Nuthin’ but an H thang, Baybay…

I’m happy to say that the bathroom remodel is really close to being done-done. Adam will install the speakers for the TV and I’ll do some touch-up painting, but we’re otherwise finito. I’m even happier to say that the TV crew is done with us! They don’t know when the show will air yet, but they’re guessing August-ish. I promise we’ll let everyone know when we get the deets (unless we look like idiots, then I’ll pretend I didn’t see it and change my name and move to…Idaho).

Since we’re so close to being done with the bath and because I’m crazy, I have another small project in the works: Home Gym. The Futon Room is no more! We moved the futon to Audra & Donnie’s new place last weekend (is that a weird housewarming gift?), where it now lives in their lovely guestroom/office. This opened up a nice big hole in the Futon Room for workout gear. I already have an ab/back hyper bench and some small weights in there, as well as a couple of exercise balls (stop snickering). I’m getting a treadmill from my Daddio – for free even! – and I’m on the hunt for an elliptical machine and a weight training gym. Other than outfitting the room with various pieces of equipment, I also have a master plan to extend the wood flooring from the hallway into this room.

I’m getting tired just thinking about it.

The BATHtastic! crew arrived at 7:30am on Tuesday and didn’t leave the house until after 10:30 that night. It was a loooong day of shooting.

At the end of the day, the bathroom was nearly done:

1. Sadly, the backsplash shattered into 1,000 pieces while our contractor was trying to shave it down to fit the wall-mounted faucet. Not his fault really, since the faucet specs weren’t followed by the glass company. The good news is that we’ll have a new one next Thursday. I can’t wait.
2. The vanity didn’t quite fit the plumbing needs, so it too has to be messed with some more before we can use the sink. Plus, there’s no drain yet because I bought the wrong kind. Rats. A plumber will be stopping in tomorrow.
3. Oh, and no one realized it until we unboxed the TV mirror, but we have to install in-wall speakers. That information would have been helpful when they were dealing with the sheetrock. Now we have to figure something out (and when I say “we”, I mean “Adam”).
4. Finally, there’s some trim work that needs to be finished off in the closet and hallway…and then it’s really, actually complete.

Looking beyond our short list of final tasks, I absolutely love the result of the design. The way it came together was simply amazing. Thinking back on it, I had a bit of a hard time visualizing how all of the pieces would fit. Normally I’m good at picturing how things will look together as I pick them out, but I didn’t get too deep into all of the details on this project and it ended up being a very fun surprise.

Next week and over the weekend, we have to participate in some “lifestyle” shots. Basically, they want to shoot us in our natural habitat(s) to describe who we are for the show. They plan to play up the geek angle for Adam by shooting some of his Retro Gaming party this weekend. For me, they’ll stage me shooting photos someplace outdoors. We tossed around ideas for capturing our work-lives…which quickly deteriorated into me drawing a unicorn-like creature on a whiteboard. Should be entertaining, anyway.

Unfortunately I didn’t accomplish quite as much as I’d hoped last night. I was able to finish painting the one lovely remaining corner of the basement, which was a painstaking job. When trying to cut in red next to 2 walls of a light sandstone color, you have two choices: go fast and have it look as if a little kid painted out of the lines, or go slow and steady to achieve a nice strong line in the corners. I chose the latter, so it took forever.

Moving upstairs, I was able to get the hallway primered and most of the bathroom. I only have 1&1/2 walls left in the bathroom and I think it’ll go quickly.

My goals for today are:

- Finish the primer in the bathroom
- Paint the hallway and the bathroom
- Stain/poly the trim Adam picked up from Home Depot (he’s responsible for cutting and installing it)
- Stain/super-poly the shelves for the wet-bar
- CLEAN

My sister is coming over today to help me clean, which will be a huge help. Every surface in the living room/dining room/kitchen has to be dusted. Let the sneezing commence!

Oh, and I forgot about the vanity on my checklist. We need to assemble the Ikea vanity from two boxes of parts at some point this weekend. I’m not really whining…it’s a lot to do, but it’s really fun to see so much progress.

My entire house is coated with sheetrock dust. Pretty soon, I imagine you’ll be able to pat me on the back and watch a cloud of dust rise from my shoulder. I’m gritty, dirty and dusty.

Our bathroom has seen long strides made this week. The sheetrock, skim coating and knockdown ceiling are completed. The tile is done. The floor is installed – with trim. The pocket door is enclosed and the casing is nailed up. The can lights are in. The electrical is nearly squared away.

Our basement can tell a similar story. In one week, we were able to remove the moldy old sheetrock/insulation, and have the new stuff installed, taped, mudded, sanded, primered and painted. The outlets have been replaced with better ones. The entire basement family room, wet-bar and game room have received a fresh coat of paint.

We’ve (still) got a long way to go, and a short time to get there (to quote Cannonball Run). Here’s what’s left To Do before next Tuesday:

- Buy wood trim for the basement and upstairs hallway, stain it, install it
- Finish painting one corner of the basement hallway
- Primer/paint upstairs hallway and bafroom
- Buy towel bars
- Stain and install new shelves in the wet-bar
- CLEAN
- Put all the furniture and wet-bar paraphernalia back in their rightful places

I love deadlines. They’re so…motivating.

So the good news is that I’m feeling much better sinus-wise. The bad news is that I have 50 million things going on at work and 50 million more going on at home. You could say I’m running on adrenaline (especially since I cut caffeine out of my diet, there isn’t much else to run on).

Day 2 of the Bathtastic! shoot went off well. It was another long day, with people in our house from 7:30am to about 6pm. They/we installed our FAB new pocket door, dropped in the tub and started the gorgeous bamboo flooring. We had drywallers at the house yesterday finishing up the skim coating and rocking over the old closet opening in the hall. Little did we know on Friday how badly we’d need those drywall dudes!

On Saturday, my plan was to remove the dated wainscoting from the walls in the basement and repaint the walls. Sounds like an easy enough project, right? Well, maybe my optimism counts for something. Removing the wainscoting revealed MOLD on the wall in the family room and in the hallway. It wasn’t wet or growing any further, but nonetheless, it required eradication! Adam and I spent all Saturday cutting out the moldy parts of the sheetrock, peeling out some insulation and pulling nails from the furring. We took a short break to go check out Audra & Donnie’s new place (which is stunning, by the way!). Our exciting Saturday night was spent at Menards to prep for the rest of our project.

On Sunday morning, we picked up right where we left off. I sanded the patched areas of the non-moldy, formerly wainscoted sheetrock and primed/painted while Adam replaced the insulation. By 3pm, I cleaned up and headed out to shoot some photos with Misty near St. Anthony Main. We had a great time but decided to call it quits as the temps started really cooling off. Adam and Rob were at Cooper having dinner, so Misty invited Jim and we joined the group. (PS – Cooper, I *heart* you for serving Amstel on tap!). Upon our return home, I picked up my brush again and finished painting another wall.

Monday came quickly, as always. I worked from home to keep the place open for the drywallers. Our contractor from Bathtastic! sent them over to finish part of the bathroom AND help us fill the voids in the basement. We were entirely grateful that they worked our basement into their schedule and gave us an extremely reasonable price for the job. If you ever need drywallers, contact Elite Drywall, LLC (elitedrywallllc@yahoo.com) and talk with Keith or Kyle Gow. They’re identical twins though, so I couldn’t tell you which one is which!

All the new sheetrock should be ready for primer in the next few days. First, I have to paint the upstairs hallway and bathroom, a job that only entails coverage on 2 walls. Then, I have to paint the long family room wall, 2 walls in the wetbar and the basement hallway. Then I have to stain some wood! Apparently whoever installed the wood trim in the first place did so AFTER it was tacked up on the walls. Translation: when we removed the wainscoting, we revealed a strip of bare wood where it connected to the trim. Le sigh. Plus, some of the wood was rotted from the old moisture problem and has to be replaced anyway. And you know what? I must be crazy because I’m actually excited to try my hand at staining. *slaps hand into forehead*

The bamboo flooring arrived for our Bathtastic! bathroom last night. Another day, another thing to make room for. Our shoot dates were pushed back some, so we won’t film again until March 19th. On the upside, it falls on a Friday this time.

I really wished for one more free day last weekend. The weather was finally sunny and warmish, so I cracked a window and dusted/washed the entire living room, dining room and kitchen.

In other news, we’re putting some of the stimulus money to work for us. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provides a 30% rebate on certain energy efficient home improvements as well as a $1,500 tax credit. We’ve wanted new windows in our house ever since Day 1, so this was a nice incentive to do it sooner rather than later. We met with the windows dude on Saturday and are signed up for installation in late-April or early-May.

Also last weekend, I attended 2 baby showers – that was a first for me. I went shopping on Saturday for both (because I’m a procrastinator). Melanie’s shower had the best baby shower game ever. It was hilarious and even the kids had fun. The second shower was for Melissa, who is my cousin Danny’s girlfriend. They served the most delicious lasagna…plus I got to see my aunties and cousins.

Finally, Adam and his BFF’s went to some sort of class where they learned how to make bitters. Sounds like they enjoyed it. I met up with them at Cooper in the SLP for drinks and dinner, where Gwen & Dena joined us. It was a lovely evening…

I know you know that I know you know this – but weekends are too short.

The fixtures for our new Bathtastic! bathroom just keep showing up. The question is: where do you put all this stuff??

When the jetted tub arrived a couple weeks ago, there really wasn’t a good place to stash the bulky box…so the Futon Room got the job because it’s the least used room in the house and it’s closest to the main bath. The Futon Room also now hosts the beautiful vessel sink that came last week as well as the shiny new sink faucet which arrived last night. The boxes for the vanity are stored in there too, so it’s quite crowded. We’re waiting on the shower/tub faucets and countertop to land at our house any day now.

I just got an email today telling me that UPS wanted to deliver the bathroom door. Normally that wouldn’t pose a problem, except this is a kind of specialty door (I don’t want to blow the secret yet so I won’t divulge any details) and along with its hefty crate it weighs 200lbs. Sheesh! No Futon Room for this bad boy…I may end up parking outside for a few weeks while the bathroom door lives happily in my garage spot.

It’s not exactly spring yet, but this is the time of year where my brain starts wigging out at the weather. As a result, I start hyper-organizing and purging stuff in the house (which drives my husband cah-razy). This time, the objects of my pre-spring-manic-purginess were the storage area under the stairs and the “utility room.”

I pulled out everything from under the stairs, including some of the nasty, slumped over insulation that had started to slough off onto Adam’s belongings. Why would one insulate under the stairs? I don’t get it, but then I digress. Once I had the space cleared out and cleaned up, I moved all of our Tubs of Xmas Decoration Goodness in there. One down, one to go…

Moving on to the “utility room.” We have strange names for 2 rooms in our house: the “utility room” and the “futon room.” The utility room houses the electrical box, the sump pump, the freezer, the tool cabinet and the internet junk. Sort of utilityish, right? You can probably guess what the futon room contains. Anyway, I digress again.

Being that I’d already removed the Tubs of Xmas Decoration Goodness from the utility room, I went to work on my painting supplies. I’m not sure how this escaped me…but I had over 20 gallons of paint. Much of it was from when we moved into the house in 2004, making it 5&1/2 years old. Disgusted with myself, I began to weed out the paints that I know will never be used again (mostly because they were too danged old). I removed the lids and stacked them in the garage in preparation for the trash dude. How did this happen? I’m sooo not a pack rat, how did I manage to unknowingly keep all of this paint??

Another part of this entire effort comes with an ulterior motive of mine. I really want to oust our laundry room from the tiny walk-through space that leads to the basement bathroom…and put it in the more spacious utility room. All I need to do is get water to that space (easy), a drain (hard) and a vent (so-so). Am I actually talking about another project whilst in the middle of another one? Yes, yes I am.

Adam and I have lived at our house for 5+ years now. We knew it was a fixer-upper when we bought it. The previous homeowners did some interesting things, including but not limited to their clownish decorating style, iron burns in the carpet, punch holes in all the interior doors, hand-painted countertops and enormous messy gardens in the yard. It’s taken 5 years to erase all of this and make it our own.

Last year, our big project was to complete the master bath/Adam’s bathroom. It became apparent that this room suffered from mold problems, so it was an easy choice for us to remodel this bath first. The good news is that we’re very happy with the space now…and the bad news is that is took a year to finish. Hoping to have a better turnaround on the next bathroom project, we elected to tackle the main bath/my bathroom. Much like the other bath, this one will largely be a “gut”, but unlike the last project, having the main bath out of commission for a year won’t fly.

Last November, I happened to catch an ad on Craigslist for a TV show called BATHtastic! A home improvement show junkie on the weekends, I’ve seen the show several times. As it turns out, they were looking for homeowners who wanted to remodel a bathroom for their new season. I filled out an application, submitted a couple photos, and lo and behold, they called me the following week. I was a little shocked, expecting that they’d have thousands of submissions to go through. One of their peeps interviewed us, checked out our bathroom, took photos – and by early December, informed us that they wanted to feature our bathroom on the show.

Last Tuesday was our first shooting day. They took more camera interviews with us and we started to demo the bathroom with the help of the show’s host and their contractor. I’m still amused that I worried so much about cleaning every nook and cranny before they arrived, only to have them leave 11 hours later with every surface covered in construction dust. There are two large holes where the linen closet and the bathroom once stood; to be rid of the old, ugly fixtures excites me to no end!

The crew is coming back to shoot Day 2 on March 1st and Day 3 on March 23rd. And then I’ll have an amazing, completed new bathroom. Our BATHtastic! designer, Kelli, has been full of interesting ideas. She’s found such unique materials and fixtures that I can’t wait to see it all pulled together.

I just hope I don’t look like too much of a tool on TV.

Yesterday, I spent the day in my friend Keri’s basement. I helped her paint their family room a lovely yellow color called “Butter.” The two of us kept looking at our work and uttering “Yay!” or “This looks amazing!” I’m even thinking about stealing their color for my own basement painting project. Not only do I think we both felt very accomplished when the job was done, but I also had a sense of readiness for my own upcoming painting project. You could say this job was a primer…Get it? *fizzle*

Our own basement is a hot mess right now. Adam is rewiring the entire Entertainment Wall with the new TV and speakers, which means there are wires, electronics and construction materials everywhere. I die a little inside when he tells me he has more wires arriving in the mail soon. But each time I enter the basement, I chant in my head “It will be awesome when it’s done, it will be awesome when it’s done.” He made a lot of progress while I was out yesterday and it’s starting to look promising. Today, I’ll be priming the Entertainment Wall and trying to arrange some of the mess into organized mess-piles. If I’m not back by the end of the day, send a search party.