DIY

In Monday's post, I mentioned that our house has been a little upended (oh, how I love a good understatement!) recently. I thought I'd give you all a peek at just how dramatic the change has been, though. We moved into our house about three and a half years ago, and though only the HVAC system needed immediate attention, there wasn't much we weren't planning on changing eventually. The first changes we wanted to make were to the 2.5 bathrooms, each of which competed with the others for the most hideous wallpaper award. The master bath got a facelift first, then the powder room downstairs. Those were just quickie paint jobs, mind you, and the powder room got a new sink, too. As we approached the holidays this year, though, Matt got the DIY itch, and said that he wanted to do some kind of project during the week he had off of work between Christmas and New Year.

The project started out small enough, I guess: he wanted to replace the sink/cabinet in the kids/guest bathroom upstairs, and update the wallpaper with a fresh coat of paint. The more we talked about it, though, the more he wanted to do: first it was the linoleum flooring, then the toilet, then getting the popcorn ceiling down... The final frontier was the bathtub - one of those one-piece acrylic jobs that got installed with the house 20+ years ago. I was pretty unsure about tackling that particular project, but Matt claimed that with his brother Ben's help (Ben is an AMAZING contractor in the DC area, if you happen to know someone there, BTW), it wouldn't be a problem.

Well, guys, it pretty much sucked for two solid weeks, but we went from this:

(these were photos Matt took during the house inspection before we moved in.)

To this:

Mad, mad props to my husband and Ben, and also to my brother Evan who helped with the demo process. I gave a lot of opinions and did some painting, but I can't say how proud I am of Matt for doing this... this is a guy who, when we met, may or may not have been able to distinguish a wrench from a pair of pliers, and here he is using a tile saw!

Finally, the most important part: the inaugural bath:

Looks pretty good, right? (Thanks for stopping by, and have a great weekend!)

xox,

annemie