There's a Hole in My Living Room

Literally.

I've lived in my house for 8 years.  It is now at the stage where things are falling apart.  They are literally caving in.  Last year, somewhere around a week before our wedding, a fairly sizeable hole suddenly formed in our living room ceiling, spilling water from the floor above.  Yep.  There was apparently water leaking from a small crack in the bathtub upstairs, and it was seeping into the floorboards & ceiling underneath for God knows how long.  This is the largest of several things (water heater, stove, dish washer...) that have started to "go" in the last couple of years.  I'm going to choose to blame Paul here.  That seems reasonable to me. 

So, this disaster area is FINALLY scheduled to be fixed (basically a whole new bathroom & ceiling) in a couple of weeks.  Cross your fingers.  We have been "scheduled" before.  Between plumber #1 (who obviously did not fix the problem), the homeowner's claims, negotiating (and renegotiating) the contract, rearranging the living room so as to avoid MORE water damage (and gradually giving up any hope of aesthetics, eventually ending up with a bucket under the leak like the poor people in movies), and giving Lowe's the equivalent of a nice car down payment, it has been quite a little soap opera.

Paint colors are curious things when you live with a boy.  I used to go to the store & pick a color.  For realz.  No drama.  No compromise.  Hence, I have a light pink bedroom, purple guest room, and a sort of dusty blue office.  None of these are very masculine colors.  Choosing the paint color for this new bathroom was far more difficult.  I knew I didn't want something too dark because the room would seem too small.  But for a time, I was looking at some warmer, richer colors that would go well with the wood flooring & vanity that are going in.  Paul nixed those right away.  "Too dark," was all he said.  Then I remembered that we had registered for & received as gifts a really beautiful bathroom set with various shades of blue, green, and purple. 

Now, not even I am obnoxious enough to have 2 purple rooms right next to each other.  I wasn't going to go that far.  But a nice aqua would have been nice.  No.  I forget why that got the kibosh.  Then I moved to the green family of samples.  I found a nice pale green to make the room seem lighter (there is no window) & bigger.  Paul instead went a few shades up the wheel & basically picked what looked to me like the flourescent green that I wore circa 1986 with my jelly shoes.  I carried swatches around with me for a while.  Brought them to work, looked at them under different lighting.  It's like I'm a high-maintenance wife all of a sudden!!  What is happening to me?!  Anyway, we did end up going with a bit of a brighter green than I originally picked that coordinates nicely with the new swanky bathroom set. 

Oh!  And I almost forgot.  Paul works for PPG, so it HAD to be Olympic paint, which was also a slightly limiting factor, but PPG is an important business partner of Bayer's, so I am not going to complain about that part.

So another aspect of this bathroom remodeling project is the fact that we only have 1 bathroom.  This is a problem for obvious reasons.  I wanted to go live at the Fort Pitt motel down the street for a couple of weeks while the contractors were working.  I mean, they do have weekly rates.  Paul thought that was overkill, so we came up with an alternative solution.  We happen to have the Pittsburgh toilet & shower.  You know, a freestanding toilet in our unfinished basement that had not been used in 8 years, and a shower that had so many boxes stacked in front of it, that one might forget it was there.  So we recently moved all of the boxes & cleaned in preparation.  I mean we CLEANED.  Eight years of non-use literally washed down the drain.  It will be weird using the toilet in the middle of the open air of the basement.  There is no way to really close off the bathroom area.  I'm going to approach it as an opportunity to experience an aspect of prison life.  I look forward to my new-found humility.  I shall blog about it.

I will post pics when the bathroom is done.  It's supposed to take 2 weeks.  I'm just hoping to have it done before the next Olympics.