A Little Tiny Toilet

I'm waiting on the guy in the van from the city utilities company that is sitting in front of our house right now to get out of his van and knock on my front door.

The reason he is out there is because we got a call regarding the large increase in water usage in the last few months. Since we haven't increased the showers, the laundry or the overall water usage at all, it's been an expensive mystery that leads to well over $120/month in JUST water and wastewater billing.

I am so afraid that it's leaking pipes under our house in the crawlspace.

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30 minutes later:

The verdict is A LEAKY TOILET. Whew! The one in our upstairs bathroom. All it's insides need to be replaced. The utilities guy turned it off and now we just need to get the stuff inside the tank replaced and our bill should decrease substantially.

Yeah, it's that same bathroom that I've been trying to remodel. Did I mention the shower doesn't work either?

I would really love to have one of those low-flow toilets.

Why is all the eco-friendly stuff so completely unaffordable??

Bathroom Break

Here we are - January 3!

I have a bit of a head cold, but nothing terribly serious. Just enough to make me slightly miserable.

Avery and Danny are coming over today to help me work on the upstairs bathroom. Our most pressing goal for the rest of the winter is to get that bathroom working again so that we can actually use it. Our house belonged to Alex's grandparents for forty years and there are some very strange quirks. For example - they really have something against using the bathroom that is part of their master suite. In the house they now reside in, they do not use their master bathroom, although, like ours, it is attached to their bedroom. They walk down the hall to a second bathroom. When they lived in our house, they walked all the way downstairs to use a tiny, cramped bathroom on the first floor rather than make a mess in the large, spacious, master bathroom directly next to their bed. The result? The master bathroom has a seriously bad case of dry rot and the fixtures don't work properly. We are not afriad of using the master bathroom, but we can't until we get it working again.

I'm not a plumber, so I can't actually replace the shower fixtures by myself. However, I can strip wallpaper, paint and scrub, so those are the goals of the day. Here are a couple "BEFORE" pictures.

I know this is hard to believe, but I actually have already done a bit of work in this bathroom. I replaced all the brass cabinet pulls with polished silver. The previous owners also had a serious affinity for brass. I think it's a generational thing because brass just screams "I did my decorating in the 80's and never looked back!!" It's definitely time to update things a bit.

If you will notice the green bathmat on the floor, and hearken back to what I just said about the silver hardware, I will give you a general overview of the room's eventual theme.

As you get to know me a bit better, you will find that I am a very elemental person. I am certainly very earthy - that is evident by my green thumb and my love of playing in the dirt. I drew the idea for this bathroom from an experience I had walking through the park one very early morning, when everything was dewey and silvered, and the sun was just beginning to rise, and all the foliage was brand new and pale. (It was in April.) And so, later today or perhaps tomorrow, when you see the finished product, I hope you will agree that the inspiration rendered an appropriate result.

Ta-ta for now! There is a lot of work to be done today.