The Return of the Blog Monster!

Yes, I'm back!

Why? Because finally enough interesting things have happened to us and our house to merit it.

That's not entirely true... things of relatively moderate interest have been happening all year, but now there's a bit of breathing space to actually document it.

What kind of things? Well, I've been doing a bit of travelling, both for work and in the interest of drumming up freelance work (not too much success on that score just yet, tho I'm currently working on one small job.) I was maid-of-honor for my friend Tracy, which was quite a wild ride. And we've been verrrrrry slowly getting things done with the house. I have yet to post the pictures here from my art studio remodel (although some pictures can be seen on my sketchblog, before and mostly-after). Our new cat Tinkerbell has fully taken over the house, although Tony has been tolerating her with more humor than previously.

Oh, and we're undertaking our first major remodeling project: a total renovation of the main bathroom. Being a bigger pair of stress-monkeys than usual lately, along with having no direct experience with this level of work, we've hired a contractor to do pretty much the whole project. He's also doing a couple other smaller projects for us which Jason is far more excited about than the whole having-a-fully-functioning-bathroom thing because it will give him more space to store comic books.

For future reference, here are the "before" pictures of the bathroom:

The bathroom is essentially unchanged from when we first moved into the house over two years ago. We didn't even bother changing the artwork on the walls. Why? Because we knew this room was on the hit-list and it's only a wonder it's taken us this long to get around to it. What's wrong with this bathroom?

• The tub was so prone to leaking we never bothered using it.
• The plastic (yes, plastic) tiles were falling off of the walls.
• The ceramic "baseboard" tiles along the floor were also falling off and had to be pushed back into place every time we mopped.
• The light shield was missing from the florescent tube (assuming there ever was one) and the tube itself was starting to fail.
• The nice, big medicine cabinet extended into the uninsulated attic, so everything in it got hot in the summer, with big mirror doors that didn't slide very easily.
• The glass sliding shower doors (which is a personal pet peeve).
• The bright green paint on the walls and ceiling which tended to make you look like you always had the flu and which didn't play nice with the mint green tiles (the photos are pretty much spot on - sorry dad!).
• No storage besides the medicine cabinet (and no linen closet in the house either).

Not visible in the pictures are:

• The small hole in the ceiling (dad may have thought we wouldn't notice that one, but the masking tape didn't fool us!).
• The scary, scary metal-coil heating fixture in the ceiling which had its switch bolted shut so no-one would ever think to use it.
• The outlets without an interrupt switch.
• The toilet with a scraped-up bowl from when we used a scrubber with wires exposed, and which recently started running spontaneously several months after we'd replaced almost all of its innards.
• The sink plug which I broke by pulling on the handle too hard one day.
• The door with the chewed-up corner, which periodically refused to latch, necessitating a hook-and-eye to ensure privacy from the far-too-sociable feline contingent.

Basically, it was a bathroom that hadn't seen too much more attention than a fresh coat of paint since it was first installed in the 50s.

The only nice feature in the bathroom is barely visible in the pictures: the stained-glass window that Jason's father made. Somewhere I have a picture of it in the daylight, where you can see the gorgeous colored glass in the center...

The space is pretty tight, so we couldn't do anything super-major like rearranging the room, but we'd worked out a general design scheme with our contractor and work started this past Monday.

Why, you may ask, am I posting a picture of our hallway? All will be revealed....

Also, just because things aren't interesting enough with contractors in and out of the house and the living room tarped against the dust, we're also dogsitting while Tracy and Travis are on their honeymoon. Cody, say hi to the nice people!

Seriously, our cats are loving us right now!