keys I have to carry around....I didn't have a key chain and I can never find them in my purse, now I can....Thank you Carolyn, it is like you really knew me or had actually been to my house to see what my favorite things were. I have missed all of you and I am hoping that I can get back into the blogging again very soon....this is a start....I will finish posting pictures of the bathroom when it is completed hopefully the first part of next week or later in the week, and then post the pictures of all the Christmas decorations as well. Love you all and thank you for being so patient with me.
If you can see the difference here....there is a little of the dark on top.....I mixed the white and the dark together and actually got the color that I was going for the first time....this picture still doesn't allow you to really see the true color due to the lighting in the bathroom....the window is closed and there is one small light.
Late at night and still painting....I am working on retouching the ceiling.
What is more fun than painting your ceiling pink? Nothing, except making your son think it is going to stay pink....it is the kind of paint that goes on pink so that you can tell where you have painted, but turns a bright white....it was so much fun making him think I was painting it pink though....I finally had to fess up and tell him the truth....because he was getting upset. Can you tell why my neck hurts so much lately. This is the third and fourth coat I have painted.
Trying to look happy while painting....but hurting like a dog (not sure how a dog hurts, but I bet it feels something like me right now)....I was also bending down painting the wall and all of a sudden, I don't know what happened, I just fell into it....and screamed....the texture scraped my forearm and my knuckles.....Chris and my mom were home and came running thinking that my grandbaby had gotten hurt or had gotten into the paint.....no, I just fell for no reason at all. Got paint all in my hair and arm, then had to repaint it all over again.
I forgot to mention what I had been doing all day today.....I went to go get the ceiling paint out of my car this morning and when I opened the door, the gallon fell out all over the black asphalt driveway.....I spent all day trying to get it up....I washed my dustpan and brush that went with it and scooped up all of the paint and put it back into the can....and I still used it.....I washed and scrubbed the asphalt in 30 degree weather....and freezing. I then had to get our water hose with a sprayer and wash all of the driveway....the water came out of the sprayer two ways, one way on me getting me soaked and the other onto the driveway.....it took me awhile to warm up after that. Glad to know there is no more paint on the driveway though....I had a mess to clean up inside and out....I had tracked paint all through the house from the bottom of my shoes. I had to rest after all of that hard work. So that is what I have been doing all day. I pray this is finished by Christmas.
