Can I build it? No, I can't.

I've had a spectacular week 'helping' my husband with the remodeling. My poor husband, he has a problem. Number one, he's super detail oriented; two, he doesn't have a whole lot of spare time. I figured I'm his perfect solution! I have TONS of spare time, and, well, I'm not super detail oriented, but who needs details, right? They just stand in the way of progress. My husband had a day off, and boy, was I raring to help! The problem was, there wasn't any job that he'd trust to me! I insisted on helping, so he let me install sheet rock while he painted with a fancy new paint sprayer. I hadn't done it before, but how hard could it be?Harder than it looks, apparently.

After experiencing the splendor of my building skills, he decided I could paint. He bit his lip as he handed the sprayer over to me. "It'll be fine, I can DO this!" I told him. Everything was fine, until I was about halfway done. Suddenly, instead of a fine mist, the sprayer started spitting at the wall! Undeterred, I wiped up the drips with a foam brush, and kept up with my work. (I'm very diligent, you see) Then instead of a hissing sound, the spray gun started swearing at me with this ACK, ACK, ACK! sound. That was it for the fancy new sprayer. All our efforts to clean and revive it failed. We lost a good tool that day.

I didn't give up. Ordinary people would be crushed by these failures, or maybe they just would have read the tea leaves and gotten a clue. Not me, I kept going. We still had a handy-dandy paint-roller-pump-dispenser, and no I didn't kill it. I painstakingly painted the bathroom ceiling with this thing. My shoulders were killing me, and I was almost out of paint. All it needed was the final coat. My sweet husband impressed upon me the importance of rolling the paint in only one direction for this last coat. Anxious not to mess this one thing up, I failed to notice that there wasn't enough paint coming out of the pump, and I painted stripes in the drying, still-tacky ceiling. Blast-a-matic!

This wasn't my week for construction brilliance.

Despite my help, the work is progressing. The tile is laid, mortared and waiting for grout in the powder room,
The paint is pretty much (cough) done is the master bath, and hardy board laying has begun.

Here's the shower, and the ADA height, unpluggable toilet will be where my now paint-covered dining room chair is. How did my dining room chair become a paint ladder? I have no idea, ask Mr. Details. Our bedroom sheet rock would be a lot farther along if some idiot hadn't messed up a big piece of it that had to be redone. Some people!

That plastic sheeting opens up to my current bedroom, and I'll be plenty happy when that's closed off. My boys have taken to using that as a door when I lock mine. They come bursting in while I'm dressing, and I take great satisfaction in their howls of dismay. "You'd better knock if you don't want to see this" I calmly tell them.

This is what I'm looking forward to the most:

I can totally spy on the neighbors now.

If I want to be able to spy on their garden (and I do) I'll need to do a little trimmin' on the pine tree. We have a chainsaw, I bet it wouldn't be too hard (snicker).

I'm looking forward to this too:My bathroom tile. The tile I chose for the picture looks mostly blue-grey, but the main color is the rusty mocha brown you can see in the trim. I love these colors, they're so serene. So there you go, this is what has been devouring our every spare minute the last two and a half months. If all goes well, we should have two (!) toilets in about a week. I think I'll declare the new powder room a ladies only rest room.