Feathering Our Nest

When C bought our home in 2005, he definitely made the purchase with an eye towards potential. I mean, it wasn't going to fall in on itself or anything, but the original homeowners definitely turned a blind eye towards good taste and practicality. Not to mention that the folks who owned it before us rented the place out to Norma Ray and Billy Bob, so our little Love Nest came with more than its fair share of dings and dents.

When I met my Beloved, he was in the throes of renovating the master bathroom. (Go ahead and look up throes, I know you want to. I used it correctly. It means "epic struggle.") Now, if you have ever been to our home, you have surely gotten a tour of said bathroom because we are very proud of the hard work that went into making it a beautiful and much more functional place to shower and brush your teeth. Much of the work, in fact most of the work, in there was completed by C alone; I, however, will take credit for being the motivation for completion (He had been working on said bathroom project for 2+ years when we started dating. I told him I wouldn't marry him until the bathroom was usable. I was only partially kidding.)

Anyhow, we've done many things to feather our nest since marrying last year. Well, since I was pregnant for 97% of that time, I wasn't a whole lot of help -- unless you count making Honey-Do Lists. But again I was the motivation for completion. Or, in this case, I was growing it inside of me. We painted every wall in the house, remodeled the laundry room, set up the nursery, cleaned out the daylight basement, updated the fireplace and very recently have been working on our backyard. We've had a drainage problem that has washed out most of our good dirt and all of what little grass was there was long ago killed by the dogs...so while the weather was halfway decent, C started building a retaining wall with the help of my dad.

In the meantime, because apparently one project at a time isn't good enough for us, we decided to tackle Olivia's bathroom. It's small, which we can't change, but also had horrible wallpaper and a really beat up little vanity and cabinet. I wanted to paint and patch some holes, and C has always thought that it smelled funny (dirty) in there and wanted to scrub everything down and redo the floor tile.

My handsome Better Half, oblivious to what the remodeling future holds, smiling as we tear down wallpaper.

We figured it would be a three weekend project, with Labor Day giving us a long weekend to work to finish up. So about a month ago we rented the steamer to remove the wallpaper and knocked that out one Friday night after Olivia went to sleep.

Now the fun begins as we remove all of the junky bathroom fixtures.

Next, we started removing all of the fixtures so we could take up the tile from the floor. This is when we first realized we were in trouble. Big Trouble.

(L) The sheetrock was so nasty behind the shower surround that you could push your hand straight through it.
(R) Trouble is a-brewing. This is the hole in the subfloor that was directly under our toilet.

It turns out that Norma Ray or Little Billy Bob or Frank Lloyd Wright had a leaky faucet somewhere along the line. And a leaking toilet. And a leaking shower. As we peeled back the layers, we could see that the leaks had been (mostly) found and fixed, and the damages had been patched up but not really corrected all along the way. And that smell C couldn't source? It was all of the rotten wood and sheetrock. So to recap, Everything in the bathroom had at one point contributed to massive water damage, and the floor, subflooring, floor joists (!), sheetrock, insulation, and all plumbing fixtures needed to be replaced. As I have said to one of my house guests recently, it's amazing that one of you didn't wind up falling through the floor when you used our commode.

Rotten wood and smelly filth are all that's left of the bathroom at this point.
Can you believe someone just covered this up and hung wallpaper?

As the work to remove all things rotten began, C and his father-in-law (who has been a gigantic help with all of this, thank you!) found that the damage to the floor and whatnot extended under the adjoining wall into Olivia's nursery.

Here's more of the water damage and subsequent hole in the floor in Olivia's room.

So they have been working to fix her room first so she isn't displaced. When Mom asked for a progress report earlier today, all I could say was "they've ripped out even more stuff, there's a bigger whole than the last time I talked to you, and they haven't started to fix anything yet."

I just had to include this photo of the bath tub in our front yard. It's cast iron, so when Dad and C first tried to pick it up yesterday, they thought it was nailed to the floor because it was so heavy that it didn't budge!

To be fair, progress had been made. They've worked hard and accomplished a lot in very little time. It's just a far cry from where I expected to be this weekend, putting the finishing touches on a new paint job and beaming with pride at our fresh smelling guest bathroom.

We'll get there. Eventually.