Remodeling....Ugh!

Don't you just love remodeling?  The way it takes over your whole house, makes everything dusty and dirty, sometimes making your husband a little grumpy?  Don't you LOVE it?  {insert sarcasm here}

Our upstairs hallway has looked like this since AUGUST!

And we are only remodeling a bathroom!!  I know....seems like a long time for a bathroom doesn't it?  You should probably know that we live in a 100 year old house.  That explains a lot, doesn't it?? No?

We have learned through our 15 years of owning this home, that no project, big or small, goes as planned.  What always seems like a simple, straightforward project always ends up being something completely different.

With this bathroom...imagine our surprise at finding a 3 inch thick concrete floor that all of our plumbing pipes ran through.   That's right, not under, not over, but through concrete.  We were already going to replace the plumbling from the basement all the way to the 2nd floor, but this made things extremely complicated.  Add to that uncovering a brick chimney under one wall.

So it was stripped down to the studs, new wiring, new plumbing, new walls, new concrete board, new floor, and new bathtub, sink, and toilet. Whew!  And we aren't done yet!

We are getting close!  We painted this weekend, and got the new floor in.  Now Husband is working on trim, then on to the fixtures.

Can't wait to show you the finished room.  Hopefully we'll be done soon!  Until then, we'll just keep living amongst the tools and dust!

Gardening is Back Breaking Work!

Look what I worked on yesterday!  After all the tilling, I let the ground just sit for a few weeks.  I went out frequently to pull out clumps of grass, but for the most part, much of it dried and died on the top of the soil and I just mixed it back in.  So finally a sunny day came around and I was ready to put some plants in the ground!  I chose some perennial verbena in the hopes that it will bloom all summer.  I bought a few daisy starts from a garden sale, I transplanted some milkweed and cosmo starts from our seeds, and transplanted some lambs ear from the backyard garden.  I still need to transplant two roses that will go in this from garden as well.  By back just couldn't take any more!

 I was also working on creating this cute little path off the front steps to my bench.  This is on the north side of our house, so sometimes that dirt stays pretty wet and muddy.  The bricks were saved when our street was torn up about 10 years ago.  They are about 100 years old!  They had been edging this garden area, but not doing a very good job of keeping the grass at bay. (neither was the gardener), so we're going to try something different, but I just had to reuse the bricks.

 I'm getting very excited about my mulch delivery.  I haven't been able to afford mulch for a few years now, and everything is down to dirt, which as you know, means weeds!  I can't wait to get a fresh delivery!!

Doesn't this look like a cozy spot to wait for the kids after school?  Yep, that's where I'll be!!