Yes!

We knocked out the temporary shower and I couldn't be happier. Do we have more work to do to repair the wall, the floor, etc? You bet. But we also now have a nice, new, workable bathroom. And, I can't tell you what a luxury it is to have a beautiful bathroom once again. It also opened up the front of the house to the back of the house. I'm a lucky girl. Here are some pics of us dismantling the shower. Exciting, eh?

Will the Bathrooms Ever Be Done? Yup!

We had planned to tile both bathrooms this last weekend but if you've been following along, you know nothing ever goes according to plan. However, that being said, we did get all the cement board up in both bathrooms so we CAN do the tiling - probably next weekend.

Downstairs Shower

Upstairs Shower

Earlier in the week we attempted to install the cement board on the angled ceiling in the upstairs bathroom. Even after cutting more and more off, it still didn't fit right, got jammed and we ended up damaging the drywall. It is actually worse than in the pictures. It will get replaced at some point but it's not a showstopper--thank goodness.

The following picture shows how we inserted a base on the floor of the shower so that if something fell on it it wouldn't damage the shower floor. We will keep it there through tiling. Another thing I want to communicate to you is that for the cement board in the downstairs bath, we did NOT countersink the screws. Because of that the screw heads are elevated so the tiles won't be flat. We need to go back and sink the screws. We made sure we did it upstairs. Now we just need to tape, etc. and we'll be ready for tile. I can't wait.

A little pick-me-up

Earlier in the summer my son helped us out by doing some landscaping for us. We didn't have much of a budget but we only had to buy the plants, he did the labor for free. What a great kid. He is in the process of mulching around all our trees and maybe next year we will plant hosta gardens around some of the larger trees. To mulch everything we needed about 10 yards of mulch. We planted hostas, hydrangeas - regular and tree form and also an oak leaf hydrangea, some petunias and I think that was it. My son also pulled a very large, overgrown arborvitae on the corner of the house and pulled up all the weeds and out-of-control ground cover. Here's how it looked after he finished.

Someday in the future we hope to replace the front porch with a wooden porch and steps and a nice railing and columns. I would also like to make it a little bigger. The siding and shutter colors probably will also change. What colors do you think Hardy House should be? Keep in mind there is a big red barn off to the right of the house.

Tell me what you think.