I’m coming to realize that no matter how hard I try, if I don’t direct my focus to the right things, I’m going to always be DISTRACTED. Whether I’m being distracted by the noise of social media, the noise of podcasts, audiobooks, games on my phone, or the constant stream of anxious thoughts that flow through my brain on a daily basis… if I’m not directing my focus to that which I need to be prioritizing… I will get lost. When a thought crosses my mind while cleaning the kitchen and I pick up my phone to finish that thought, and black out and realize I was just sitting at the kitchen island perusing amazon instead of adding the item to my grocery list like I had intended. Sure, maybe my social media screen time has gone to zero, but Pinterest, text messages, email, amazon and mindless games have more than made up for it.
A little Life update: We have been thrust, face first, into a bathroom renovation. Sometime around October, we realized that the floor around our shower, in the primary on-suite bathroom, was starting to bow. We have lived in this house for over 4 years now, we are clean and responsible humans, not allowing massive amounts of water to pour on the floor after showers. Heck, Ryan is one of the cleanest people I know. (which is why I knew right away that I would marry that man, and raise babies with him.) Pretty sure I’m the messy one in this relationship, and even then I’m actually very clean. (Not neurotically so, but you know… it’s organized chaos).
Sorry, I digress. Back to the bathroom. We noticed that the granite slab that separates the shower from the vinyl flooring had a hairline crack in it. And overtime, water was slowly trickling down onto the subfloor and keeping it water logged, thus making it BOW. Well Shoot. With Christmas quickly approaching, family coming to visit and Ryan’s travel schedule for work… We just kept putting it off, knowing it was a ticking time bomb.
Boom.
About a month ago, we decided to tape off our bathroom, move everything out of there and start figuring out what the next steps would be to deal with this problem. Talked to home insurance adjusters, etc. As Ryan peeled back vinyl floor tiles to assess the damage, it became painfully obvious that we weren’t going to be able to simply replace the floor and be on our way. Ripping out subfloor, revealed a leaking shower drain, meaning we would need to rip out the tile in the shower.
And you know what that means. All the perfect pieces for an “If you give a mouse a cookie” situation. <if you’ve been around for any length of time, you’ll understand this reference> [or read this blog post] Could we rip out the shower, and replace it with the same brown tiles, and granite step and be on our way? Sure. This bathroom was only redone in 2017, so it wasn’t that old, we could probably find similar tile to match… but do we LIKE that tile? Not really. Tile costs money. And so begins our story…
If you’re going to replace tile, you might as well choOse tile you actually really like.
Let me preface this by saying, when we bought this house, I really liked the idea of having a tile bathroom with glass shower doors. When I saw the bathroom in question on the listing I said “That’s a nice bathroom. Not my personal style, or what I would pick, but really really nice.” And that’s how the past 4 years have gone. I love my bathroom, it’s bright, it’s clean and I feel like a complete spoiled brat to have it attached to my bedroom. After living in a house with only one full bathroom as a family of 5, moving to a home with 3.5 bathrooms felt like we won the lottery.
Welp. Here we are. The further we dug, the more we realized things were not done right. And if you know my husband… You know it needs to be done right. So welcome to my current anxiety spiral...
…The bathroom renovation I wasn’t mentally prepared to start. But as my sister in law reminded me, a kitchen renovation was thrust on us at our old house, and it resulted in an AMAZING kitchen in the end. A fridge leaked, turned a new kitchen floor into a mold and asbestos discovery, quarantined from our house/kitchen for months, everything was gutted, and over the course of a year we got a beautiful kitchen out of it. Honestly, the kitchen wasn’t finished until a few days before we listed it to sell… but minor details.
It’s amazing what a few new cabinets, new doors, hardware and paint can do to liven up a kitchen. Gosh I miss that kitchen. I almost miss the simplicity of life in Midland. I definitely miss being close to family. I miss the ease at which I could clean this whole house in a day. I miss the littleness of my babies when we lived here. Life was so different. Granted, it was towards the tail end of the ‘pandemic’ when we moved, and life was just… different like I said. I can’t help but look back at these photos and have my heart yearn to go back in time just for a little bit. If anything, just to be this younger mama, with squishy littles to snuggle.
Okay, until next time.
