Housekeeping???

Oooooooookaaaay.

Reality is starting to hit. My master bathroom (roughly the size of my old apartment) is coated in fine white powder as a result of sanding the ceiling. My guest bath has a newly-installed cement board floor, which is to be followed by slate in short order, but currently it's kind of gritty/crumbly/grainy mess. The areas that have been purged of vinyl tile (mostly essential-to-walk-on-toilet-surrounding-areas) are sticky and there are sticky footprints all over the floor close-by. The paint, which isn't supposed to be on my cement floor in the first place, chips and flakes and sticks to things. I don't have any bathrooms that have doors. Generally I can't touch any surface in my house without attracting some type of residue.

I need another toilet to smash.

The double-edged sword of home renovations seems to be that 99% of every job is preparing for the actual job to happen. It's tiring and tedious, mostly because you don't really see any finished product for ages. The great thing about it is that it forces you to finish the project because even when you're 90% done, it still looks as bad as (or worse than) it did when you started. It's that last little bit that gives you all of the rewards. A lot like giving birth really, hours and hours of backbreaking labor involving sweat, muck and general unpleasantness for that final, rewarding push. Of course, having never had kids, this is only a loose analogy. Or maybe it's more like sex for a man? All that tedious foreplay for the five second pay-off? But then, I've never been a man having sex either...

I think tomorrow I'm going to putz around and do fun things, like attaching doorknobs and trying out paint samples and maybe seeing what's in the 20-odd paint cans left in the awesome little crawl-space under the stairs. The crawl-space is currently storage, but I'm so tempted to make a little Amy-sized cushion-lined nook off of the living-room that I could curl up in to read. But who other than me wants a nook like that? For that matter, who other than me would fit in a nook like that? But the paint cans are the project closer at hand, and for whatever reason rummaging through other people's old junk is fun to me - probably why I like garage sales and flea markets and creepy old abandoned houses. The hopeless optimist in me waiting to unearth treasure (same reason I keep dating. Ha!)