Welcome back! I am a little late getting to my week 5 update. I try and post them on Wednesdays, but this week was crazy. We have made SOOOO much progress on the bathroom this last week. Fortunately, my husband didn’t have to work this week, which meant that the progress we made was off the charts.
I cannot believe we are already in the 5th week of the one room challenge. There is a lot that needs to happen in the next 3 weeks, and honestly, I don’t know if we will make it. WE ARE going to try our very hardest, but like most projects and timelines, we bit off a huge chunk, and renovations just take time.
When we do remodel projects, my husband and I make a great team. He worked in construction for some time, and has a huge variety of skills revolving around that.
Combine that with me…growing up in a household where I watched my parents remodel our home for 10 years of my childhood, and a love for learning new skills and hobbies (thank you ADHD) we make a great team.
On our last home we renovated, we re-did EVERYTHING, down to rewiring the entire house, including the breaker box. ( I always encourage using a professional for things like wiring if you are not sure what you are doing… its a big deal.)
Luckily our neighbor at the time was an electrician, and he helped make sure everything was up to code and circuits/ breakers were not overloaded anywhere.
Our last house flooded for awhile, which made it interesting. We had started renovating it, and then we had natural springs pop up in the basement flooding everything.
We had to gut all of the work we had done and started over. We tried everything and contacted everyone who we thought could try and help fix it. They even replaced the pipes for the city in the road in front of our house.
No luck. It flooded for almost 2 years straight. So we re-did everything.
We drywalled, built walls, poured cement, built an insulated / powered shop in the backyard, dug our own sump pump, and build a water filtration system to use the ground water to water the lawn, replaced windows, landscaped, floors, kitchen renovation…. You name it, we did it in that house. We were fortunate to sell it, and here we are at it again.
That was a lot of back story, but basically we have a bunch of skills we have learned over the years, some out of curiosity but mostly out of necessity. My husband had received a new job offer while we were about 1/2 way through our house renovation. He was driving 3 hours a day to get to the new job and back, which left a bunch of the renovation chores to me. I couldn’t just sit there and watch projects not being done. So I picked up the hammer, saw, nail gun, and drywall lift, and learned new things.
It was hard.
But now we have skills we never thought we would. They are coming in helpful for our current house.
So basically, my husband’s skills were put to use this week. He did things that I have no idea how to do. Then later, I will do the finish work, which is the stuff that I love to do.
This last week, He was able to insulate all of the exterior walls, and build the walls we needed for the walk in shower, the toilet closet, and the vanity. He wired in all the lights, and got most of the plumbing done.
There were a lot of moments were the measurements for random things were needed. Things like:
- How tall do you want the shower seat?
- How high up do you want the mirror?
- Where should we put the shelf in the shower?
- Where do you want the lights hung?
- Where should the outlet on the wall go?
The list went on and on. There was many times were we used the standard measurements for things, like counter height etc. The things that there was not standard measurements for, the decisions were made by me holding up my hands, and saying, “Well about this big?” or “How about this high?”
My husband is such a good sport to put up with my decision making skills.
So overall this week is not a huge flashy difference, like having a completely demoed room was, but there was a ton of new things put into the space, which is a huge deal. I cannot wait to get to drywall. As soon as the plumbing is done that is the next item we will be doing. I will share more on social media as we go! Check back to see our progress next week!
-Amanda