As I mentioned last Sunday, the downstairs portion of the house finished about a week ago. The bathrooms gave us a lot of trouble (more below), but now, hallelujah, the house is DONE!!!**

Kitchen:

Ignore the open space by the window. We plan to build bench seating and a coffee bar in that area, but we’re going to wait until finances recover before doing that! (Temporary coffee bar setup below! This is the part that didn’t cost any money, haha!) The last photo in the above collage is a detail of the maple/black walnut butcher block countertops, which we really love!

Living/dining rooms:

That navy accent wall is my probably favorite part of everything we did during this project. (It looks darker in the picture than it is.) And I can’t tell you how good it feels to have decor up and books shelved for the first time in months! You better believe that all went up the very first day possible.

Bathrooms:
Okay. There were a lot of problems with the bathrooms. The master floor had to be laid five times, and even after that, the tiles were askew. (This is a long, complicated story involving the kind of tiles we got, which were apparently a Bad Idea.) We plan to rip it up and redo it in a few years once our finances recover, because it looks and feels awful right now. But I was tired of not having a bathroom while we ripped-and-laid, ripped-and-laid, and I knew more time wouldn’t improve it, so I made the command decision to move on. Only then, as we approached the last bits of work needed on the bathrooms, our contractor prioritized another job over ours and just stopped showing up to work. So Jason, the boys, and I did the rest of the work ourselves. We were pretty much done accommodating an unpredictable schedule, and needed our house back NOW. Four months is too long to have your house under construction, and these bathrooms had literally been torn apart since Mothers’ Day. There was a lot of frustration at the end, and that’s an understatement. But moving on – pictures:

Don’t blame me for the teal! The boys each wanted a different color in their bathroom, and they rolled a dice, and Ambrose won. So we got this. I imagine we’ll repaint after they’re all off to college! Outside of photos, that teal is so bright that all the white (toilet, vanity, trim, etc) looks sea-foam in color. !!! As for our bathroom, we’d planned a lighter lavender color, but Sherwin Williams can’t seem to tint paint properly unless you choose from their limited selection. Our first attempt at lavender was some bizarre mint-green-and-pale-purple mix. Yuck! It looked like when iceberg lettuce goes bad, haha! So we just chose one of SW’s colors, and had to go with something much darker. At least we liked it in the end, even if it wasn’t what we’d planned.

So our house all done. Four months of construction complete. House put back together. I wish it had taken a few weeks instead of four months, and I definitely wish our bathrooms looked like they’d been professionally done instead of DIY, but really, I’m just happy to be done. I can’t express how good that feels. So please, everyone, send us positive thoughts that this is the last time we have to repair multiple rooms in our house all at once! Multi-room damage in three houses in three years is no fun and I don’t want to do it again!

**Of course, I say “done” but what I really mean is “done until three days later when the guest bathroom toilet starts backfilling and overflowing when the dishwasher runs because apparently there are tree roots in our line and the pipes have to be replaced and we’re just waiting until the plumbers can bring in a camera later today to find out exactly how much of our front yard landscaping we’ll have to dig up in order to make repairs, not to mention the toilet overflows a second time and floods the entire living/dining room, so we have to rip up and replace the brand new floor.” Sigh. It never ends.