New bathroom

I live in Los Angeles, near the beach. This means that the house I own would sell for a ridiculous amount of money. This does NOT mean it is worth a large amount of money. In fact, the house was built in 1953 and is a complete piece of crap. The four of us live here, in 1400 sq. feet, with 1.5 baths, and pay almost $2000 a month to the bank.

But wait--we're the lucky ones! We bought 3.5 years ago!! If we bought this same house today--we'd have to pay almost double. Oh, and did I mention: no central heat or air, no insulation, tiling in bathrooms and kitchens from 1953. We replaced the roof and plumbing when we moved in. Every time it rains we have a lake both in front of the house, on the side, and in the rear. We have no gutters. We have relandscaped the entire house, front and back. (I say we, but truly, my husband does all that. I'm not good with plants. . .but that's another blog) . And the kicker? Oh yes, we live right next to a municipal airport! Hooray! Airplanes taking off and landing all day long a few hundred yards away. Pure Eden.

So. We have decided to redo our bathroom. That is, the one full bathroom, which the four of us currently share. (This actually not being that big of a deal, since both children are under 2 and not potty trained. They don't use anything but the tub). Our bathroom is small, and unfortunately there is no way to make it bigger unless we completely remodel the house. So we are re-doing it, but all that really means is getting rid of the 1953 appliances and tile and replacing with new.

But since we only have 1 full bathroom, for the week or so they are working on it, we have nowhere to shower. Not exactly convenient. I mean, yes, it's true I don't always get a shower every day--but come on, even I draw the line after 2 days. While the bathroom is being re-done, we are packing up our things and driving down to the beachclub to bathe, about 2 miles away.

Things I overheard the contracter say:

"Son of a bitch!"

"No, that one doesn't fit. Where's the one that fits?"

"I don't know how to do it. I thought you knew how to do it."

"Well, that's gonna cost you an extra day's work, but yeah, we can do it."

But despite all this--the bathroom is done, we only went over budget by $300 and the contracter actually did a pretty decent job. So I don't have anything else to bitch about, no matter how good blog-reading it would make.

I'll send some before and after photos if I can figure it out.*


*You may have noticed the non-functioning link to dooce at the top of the page. This was to be my blogroll, but obviously I can't figure it out. That is NOT where I wanted it to go, and of course I wanted the link to work. Bear with me, at some point I may fix it. (However, since I have no readers the only person that would use the links is me, and for now I just go to SBFH. So there's no hurry.)