Putting My Returned Tax Dollars To Good Use

Our house was built in 1923, and most of it is in wonderful shape. We love our house"¦ except for the kitchen and one of the bathrooms. They're both extremely tiny, which I could deal with, but the linoleum is just hideous. It's not quite the same in both rooms, but it's pretty similar: a perfectly pee-yellow background with a brown design etched in. The brown is just the right shade to make it look like there's always dirt in the crevices of our floors. Our friends must think we're disgusting. And there's a point to mentioning the pee-yellow color too. You might remember that we have three dogs. Most of the time they're pretty good about going outside, but when they pee on the kitchen floor, you really have no warning that it's there until you step in it with your bare feet. It's disgusting.

Anyway, 'tis the season for tax returns, so we finally decided it's time to spruce up the ugly bathroom. Isn't it funny how quickly home improvement projects can get out of control?

It started out fairly simple "“ we thought we'd replace the tile on the walls. The tile that came with the house was ivory and just looked dingy all of the time. Well"¦ if we're replacing dingy ivory, we might as well replace the toilet and the vanity, because they're both ivory too. It would look funny to have white and ivory in the same bathroom. Oh, and also, the bathtub is ivory. So, we tore out everything and bought a bathtub and a toilet this weekend (nothing says 'I'm a homeowner now' like buying a toilet and getting excited about it). Well, while we have everything out of the bathroom, it might be a good time to go ahead and replace the ugly linoleum on the floor. So yesterday we started scraping that up. We got through ugly yellow linoleum, subfloor, ugly faux-marble linoleum, subfloor and a nice layer of glue before we discovered pretty hardwood floors underneath like the rest of the house has. That's quickly motivated us to skip the tile and restore the floors to their original splendor.

Oh, and somewhere in the middle of all of this, my husband decided that he would go ahead and replace plaster in the older part of the bathroom with drywall.

So, needless to say, this is what our bathroom looks like as of yesterday:

Actually, that's a lie. Since then, that little wall that juts out on the right has been removed and the old bathtub in the picture now resides in our backyard with the old toilet (yeah, we're THAT house now"¦).

On the plus side, at least we have another bathroom in the house to use. We have some friends who remodeled their bathroom and had to walk across the street to the gas station to use their restrooms for an entire weekend.

Please tell me this has happened to you - you planned some small little improvement to your house/condo/apartment that quickly spiraled out of control. Please tell me this"¦ and tell me that you eventually completed your project and it turned out awesome and was so totally worth it.

"¦OK, and tell me if it was a complete disaster, too. I guess it's best that I'm prepared for the worst.