Reality Bites!

Have you ever though you had a really good idea and then the actual situation, aka reality, sneaks up and bites you in the fanny? Welcome to our world! LOL I'm quickly finding out there's a big difference between what Tom and I want and think we're going to do at the cauldron and what actually happens. Case in point . . .

At the beginning (that would be when we were naive and not aching in every joint) we had great plans of cutting corners by using a lot of the original materials. "The walls are fine", we said. "This vanity will work great with a coat of paint." Uh huh, right. Reality set in and at the moment the place looks like Jericho after the walls came tumbling down LOL The first to go were the west bathroom walls which btw, I am still stripping. Long story short - the second batch of stripper never arrived so I'm reduced to hand scraping the years of gunk and dried first coat of stripper. At last estimate I figure it'll take another 3 days at least before I even think about sanding them. But hey, it keeps me out of trouble and I'm getting some nice definition in my upper arms LOL

With me hogging the bathroom (typical woman) Tom set to work in the east bath where we had also planned to keep the old wallboard. Well, he did, I wasn't so happy with it although I agreed it wasn't all that bad. Next thing I knew, down it came along with the vanity we had hoped to save. Just too much work needed to repair each and even after the work neither would look decent. Tom spent days putting up new drywall - the man is obsessive about muddling his joints LOL - while I juggled the decorating budget to make up for the extra expense. The juggling thing has actually been fun and led to my current project of painting tile. Being a bit of an overachiever it's not enough that I have to learn to cut and install tile but apparently now I think I also need to decorate with hand painted tiles on a shoestring budget. Seriously though, a Mexican color scheme just screams for those ornate painted tiles and they're like $5 each and up! And yeah, yeah, I know, it's just a rental but it's our rental and ya know already we're a bit different LOL

Between the scraping during the day and the tile painting at night Tom's been able to work in blissful peace without my chattering but it's maybe not such a good thing. It seems that as the evening goes along and weariness sets in one beer leads to another and a certain someone goes into destruct mode. First he peeked behind a wall in the east kitchen to repair a cupboard and didn't like what he saw. Then I opened my mouth and asked for the rest of the old bath wallboard to be removed from the connecting hall and before ya could blink the kitchen was naked down to it's lath! That was way cool! Not the mess, which Tom kindly cleaned up, or the work but all the discoveries. I'll admit to being a bit of a renovation geek and I enjoy peeling apart the old layers of wallpaper and poking around de-construction debris. Tearing off the old wallboard exposed a slew of different papers which were in fairly decent condition. We were even able to see a bit of the original paper although it's not likely we'll be able to save any. And Tom found the baseboard molding was still attached with the original square head nails! This is by far the oldest building I've worked on and those bits of history have been great to find. Later this summer it's going to be a fun puzzle to research the place and its beginnings and possibly even find some old photos. I think they'd be great to hang in the entrance way = )

During the few spring days we had recently, before the current round of ice and snow, I was even able to get a bit of work done outside. The sidewalk along the east side that had been buried under weeds and dirt is now clear and the back patio even got raked so we're not walking through muck and leaves. Rocking chairs for the front porch were purchased and assembled and are just waiting on Tom to install some anti-theft tethers and the return of spring and sunshine. I also braved my notoriously un-green thumb and planted Jiffy Pots with herb and flower seeds for the back yard. With luck, or perhaps replacements from the local nursery, we'll have a kitchen herb garden similar to what might have grown there originally as well as some old-time 4'o'clocks this summer. Heck, I'm thinking if I add a tomato and a few pepper plants we can even keep the tenants in fresh salsa - or us LOL