Apparently, my last update was in May. No, I'm not dead. Yes, we're still working on things. I think between planning on doing things and actually doing things, the post-doing-things blogging has just been...woefully neglected.

My bad. 

So, where are we? 

In May, we applied for and were approved for a home equity loan, which meant that the larger projects (bathrooms, laundry room, plumbing, etc) would finally be feasible. The most shovel-ready of these was the plumbing. During our initial home inspection, we were told that the older pipes were polybutylene, which was phased out in the nineties after a class-action lawsuit. (Fantastic! Just what every prospective homeowner wants to hear.) Our inspector said these were in good condition, so they could fail in twenty years...or they could fail tomorrow. 

Since plumbing would be the basis of our next major renovation phase, it made sense to prepare . 

The first step was to extend the tile in the kitchen into the laundry room. As it looked before: 

Icky, hateful linoleum. Awful, leaky utility sink. Terrible paint job. Cramped layout. 

Pro tip: don't try to move a washer by yourself. The dryer, sure, they're pretty light. And if you do move the washer by yourself, don't wear sandals. (I hope you can see where this is going. I don't think I broke my toe, but it wasn't pleasant to walk on for like a week.)

The original wood floor was under the laminate. I thought about sanding and refinishing it, but because this was the original bathroom before the 1986 remodel, there were a lot of plumbing holes that were poorly patched with plywood, so it wouldn't have worked out. Plus, we'd already bought the tile. 

I put down new backerboard, and had some expert help on laying tile squares:

The black and white cat approves of the black and white tile. 

  

After way too much research, we bought a new stackable washer and dryer, which we love. (And which totally haven't been stacked yet because three months later, I still have not finished patching the drywall. Oops.) 

Our plumbers were awesome. We went with Puddletown Plumbing, and have been very happy with their work. The guys seemed a little scattered, but they were very friendly and did exactly what we'd asked for, and were meticulous about cleaning up. 

Puddletown was the only quote we got. They agreed to replumb all our water lines with PEX piping (2.5 bathrooms and the kitchen), add an icemaker line, and move the utility sink and laundry hookups for $2400. I should have called other companies, but it seemed like a really reasonable rate, so...we didn't. Luckily, our neighbors had another plumbing company do the same work on their house, and when their plumber found out how much our job had bid for, he threw up his hands and said, "WHAT?? He can have it." So that was some good validation. 

Also, our guys discovered a stack of early-2000s adult magazines stashed in the floor behind the upstairs bathroom. 

Me: Our friend seems to be, um, quite the leg man. 

One of our plumbers, fervently: "God bless the leg man."

****

The existing toilets were fine, but I'd seen this toilet on Pinterest, and immediately loved it.

Source: Pinterest

Source: Pinterest

Source: Pinterest

Yes, I fully admit to obsessing about a toilet. And even though ours were perfectly functional and new, perfectly functional ones could be had at Home Depot for $89, I made the case that I have saved us so much money by doing things myself, and we deserved the $300 toilets. 

Obviously, Jesse agreed with me. (Or at least acquiesced.)

So I ordered them, and they came on a pallet. That was kind of awesome. 

Installing a toilet is literally the easiest thing in the world. And even though I've only installed the one in the laundry room (the upstairs bathrooms still being, erm, in transition) it's skyrocketed to being the best toilet in the house. (Despite the fact that the door catches on the bowl when you're opening it...oval vs round was not part of my calculations, but the upcoming new doors will solve this problem.)

The fanciest of porcelain thrones. 

****

In other sitting-related news, we obtained a new couch. I've been drooling over Chesterfield tufted-style couches for ages, but new ones are prohibitively expensive (like, we could have paid for plumbing...or bought a couch; obviously we chose plumbing). So periodically, I'd look through Craigslist and sigh forlornly. 

No, I can't have this. (Source: Pinterest)

And then, the ad for It appeared. It was green velvet, in almost perfect condition, and was listed at $60. The only caveat was that It was in Corvallis, which is an hour and a half away. 

I needed It. I convinced Jesse we needed to drive to Corvallis immediately to acquire It. 

It is totally worth it. 

See?

Everyone loves the new couch. 

(And doesn't Pecan look spiffing in her fancy summer haircut? Say yes. Just say yes. You don't want to know the effort it took to get her that way.)

That sinking feeling

(Apologies, this post was SUPPOSED to go live before our trip to Alabama last week, but the faucet was STILL LEAKING so I couldn't post without finishing my project. Humph.)

So...the kitchen faucet sprang a leak and we decided to remodel the whole room. (I'm using the royal we, in case you were wondering.)

Let me back up. I came home from work a few weeks ago, and went to get a glass of water, and ended up with wet socks. (Never a good feeling, that.) The culprit? The cold water side of the kitchen faucet. Jesse was out with friends, so I was home alone with a potentially major plumbing issue. I did what any self-sufficient adult would do: I panicked and ran to Google. 

This army is run by General Issues.

The first order of business was to turn off the supply lines to the faucet itself, which the internet helpfully noted would be under the sink. Except when I looked, there weren't any valves on the supply lines under the sink. After further investigation, I found the cold water valve on the ceiling in the basement, but the hot water valve was...nowhere. So the next logical step was to turn off the water at the hot water tank. 

Helpful plumbing assistant Sassafras.

Because our house is a carefully-assembled series of "What the hell were they thinking?!" constructions, I was (mostly) not surprised to find out that there IS no hot water cut off valve at the tank. Yep, there were 40 gallons of hot water between me and a replacement gasket. So I did the obvious next step: opened myself a beer and called my mother. 

The consensus was that we needed a plumber. Since the leak was contained (cold water was off, horrible warning taped on sink, Jesse warned via text, etc) it wasn't an emergency situation. The next morning, I called the best plumber Angie's List could recommend, and the scheduler helpfully noted that the first available appointment was October 6th...ten days away. 

Well, it's not like we've been cooking much anyway. I took the appointment, and resolved to make room in the laundry sink for dishes. 


THE SINK

In the meantime, there was an IKEA sink somewhere in transit, slowly making its way to my waiting arms. This sink is the pinnacle of my kitchen remodel hopes. 

The IKEA Domsjo double-bowl. It's huge. It's lovely. I need it.

Our kitchen is expansive. Our sink is currently cast iron and lemon yellow, which is cute, but not really the look I'm going for. 

My decorating technique has always been to figure out what I like, and then to figure out how I can get it. (Or at least recreate it, which is often the tougher task, since I unfortunately have very expensive tastes.)

My Pinterest board is full of kitchens like this:

Source: Pinterest, that beloved timesuck

What do these gorgeous kitchens have that ours does not? Cabinets to the ceiling, and farmhouse sinks. There's a gross soffit above our cabinets, but hey, I can remove that. The issue I was running into, however, was that sinks? Are really really freaking expensive. Like thousands of dollars expensive. So when I found the IKEA Domsjo for $300, I almost died. And then I really did almost die, because it wasn't in stock. 

Turns out, there were some supply issues with the double-bowl Domsjo, and for almost a month, I had it saved in my online shopping cart, biting my nails because it was no longer posted on the website and looked very much like it would be discontinued. The first paycheck I could afford it, I sprang, and my giant sink began lumbering on its two-week journey across the country. (Apparently Boston was only place that had it in stock.)

This story ends happily, though, because I have my fancy sink, and it's now back in stock at my local IKEA, so everyone else can have a fancy sink, too. 


THE REMODEL

When I ordered the sink, I didn't really have a plan, besides "OH GOD IT'S ONE THIRD THE PRICE OF ALL THE OTHER SINKS AND IF IT GETS DISCONTINUED I WILL CRY BUY IT NOW BUY IT NOW!!" (All you advertisers, take note: the scarcity argument actually works.) Then, our faucet broke, and suddenly our sink was due to arrive two days before the plumber. And suddenly it made sense to install a new faucet sink with the new sink. And since the sink was going to be replaced, I could redo the counters like I'd been wanting. And if I was going to redo the counters, I might as well take down the soffits beforehand, so falling drywall wouldn't damage the new surface. 

It's a slippery slope over here at Left of Center, but I managed to convince my project manager (aka Jesse) that it would in fact be worth it.

I started my three-day weekend with the joyous arrival of The Sink. Much crooning ensued.

Seriously, that is the biggest box in the world.

And that box contained the biggest sink in the world. 

IT'S SO PRETTY I'M GONNA DIE. 

Then, the soffit demolition started. 

Safety first!

Being the crazy person I am, I'd researched everything I could find about soffits prior to demo. The internet indicated that almost all soffits were just a simple frame and drywall. 

That is not what I found.

Yep, that's drywall over 1/2 inch plywood, which is covering up...a heating duct. WHO BUILDS SOFFITS OUT OF PLYWOOD? I was not warned about this. 

The best part? The soffit wouldn't even have been necessary if the original builders had put the heating duct eight inches higher. Yep, they sacrified something like 30 square ft of potential cabinet space because they didn't feel like moving the duct. 

I called Incredible Builder Dad. His sage advice was to put the drywall back up, and then wait a year or two for when we could take the kitchen down to the studs. 

Sorry, Dad, I'm pretty sure you said, "Use the reciprocating saw and do it now."

It was gross. Like, beyond gross. The entire soffit apparently served as a mouse superhighway for the last thirty years, and I was SO GLAD for my super filter mask because YUCK.

Here, speaking of filters, have an artistic shot of the chaos. Yes, I did also pull down the wall next to the furnace chimney. Why? Um, it was easier than the soffit. Also, it was there. Jesse wasn't home. Did I need a reason?

I'm pretty sure the author of xkcd is watching me on hidden cameras.

Finally, after two crazy days of kitchen demo, the soffits were out, the heating duct was duly adjusted, and it was time to do the countertops. 

If money were no object, I would have put in soapstone. It's gorgeous and patinas nicely. You can sand out scratches, it's non-reactive, and so much more user-friendly than granite or marble. From everything I've read, it's very much a "living" surface, one that changes over time and ages with the house. 

Source: Pinterest

Except not only is soapstone very very expensive, it's almost impossible to source on this side of the country. Apparently it's easier to find on the East Coast, where it's a much more common material, but here on the left coast, you have to special order it, which makes it even more expensive. And we have a lot of counter space. It just wasn't going to happen, at least not in this decade. 

In the meantime, our countertops were navy blue laminate, and although they were in mostly usable condition, it wasn't very pretty. I'm a superficial person, I need it to be pretty. I mean, with our gorgeous new sink, the entire kitchen needed a makeover.

After extensive research, I discovered a technique online where I could skimcoat the existing laminate with a concrete-like product called Ardex Feather Finish. By adding black concrete pigment, I could approximate the color and texture of the soapstone I wanted, for a fraction of the cost.

The entire process of skimcoating was 100% easier than I expected. Because some of the laminate was peeling, I added a layer of 1/4 inch backerboard to all the countertops, so the Ardex had a perfect surface to adhere to. Each layer was supposed to take 15 minutes to dry, but it ended up being more like 12 hours; I was being enthusiastic about putting it on.

I could have gotten away with one or two layers of the Feather Finish, but I wasn't achieving the charcoal color I wanted, so I ended up doing four layers, with the proper color ending up being one bottle of Quickrete charcoal concrete pigment per box of Feather Finish. 

Once the final layer was dry, I sanded it first with 60 grit sandpaper, to knock down all the large lumps, and then 120 grit to polish it up. I was supposed to sand between each layer, but I'm lazy, so lumps from the earlier coats ended up showing through the final coat. The effect actually looks like striations in real stone, so that was a pleasant surprise. 

 

Yep, that's my ShopVac taped to my orbital sander. A poor girl's dust reduction system, if you will.

The end result is fantastic. I love it, and it's so much better than what I could have hoped for. The texture is very much like honed stone, and there are just enough imperfections that it won't be too much of a tragedy the first time I drop a heavy bowl on it. 

 

Right now, it's got two coats of 511 Impregnator Sealer on it to prevent staining and make it water-resistant, so it's darkened up quite a bit, and when that's cured in a day or two, I'll put on two or three coats of Minwax Polycrylic on it to prevent scratches. I use Polycrylic to seal all of my projects - including the kitchen table I refinished at the old apartment - and I've never once had an issue with scratching or peeling, and once it's cured, both it and the Impregnator are food-safe.

So. Counters are done. Time to install the gorgeous sink!

Before I'd done the Feather Finish, I'd made a template of the sink from the sink box (carefully tracing around the edges of the sink to ensure proper fit) and cut the counter to size. It should have been perfect...except it wasn't, as I am coming to realize about this house. We couldn't get it in. So we pulled it back out, and sawed some more off the edge of the cabinets, and tried again.

Still nope. So out it comes, and we saw some more off, and that doesn't work, so we cut from a different area, and that STILL doesn't work. I MEASURED THE DAMN SINK. ITS CARDBOARD TEMPLATE HAS AN INCH OF SPACE AROUND THE EDGE! There is NO REASON this sink should not be fitting, except it just. WON'T.

We haul it back out - keep in mind that this sink weighs more than I do - and I hack quite a bit off the cabinets. 

I'm pretty sure the N is for NOT FITTING.

At this point, it's getting close to 9pm. We both have to be up by 6am, and I, for one, would REALLY like to shower and get the countertop dust out of my hair, but the water is still off because the faucet is disconnected, so we can't. So we try to wiggle it in place one more time.

And then this happens:
 

In case you can't tell, that's the corner of my beautiful, brand new sink, no longer attached. I almost cried.

That's when we decided to call it a night.

The next day, we inspected the damage. It turns out that with a little epoxy, the crack will be almost invisible, and the sink itself isn't structurally damaged. After way too much finagling, it is, at this point, precisely level and more or less in position.

THE FAUCET

After the ordeal of the sink, I thought the faucet would be fairly straightforward. Oh, how innocent I was.


Jesse and I had spent the better part of the week prior trying to find a faucet we liked. Our options were limited by a) budget and b) the single hole in the Domsjo. I really wanted something in a warm, classic brass, but in the end, we settled on a Hjuvik from IKEA. It wasn't the cheapest, but it was big enough for our giant sink, and it felt much more sturdy than comparable models at the plumbing store. Plus, it came with a 10-year warranty, and warranties are good, right?

 The inspiration, via Pinterest.

 The reality, via IKEA.

It turns out that most IKEA faucet supply lines do not connect up with American plumbing without a little help. The supply lines were 3/8", while the lines from the wall were 1/2". After reading many horror stories online about Frankensteinian DIY line connections, we ended up just finding a couple of 3/8" to 1/2" adapters at Home Depot. While we were there, we picked up a few extra parts for the drain assembly, since I'd been wrestling with the stupid garbage disposal for the last few hours and couldn't seem to make any headway.

So we got home, and managed to cobble together the drain pipes, with no small amount of silicone goo. Then, we hooked up all the supply lines, and discovered that they both LEAKED. And not just a little bit. We took our degraded gaskets to the plumbing store down the street, and were told that not only did they not carry that size, we'd have to run entirely new line. Yes, we will eventually, since we've got polybutylene lines that are no longer up to code, but we were flying to Alabama the next day for a weeklong vacation, and our sink was still dripping a quart of water every few hours. (And remember, there is no water shutoff. Even turning it off at the curb didn't seem to make any difference.)

Long story short, I gobbed everything up with approximately a pound of silicone goo, and then we left on vacation. (That's another post for another time.) While we were gone, I ordered some assorted gaskets from Amazon, and they were waiting for us when we got home. Tonight, I spent three hours with my head under the sink, carefully putting everything back together and chasing drips around, but we've finally done it. 

We're not going to win any prizes for beauty, but the faucet works, the drain works, and nothing is leaking (knock on wood).
 

My gorgeous sink is installed and functional, and we can FINALLY go back to taking hot showers without having to go to the basement to turn the water on first. Plumbing would be SO MUCH EASIER if it didn't involve water.

 Whew. Now I'm going to bed. 

Doors, Floors, Chores and More!

Okay, first of all, when I decided to start a renovation blog, that decision occurred when we were not actually renovating. Now that we're right in the grimy thick of it, I am exhausted. I don't remember the last meal we've had that wasn't takeout. I don't want to remember the last time I vacuumed the apartment. Finding my USB cord to download photos from my phone? Just...hasn't happened. I told Mom last week I have no idea how she and Dad managed to build a house, work their jobs, and raise two stubborn kids. "That's why it took twenty years," she said. Touche, Mom, touche. 

Rather than recap the last two weeks (two? wait, what? when did that happen?) in infinite detail, I will instead give you the glossy highlights. Mostly because even with photos, I'm not sure I could tell you what happened yesterday, much less last weekend. 

First, and foremost, has been my big project, the....

Doors

I have expensive taste. We all know this. I am also very set on getting my way. Combine this with two years' dreaming about the perfect house and almost no budget, you have a recipe for frustration. We need a garage door. (As my sister pointed out, the blue tarp-door-monstrosity - while thus far effective - is not really the armored car of doors.) A cheap aluminum door starts at $800. The lovely carriage doors I want start at $5000 and just go up from there. 

When I saw those prices, I'm pretty sure I Hulked out into the Incredible Builder Girl right there in the aisle at Home Depot. As Incredible Builder Girl, I am thoroughly convinced I can do anything, and do it perfectly, for almost no money. (Incredible Builder Girl has some issues with reality. Luckily, she is married to Gently Practical Guy, who specializes in saying, "Are you sure that's a good idea?") We were THIS close to settling on aluminum. 

But then Incredible Builder Girl surged back, and remembered the wisdom of Incredible Builder Parents: it's just a stick. It's just several sticks, put together in a specific pattern. And Incredible Builder Girl has an engineering degree, so she knows where the stresses occur on the pattern, and how to mitigate them. And Incredible Builder Girl has been salivating for an opportunity like this for her entire life, a chance to prove she's really worthy of the title. 

The inspiration 

(source: Pinterest)

The reality 

(source: our back yard. Go ahead, be depressed.)

We did not buy an aluminum door. Instead, we, erm, liberated a good portion of my dad's power tools (we brought pizza!), and then spent an entire Saturday driving around three counties (yep, count 'em: Multnomah, Clackamas and Washington) collecting building supplies. 

Figuring no one knows carriage door hinges like the people who sell horse tack, we first went to Coastal Farm and Ranch to check out their hardware. They had a small selection, but it wasn't exactly what I was looking for. (Neither was I looking for the baby rabbits they were offering. SO FLUFFY. Unfortunately - or fortunately - Gently Practical Guy prevailed. ) Onward to Building Materials Recycling LLC, which is my new favorite store, despite being about a thousand miles away from our house. If we ever need windows or trim or old wooden ladders (yes, yes and yes!) this is definitely the place. 

God, I love a good warehouse.

We bought a lot of things, but not as many things as I wanted. Sighhhh.

Sunday, being the traditional day of rest, was spent hanging out with friends and watching them scrub the gunk off our floor. Thanks guys!

Heated construction started bright and early on Memorial Day. In order to make the new doors, I wanted to either salvage the old frame or use it as a template, which meant that when the tarp door monstrosity came down, the garage and its contents were completely unsecured and open to the alley (albeit behind our chain link rolling gate). Even though we weren't really storing anything valuable in the garage, once it was open, I didn't want to leave until we could lock things back up. 

Timberrrrrrr! And good riddance.

This definitely wins the award for Best Use of Spray Foam 

Insulation as a Structural Adhesive.

This is my new impact driver. (God, I love my impact driver.)

 My lovely framing assistants, Jesse and Faith!

Putting on the plywood backing, and starting to strip the paint from the old windows.

During construction I learned two lessons. First of all: kerf. This is the bit of wood that's taken off by the saw. I have always been advised to measure twice and cut once. By midafternoon on Monday, I was ready to scream. I was measuring things four and five times, making the cut, and then finding I was an eighth of an inch off in one direction or another. Apparently, depending on which side of your measurement mark you cut, the kerf can make your piece of wood larger or smaller, leading to bouts of frustrated swearing and mildly alarmed husbands. So. There's that. 

Lesson two: old buildings. We were SO GOOD about making sure the doors were square. We even took apart one of the frames and redid it from scratch when it didn't perfectly meet my L square. Those doors? Not a degree off 90, on any corner. They were PERFECT, and yet every time we held them up against the garage, the frames were flush to the bottom and gapped at the top. The hinges just wouldn't line up. Did it occur to us that the garage was crooked? Nope. Around 7:30 we eloquently and profanely called it a night, and screwed the damn things together and then directly to the garage. 

The only way they're getting in is if they have my sawzall. And they can't ever have my sawzall.

Still not ideal in terms of daily storage, but a much more effective burglar deterrent. 

Later that week, someone asked us if our indeterminately-aged garage was square itself. Oops. Upon further investigation, it is most definitely not, and neither is the concrete beneath it. Most plansets have "Adjust to field conditions" on them. Our whole house is apparently becoming a field condition.  

After another weekend of work, the doors are now up, and even function as doors. There was less swearing, and more sawzall. (I love my sawzall.) We ended up getting new hinges, since the hinges we got at the warehouse, while definitely strong enough, required too large a gap between the door frame and the garage. I even got some of the fancy hardware at Home Depot to spruce it up a bit. 

Almost done!

After much scraping and the welcome infusion of a heat gun (I love my heat gun) I finished stripping one of the windows, and got it in place. Yes, it doesn't have any glass. Apparently the temperatures required to boil paint off of wood are also the temperatures at which glass easily shatters when gently touched with a paint scraper. (And let's face it, I'm...not gentle.) We will be adding opaque acrylic later. I'll continue the cedar panels around the the window, but right now, the floors take priority, and the garage will have to wait. 

Whew. Now it's on to....

Floors

After letting it marinate in the garage for a couple of weeks - we specialize in avoidance around here - we finally took the carpet, padding and all the, ah, feline-anointed baseboard to the dump. SEVEN HUNDRED POUNDS OF CARPET AND WOOD. And now it's gone. Woo-hoo!

Proof that the carpet really is almost as old as I am. And not in a good way.

Tada dump tada dump tada dump dump dump...

We discovered there is at least one place in this world that smells worse than these carpets. Yikes.

Git 'er dun!

And buh-bye.

Since the west end of the living room was still a little funky - and not in a musical way - we liberally sprinkled baking soda on the subfloor and let it sit for a couple of days - more avoidance, there - and then scrubbed it with vinegar. Remember when I said pulling up the carpet padding was the most disgusting thing I've ever done? I lied. This was gross and wet. Mud, made from twenty-five years of sifted dirt and sloughed-off skin cells. Yecccch. 

The cable installation guy didn't even blink at all the white powder coating the floors. 

I worry for his health.

Floor goo is icky. That's why we made our friends help clean it up. Thanks, Jonny!

Only the bravest of men vacuums that goop in khaki pants.

Once the mud was scraped up, things looked much much better. So much better, in fact, that we called our flooring contractor and asked if he could just refinish the wood, instead of replacing it. He's incredibly wary about the whole thing - his previous work seems to have been in high-end condos, so he keeps saying, "You know it won't be perfect, right? It's going to have scratches and dings and stains I can't get out, right? It's not going to be perfect." And we're okay with that. We know it won't be perfect - it will have character. People pay big bucks for character. And at this point, we'll be thrilled just to move in. 

What you can't see is how it doesn't smell like cat.

There's still a bit of a funk to the room, so I'm liberally dousing the floors with enzymatic cleaner as a final resort. We're pretty sure the cat urine is gone, and any residual odors will go away when the floors are sanded and sealed, but...better safe than sorry. Half of the funk could actually be the kitchen linoleum that's also being torn up, too. 

Ahh, the kitchen floors. The previous owner had laid down cheap wood-look laminate over the original 80s linoleum, probably just to spruce things up for the market. Jesse pulled up all the laminate, and it joined the carpet during the dump run. We looked around. None of the building material reclamation places would take anything other than new, unopened boxes of laminate. 

How it looked before we took possession.

Jesse taking a well-earned break from scraping.

So now, we're pulling up the linoleum, and trying to get it done in time to put tile down this weekend. The new wood for the upstairs floors is being delivered next Monday, where it needs to sit for a week acclimating to the house's ambient temperature and humidity, and then our contractor will be back in the following week to install the new flooring and refinish the existing. Our goal is to have the tile done this weekend, so the adhesive and grout can cure before getting stomped on. (We are nothing if not ambitious.)

Since we decided rather abruptly that we wanted the tile done before the wood floors were started, we needed to actually FIND tile. Our requirements:
- Available immediately
- Available in a large quantity, since our kitchen is ~225 sq ft
- A design or pattern that fits the era of the house
- As cheap as possible. Borderline free. Preferably something the store pays us to take.

Originally, we'd been thinking wood, but since we're not redoing the entire downstairs, tile is much much cheaper, and I'd started daydreaming about something like a classy slate-gray herringbone:

Guh. So pretty. (Source: Pinterest)

Unfortunately, with our timeline (tile must be available immediately), and since all the dedicated tile stores close before I get home from work, our only store option was...Home Depot. And Home Depot does not carry gray slate rectangles as part of its open stock. They did have large gray porcelain rectangles, but they were way too modern for the look I wanted. 

In the end, we decided on this:

Mom recommended we avoid white tile, small tile and mosaics. 

Naturally, we went for all three. (Source: Home Depot)

225 sq ft doesn't seem like a lot, until you realize it's 25 boxes of tile.

Then, you become those people asking to buy ALL THE TILE. YES, ALL OF IT.

625 lbs of tile in the back of a truck. Thank the fluffy baby Jesus for trucks.

We are by no stretch of the imagination restoring this house to be historically accurate - we want it to be our home, not a museum - but this tile is still appropriate for a house built in 1923, and plus, it's going to be super cute. Yes, this is what I do now, making baby noises at tile.

Since neither Jesse nor I have ever tiled before, we're enlisting the help of a master tiler: Incredible Builder Mom. When I called to ask her if she'd be willing to help us this weekend, she squealed. God, I love my mother. The last time I heard her make that noise was when I called to tell her we'd gotten engaged. (This gives you an idea of how important renovation is in my family culture.) 

So, there's our weekend. Sound like we've been busy? Well, we've also been up to...

Chores

Everyone's continually told us that owning a home keeps you busy. Oh lordy, yes it does. But luckily, we have the most amazing social network to help us. In addition to our out-of-town friends Jonny and January, who stepped in to scrape vinegar and baking soda goo off the floors, we also have a Guardian Lawn Angel:

Is it inappropriate to say that my gay friend is an 

absolute expert at making straight lines?

Janet is fierce about edging. We had no idea. And our new yard represents a vast, untrimmed paradise for the edging-obsessed. 

Faith, Jesse and I are much less yardwork-inclined.

Two weeks ago, our dear friends Faith and Janet showed up and proceeded to beautify our front yard. Tragically, Janet's beloved electric edger ran out of juice, and she was forced to abandon the project halfway through. This past Sunday, we woke up to a frantic text: Can we finish edging your yard???? And by the time we got to the house, our Fairy Yard Mothers were already hard at work. I do not have a picture of them working because Janet was kicking up rocks and dust with the edger, and I decided my time was much better spent working on the garage doors than playing paparazzi. 

We have the tidiest lawn on the block!, and the best friends in the world.

Thanks, my lovelies!

Meanwhile, earlier in the week we'd discovered that in one of the upstairs bathrooms, the sink was leaking around the drain. (We'd hoped to make it at least a month without any plumbing issues. No such luck.) 

What's the issue? Well, for starters, the gray pipe was connected to 

the black pipe with duct tape (which we promptly removed). 

I'm no plumber, but even I know that's not up to code.

So we took a picture of the whole apparatus, drove it to Home Depot, and handed it to the nearest orange apron and said HELP. And the orange apron pointed us in the right direction, and four dollars and change later, we had some parts and a general idea. Jesse did the install, and there was NO MORE LEAKING. Voila!

Think that's all? HA. We are crazy, busy, industrious people. We are also dearly in need of a nap. But there's still...

MORE

But not much more. 

We took a break from renovation to see X-Men: Days of Future Past, which was awesome. 

Just not as awesome as the Transformers dinosaur in the lobby, though. 

Here, we model the latest in home renovation fashion. 

I bought a pair of overalls. Jesse is right - they are incredibly comfortable. 

(But he's always right.)

Whew. Is that everything? I'm sure I've forgotten something. I'll try to be a little better about posting on a regular basis but...we're constructing. And sometimes that takes precedence to taking pictures and then writing about said construction. 

Cheers!