Yeah, it has been a bit of forever since an update, for… reasons.
Namely, reasons that included a more protracted and chaotic move than anticipated, much of which was neither interesting nor photogenic, and which left us with mountains of our stuff in our way, and which made getting started on any fun projects really impossible. Couple that with an unbearably hot and sticky summer, a few less-fun-but-more-time-critical projects that needed to get done first (hello, gutters). Throw an old dog in need of a new knee into the mix, along with a sloggy stretch at one’s real job, and basically you get into a very inhospitable environment for blogging. Or, frankly, for keeping your head above water in any meaningful way.
Wildly underestimating how difficult a project is going to be is 100% on-brand for me, so I spent the fall demo-ing the kitchen on a wave of optimistic enthusiasm (“I’ll get this project knocked out in a few weekends!”) but got bogged down first in the holidays (we hosted Thanksgiving AND Christmas, because we make questionable choices), and then in another round of chaos that included Boyfriend sustaining a serious orthopedic injury, another really rough stretch at work, my annual midwinter depression, and a dead car in need of replacing.
Anyway, we’re slowly moving back toward whatever suffices for normalcy around here, and trying to pick off projects that can (actually) be accomplished in a weekend or two, in the name of feeling like we have made progress. #1 on the list was the upstairs bath, which felt like a good starting place because we aren’t really using it right now, as Boyfriend’s injury has necessitated sleeping in the in-law apartment on the safety of the first floor.
The issue with the upstairs bathroom, beyond the part where it was last updated during the Clinton administration and may have had its last really thorough cleaning sometime soon after that, is that it has a pink tub. I don’t particularly object to it, to be honest, and it’s a nice old cast iron one that is pretty roomy for soaking in, but I was eager to minimize the color or at least not make it stand out like the proverbial sore thumb. On top of that, the room is outfitted with some cheap brassy light fixtures that I don’t particularly like, but which proved difficult to replace in a budget-sensitive way (true to wonky old-house wiring there isn’t a light switch in the bathroom, so any hard-wired fixtures need switches on the base; I found two categories of replacements: ones at Home Depot that look exactly like the existing ones, and ones at specialty lighting shops that individually cost more than I was prepared to spend on this entire project). In the interest of wrangling cash flow, I opted to just keep them and find a decorating scheme that worked around them. At some point when I stumble over better options, we’ll tackle replacing them.
I am just now realizing that I have exactly one picture of the bathroom from before I tore into it, and it doesn’t even show the pink tub (again, this lack of planning is very on-brand for me), but it can give you a sense of the thing:
One of my big goals for this project, beyond making the room into a space I wouldn’t mind spending time in, was to do it without buying much; finding under-used stuff from elsewhere in our lives was actually a fun challenge, and to date, other than paint, I bought only the oversized LED Edison-style lightbulbs, the shower curtain, and the bath mat. Oh, and the mirror, which I bought from a someone on Facebook Marketplace for $12 and spray-painted glossy white. The results:
Overall, I’m pleased. And it feels good to have gotten one thing actually checked off the list. I owe updates and pictures on a few other things we’ve had going on, and at least a few posts on the ongoing quagmire that is the kitchen project… and it’s almost spring, which means we’re about to dive into a few big outdoor projects as well. I’ll try to stay on top of posting, provided no one else breaks their legs.
Chekhov's Nail Gun 