After the Afters...

Finally--- here are some after shots of our downstairs bathroom!  To refresh your memory this is what it used to look like:

We hired our friend Brad back in January to do the tile work and he was nothing short of amazing!  He is a perfectionist, a quality in which I adore, and he worked fast. That is the ultimate combination for anyone working on a project in the home, isn't it? This transformation happened in a total of 2 or 3 days. Talk about instant gratification! Kyle shocked me and installed all the new fixtures. Everyone was telling us we needed to hire a plumber to do that, but I guess not. I really should give my man more credit when it comes to handyman stuff.

I love this place! Sometimes I am overindulgent and turn on both showerheads. I know. Naughty me. Draining our world's water supply one shower at a time. At some point we'll install glass doors, but for now the shower curtain works just fine because of the lip Brad tiled in. Brilliant!

Some other changes have taken place around here that I am excited about. After seven years of marriage we decided to buy some bedroom furniture.  Remember our bedroom in our Chicago cottage?

This was the extent of the furniture inside:  A nightstand (technically it is called bathroom floor cabinet, but I thought it worked nicely as a night stand) courtesy of Home Goods, which is where our bedding was purchased, too I believe (I love that store! Here there is just a little home section in TJMaxx, not it's own store. I miss it.), a super queen bed on a frame, and 3 segments of a picket fence to serve as a "headboard".  That was it. Nothing else. We managed just fine but oh how I longed for the day when we each had our own little nightstand to store our books and treasures and such. A dresser or chest of drawers would have been nice, too. But moving around ruins furniture so we kept our belongings at a minimum.

After moving to Happy Valley, I began the hunt. When I finally found what I was looking for, Kyle gave me the go ahead after only so much as looking at a picture I took of it, so I took the plunge. A bit later I added Kyle's favorite...a few extra pillows. Happy Anniversary to us!

• Kyle likes it simply because we no longer are sleeping on a mattress that is resting on the floor. (Nothing wrong with that. You do what you gotta do) We did away with the frame when we moved into this house and put our former mattress in the guest bedroom.
• The kids like this bed because they can fit underneath it which is fun for a game of hide-and-go seek, or hide-from-Mom-because-it's-bedtime.
• I like the color, style of it, that it's sturdy (lets hope so anyway. I didn't buy the furniture warranty--seems like such a waste of money). It feels fresh and inviting to me. I hope I still love it in 10 years!

Does your man like lots of pillows on the bed?  Kyle despises pillows. To him it makes a bed less inviting when you have to battle with a host of poofy squares every time you want to climb into bed.  I only added one new pillow for every week Kyle has been gone. You know, to dull the pain of his absence. :-) Buying a few new pillows was cheaper than buying new bedding altogether, which the impractical, indulgent and change-loving side of me wanted to do. Fortunately my more reasonable self won out.   I can't say that I got them when Kyle was out of town on purpose, but I am hoping he'll just be so happy to come home to us that he won't hate them quite so much.  I'll be sure to print out  a picture and keep it in his very own night stand so he has a diagram to refer to when it's his turn to make the bed.  That should make arranging the pillows easier on him. In the mean time, I am enjoying the fresh look of our bedding.

Kyle will be glad to hear that I no longer am itching to paint our room. After being sick in bed for 4 months, it was all I could do not to hire a painter to come in and give my walls a face lift--- something more cheery and happy to look at than brown.  Yellow! Green! Anything but brown. But I'm good now. Brown is fine. I can deal with it. For another few months.  After the baby is born I may change my mind....