Taking it out for a spin.

New Tub is HERE!!

Before we put the legs on we decided to give it a try. 

Yep. 

Perfect fit. 

if they eyes are the window to the soul . . ..

 . . . then we want bigger eyes AND bigger windows! 

I woke up to our house fully shaking! I left. And just hoped the house was up when I got home. 

window OUT

The outside of our house.

Thankfully Ed is helping us! He is a friend/ pro. 

Yea! See ya old guy. 

Better light already. 

New window!! Big and bright. Just like our future. 

The house is still standing!!!!

Brad gets his reward. 

Just hanging around with my brother.

Upstairs plumbing. 

OUT. 

Big holes in the ceiling. 

IN.

A Date with Destiny.

I was a lucky girl yesterday. 

I didn't have just ONE valentine's date all day. 

I had two!

Brad, my very handy, very good lucking husband!

AND

Mike, my very handy, very good looking plumber!

I actually consider it three dates. 

Because the third date I have is a date with destiny. 

And that destiny is a brand new gorgeous modern claw foot bath tub.

And THAT is the best valentine's gift a girl can get. 

How we celebrate Valentine's around here.

Flowers and progress.

A thing of beauty. 

Happy Valentine's Day! 

Love, 

the Shaffers

CAN YOU BELIEVE, I SHOWERED IN THIS TODAY.

We have a little hidden "treasure" in our house. Pittsburgh has a thing called the Pittsburgh Toilet. All the old houses here have a toilet in the basement. Nice. Good for emergencies I guess. Sometimes they are just sitting in the middle of the room. Sometimes they have a stall around them. Ours came with a full bathroom. A shower even. I like to call this, affectionately, our prison shower.

Or, if I am feeling nice and happy that day I will call it our camp shower. 

Well being that our main bathroom is a power tool storage unit right now, the prison shower is our only option. 

LUCKILY . . . . .

We Shaffers have very high standards in prison decor. 

AND OUR SHOWER NOW LOOKS LIKE THIS.

PRETTY GOOD FOR A BASEMENT BATHROOM I WOULD SAY. 

AND PRETTY GOOD FOR TWO DAYS AND A BUNCH OF PAINT. 

We added a new toilet, a new faucet on the old sink, and just spray painted the shower pipes black, adding a new black nozzle. 

I borrowed some things from upstairs to make our stay in the basement bathroom nicer while we wait for our bathroom remodel. 

The skull, some crazy man in Tennessee found it in a field outside of Leiper's Fork and sold it to me for 20 bucks. I sprayed it with chalkboard paint. Kind of creepy. . .but it makes a great towel rack. 

Willie is ripped out of an old magazine. I have carried that picture around for years. 

I "splurged" at Target on a new candle that smells like basil and a wooden mat for the shower to cover the ugly drain. It's not supposed to sit in water, but I figure, it only has to last a couple weeks for us really.

Here, take a look at them side by side. 

SOAP YA LIKE IT!

Special Delivery!

SINKS HERE. 

Nothing a couple hundred bucks and a septic truck can't fix.

How I started my morning. 

Nothing like the smell of septic at 9 am to get your blood moving. 

THIS SUCKS. 

no, literally, this sucks. It sucks up the sewage. 

OK, the coast (and the pipe) is clear! Back to work. Basement bathroom tomorrow. 

FULL SPEED AHEAD MIKE THE PLUMBER!

Well this STINKS.

"YOU LIVE IN THE COUNTRY NOW, DARLING!!!" 

- my plumber, Mike. 

Today we had our plumber come to fix up our laundry room, and to get our basement bathroom set up for us to use during bathroom demo week. I'll explain the basement bathroom to you another time.  . . 

But the point is, he couldn't get the bathroom in the basement set up today. Why? 

Because, "there's sewage and sludge backed up to your house. Yep, right to the pipes, you're lucky it isn't all over the basement."

Oh, I thought, the basement we just cleaned, organized, and painted? Great. Add Sewage Sludge to my to do list. 

Mike, the plumber, took me outside to show me the pipe he had been working at cleaning out from the outside of the house.  With.. . ."THE SNAKE."

 But first he told me, "you better change those fancy clothes before you come see this."

I was wearing motorcycle boots and a flea market fur coat, but whatever. . .I changed into Brad's sweater instead.  

So there it was, sludge, not moving, not draining, not septicing, and certainly not going away, nothing. 

We live in the country. 

We have a septic tank. 

I know. 

There's rules to septic tanks. 

I know.

Well. 

Now I do. 

So, there we were, my plumber and I trying to figure out why it was all clogged and he said, do you put food down the drain? 

I said, "why yes, we have a disposal," in my best suburban house wife voice. 

He laughed in my face. So loud. And a little too long. I guess I made a plumber joke??

"It's safe for septic tanks," I said. 

He kept laughing. 

"Disposal??? I'm sorry, you don't have the luxury of a disposal out here. You have a septic tank, and you have to throw everything away. And flush nothing." And that's when he said it, shaking his head, judging me, with the smell of sewage floating every so faintly through the air, 

"YOU LIVE IN THE COUNTRY NOW, DARLING!!!" 

And he kept laughing.  . . . .Oh, Plumber humor. 

Our state of affairs

Under that star blanket is a hole into the bathroom. That big. That is our dust collector/privacy wall right now. 

Our drywall removal technique

OUCH

This is PAT. Pat comes to help us a LOT. Mainly because we let him use chain saws in the house, cut down trees pretty much whenever he wants, build HUGE fires, and we told him he can move into the tree house he builds this spring.  

that WAS a closet wall. 

and this WAS a closet

aaaaaannnnddd that WAS a wall.

 Believe it or not, I have taken a bath in this very bathtub since this picture was taken. 

Tom surveys the "clean" "new" bathroom. What you can't see in this shot is him shaking his head. 

Tom STILL shaking his head. 

But as you can see, we just got ourselves a pretty darn big bathroom. 

(well. . . not pretty, pretty . . .but that will come)