FEBRUARY 23 – “TWO STEPS FORWARD, ONE STEP BACK”
Okay, so I’m a week behind in my updates. I was going to be sneaky and try to back date my entries and pretend I was all up to speed, but I’ve had 2 glasses of wine and have a book club book to finish so I’m doing the speed-round version of updates instead.
So, the #1 lesson I want you to take away from our week in remodeling is “it doesn’t hurt to ask.”
Remember how I mentioned how I thought that the contractor was going to change his number and abandon our job because I asked if they might be able to switch out a couple of tiles that appeared to be “looking at me”?
My husband thought I was crazy, but look who’s crazy now! (Okay, it’s still me who’s crazy, but at least I don’t have tiles staring at my privates while I shower.)
They day after I returned from my trip to Idaho, I thought the guys were just coming to install the heating elements into the floor (yes, we got a heated floor…..in Texas…..did I mention there’s a bit of scope-creep involved in this shower pan repair?) But when I popped down to try to casually snoop at what was going on, what to my wondering eyes did appear, but the cabinets!! Oh glorious cabinets. Now they could officially tile the floor and get things really moving!
Since the guys didn’t seem to appreciate having some lady in her pjs following them around with an iPhone in one hand and a bowl of cereal in the other, I decided to head back upstairs to my hoarder-office-dungeon with the cats.
When they left for the day the last guy out said something that sounded like “No Escalier”, which in French means stairs. There’s a good chance he was telling me to “stop coming downstairs” but what I think he meant was not to walk on the newly laid tiles in the bathroom.
As much as I make fun of people with their little selfie-extension-arm thingees, I sure could have used one that day because all I could do was shove my arm through the crack in the door to take these.
After the required 24 hour drying period, I got approval from the contractor to tip-toe in there.
One door was a little crooked, but I knew from our inset cabinets in Seattle that they could tweak the hinges to fix that.
But….could they tweak the hinges to fix the fact that one of the valves had been leaking into the new cabinets for the past 24 hours?
One more passive aggressive text to the contractor and then I was heading off to the fixture gallery to pick out faucets while trying to forget that our brand new cabinets might need to be delayed to fix the water damage.
The 9yo ended up getting sick that morning so instead of a family outing to pick fixtures it was just me while my husband stayed home with the kids. In hindsight, this is probably a very good thing since the last time we went to that fixture gallery the 5yo insisted on sitting on all the toilets and making animated grunting sounds….we may be on a list.
My mission: find faucets and decide on a sink shape. Easy right?
If there’s one thing that I learned from our totally over the top, ‘best of everything’ remodel in Seattle is that the ‘best of everything’ is really not much different than ‘normal’, so off to Lowes I went!
And now that the fixtures were selected, I had moved onto a new obsession….scope-creeping our way right into the closet! First request: “Take down that wall!”
It was right about this point that my husband suggested that one hour before his flight to London probably wasn’t the best time to jump into this closet demo project.
So if anyone has a crowbar and a few spare hours, come on over and help me take down the rest of these shelves. The toilet is super conveniently located for restroom breaks.
To catch up on previous episodes:
Episode 2: The Toxic Shower Pan
Next: Episode 6: Officially in the WTF Stage
Once upon a time, Susanne Kerns was a Senior Account Director at an advertising agency working for two of the top brands in the world. Nine years ago she traded in her corporate life for a life as a stay at home mom, raising two of the best kids in the world. She started her blog, The Dusty Parachute as a way to dust off her online advertising skills and begin her job search. Instead, she now uses it as a way to spend lots of time on the computer so her kids think that mommy has a job.
Susanne’s essays have been featured in Scary Mommy, BonBon Break and Redbook and she is also a contributor in the upcoming books, It’s Really 10 Months, Special Delivery and Martinis & Motherhood – Tales of Wonder Woe & WTF?! You can follow her on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Be sure to follow me on Facebook & Twitter and check out my 'Photos' tab for a sample of my Instagram feed. It's where I post my tasteful nudes (made you look!);)
xo - Susanne
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