The Bathroom Situation

I have a dirty (literally) secret.  It's my bathroom.  For who knows what reasons, the people before us had put in a blue bathtub with fake blue-veined marble tiles around the bathtub and the same sink.  Disgusting.  And yes that is mold you see in the corners and along the grout in the tile.

It's a major, major problem.

The marbling is way worse in person, but you can kind of see how bad on the backsplash.

Before I get a new bathroom upstairs, which will be a complete gut job, the downstairs bathroom needs to be put in.  7 people have to go to the bathroom somewhere.  The downstairs bathroom currently looks like this:

That big hole to the right is where we need to move the plumbing to.  Currently, the water table is so high that it is filled with water, and we need to dig a huge hole and drop a second sump pump down to drain the water out and do all the plumbing to make this puppy work.  Sounds like fun, yes?

Here is a better shot of all the water.  Every day the kids ask to go downstairs and look.  And every day I have to yell at one of them to get their butt upstairs right this minute.  This morning I found a blue bouncy ball in it.  It's not deep enough to suck them in and cause problems.  But it's plenty deep for naughty children, of which I own several, to do some serious damage to the rest of the house.

And since we had to move all the stuff that was in the reno area out so Chad (our friend and reno guy) could fix it, all that crap, I mean stuff we value, had to go somewhere, so here is what our downstairs family room looks like.  And will for the conceivable future.

That, plus the dirt everywhere is the biggest bummer of this project.  I can't kick my kids downstairs when they are driving me crazy but it's too hot outside to boot them out the door. 

So before I get my new pretty bathroom upstairs we have to deal with all of the above.  One day it is going to look something like this:

Or this:

I'm just hoping I can hang in with all the rest of the reno without going crazy!

PS:  This just in, 2 hours after I wrote this post last night, the washing machine disconnected itself and all of the bleach water I used for washing my white slipcovers flooded the basement.  Sometimes I really hate my life.  When I whined about it to Chris, his tender words were something like, "And this is just the beginning".  Hopefully, nothing like this will happen when the walls are being banged up.  Off to deal with bleach water all over everything.

I'm Back!!!!

Remember how Michael Jordan retired and then came back to play baseball?  And everyone was all like, what?

That would be me.

Or if you don't like that comparison, do your remember the song "Return of the Mack"?  Love that song.  So here you go, in honor of my not-so-glorious return, here is the you tube video to it, it's a little risque just to warn you, but if you only need to jog your memory on what exactly I am talking about the first few beats should do it for you.

Enough time has passed (three months) and enough things are happening at the Nelson household, and family loves following along with what's happening.  Okay, if I'm honest, by family I mean my parents,  and I kind of like venting about my life on an on-line open diary for a bunch of strangers to read.  I still keep my regular journal that was my 2013 resolution but I get hand cramps because I try to write fast to get everything out.  And typing is so much easier then actually writing things out by hand.  I still need to work on patience.

Anyway, after all that to say that I am starting up blogging again.  Mostly it will probably be about what's happening at casa de la Nelson, but who knows.  No idea how often I am going to post either.  Lots of non-promises for all of you.

So, to kick things off, here is a short run down of things that have happened very recently at our house:

*  We put an offer in on another house, and got out offered.  Which led to frantic house searching for anything, anything, anything bigger/better than what we have.  Which led to the realization that there wasn't anything currently out there that we liked.  Which led to bullet point number two.

*  Instead of moving right now, we decided to completely redo the basement.  Bathroom number two for 7 people shall hopefully make an appearance in the next month or so.  (Can I just say how much I HATE spending money to fix up a house that I don't want to stay in?)

*  Ava found a teeny tiny baby duck across us in the empty lot.  We spent 45 minutes trying to catch the thing, and were told by the local feed store that it would probably die.  It lived.  And honest to goodness, it thinks it's human.  Julio is his name and he follows us around the house and outside and swims in our bathtub.

*  The whole duck as a pet could become problematic as in a couple of weeks we are getting a Great Dane puppy.  Because my house is not big enough for 7 people, now we are adding a dog the size of a small horse.  We be crazy.

*  We went on our first family trip to South Dakota.  Awesome for the most part, except Truitt pulled a table down on his face and had to get 8 stitches.  Not to mention the little thing called 12 1/2 hours of driving in a car with 7 people and an air conditioner that only works on high.

There you have it.  A brief synopsis of what's happening with us.  More to follow.