Look at these kickass stats from 2011!  Happy New Year and here’s to a few more goodies to come in 2012! Here’s an excerpt: The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 44,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would [...]

I haven’t exactly commented yet on HGTV’s Design Star this year since this summer was just about as busy as busy gets.  Visitors from all over the country, a bathroom remodel that lingered and lingered and summer weather that didn’t really show up in Portland until….oh….last week….all ki

You may have noticed that even though we’ve wrapped up the big bathroom renovation of 2011, we are by no means done with all of the housework for the year.  Does it ever stop – really?!?  Our master bedroom is kind of in a “transitional” period right now.  After all of the hoopla of the master [.

I love to blog. I really wish I could dedicate more of my days to just sitting down and writing like a fiend. But then there’s work and laundry and dinner and dog walking and….ya know…life. But I do it because I love it and it’s my creative outlet and stress reliever – weird, but [...]

Ok, so it actually arrived well over a month ago, but this blog certainly isn’t in real time!!  Let’s dish the goods, shall we??  But before we do that, let’s take a trek back in time to what it looked like before… …and here are a few WAY old pics (like right after we moved [...]

I don’t usually do an entire post to one room’s sources, but I thought the bathroom renovation was kind of a special situation.  It was a HUGE renovation and I’m getting a TON of questions about where some of the items came from so I thought this would help everybody!  I’ll just do this one [...]

Money is always a sensitive topic, but I feel it’s important to hash out the budget details on our recent bathroom renovation because there’s a TON of information on the internet about how to lay tile and install cabinetry, but never enough information about how much it actually costs!  Especially if you are

**Warning** This post contains a LOT of pictures!  Please be patient while it loads! It’s done!!!!  If you’re new here, then take a look at this post, which did a pretty good job of rounding up all of the dirty details that we’ve been doing over the past 6 months!  There’s also a chapter run down

Picture the scene – Dr. J is hanging some trim pieces, I’m between paint coats on a pair of mirrors that will eventually go in the bathroom and Maggie is doing what she normally does on a sunny Oregon day like today – roaming the house looking for the best sunbeam to crash in. All [...]

Check this out… ….and this means….you guessed it!  The bathroom is almost 100% completed!  We’ve been heads down these past few weeks, plugging away at the final touches in the bathroom.  We just miiiiight get it all wrapped up this weekend and put to bed….OMG!  Can you believe it?!?!  6 m

I am.  I truly am BAD at blogging.  I don’t blog every day.  I don’t “Pinterest” like it’s my job – ’cause I’ve got a regular 9 to 5 and it keeps me PLENTY busy.  I don’t have giveaways once/week.  I don’t really craft.  I read other peoples’ blogs but

First there was The Godfather, then The Godfather, Part II and everybody said lightening couldn’t strike twice.  Then Star Wars, then Empire, then Jedi…that was THRICE (and, no, the prequels don’t count).  Then there is WordPress, where we can be “Freshly Pressed”, an honor that I was so luck

We’ve been busting @$$ on our bathroom now for 3 months and I’ve been so busy with bathroom-ing, working and hosting out-of-towners (7 out of the previous 10 weeks - and people wonder why we have a dedicated guest room??) that I honestly have completely forgotten to update you on some of the other things we

I finally…FINALLY took a shower in our almost completely remodeled bathroom!  You can drop all of the jokes about how I haven’t showered in months ’cause I’ve heard ‘em all!  Besides, we’ve been sharing tub time with all of our (frequent) house guests since March 5th in our guest bath!!

I’ll bet you’ve been wondering what the hell we’ve been up to these past few weeks.  Honestly if there were an award for “juggling” life, then I think we’d win hands down lately.  We’ve been hosting out of towers pretty much every weekend since mid-April and we’re STILL reno

It’s been a long couple of weeks!  Work has been crazy for me, we had more out-of-town visitors, I was out of town for work, and Dr. J has been tiling like crazy, including a pretty impressive feat of drilling his thumb to the wall with an impact driver.  That was a fun afternoon trip [...]

Subway tile installation commences…..NOW: …expect radio silence for the next few weeks as career world merges cataclysmically with personal world and blog world falls behind since nobody really cares about this pesky lil’ blog anyway…. We’re remodeling our master bathroom and it’s a doozy!  You

…really, it’s the little things in life: Oh, and we also “buttoned up” the shower this weekend too: Although, this is a pic of our “second buttoning” since we accidentally made the holes too big for the plumbing bits and the cover for our plumbing didn’t fit over top – oops! 

…and what a difference it makes! It took the collective efforts of two girlfriends, three masks, about a half dozen bottles of beer and lots and lots of elbow grease to get those walls sanded down and ready for texture.  Then putting on the texture was fairly seamless (though we did have to go to [...]

Ughhhhhhh…..this is the part where I’m so grateful I have a blog.  And so grateful that it’s MY space and I can say whatever I damn well please (*gasp* – she swears!).  So where’s the bathroom in all of this?  See, I have a job.  Dr. J has a job.  Unfortunately, our jobs don’t really

Slowly but surely, I’ve been working on our lovely pirate chest.  You remember it, don’t you? ….I said slowly but surely….and boy, do I mean slow!!  It’s literally the slowest project we’ve tackled to date (the bathroom is kind of getting most of our attention these days).  A few weeke

I pretty much spent all of last weekend looking at backs and butts (of Dr. J and his dad).  They were on their hands and knees in the bathroom all weekend and LOOK at all they got done: Constructed the shower pan, including laying the cement, water barrier and another layer of cement.  It’s a [...]

I love a clean house.  I hate cleaning.  And yet I still love a clean house.  Conundrum??  Absolutely.  This is why I have a wonderful cleaning lady who is absolutely worth every penny I pay her to come and clean the house once a month to help keep me on track.  Problem solved!  However, I haven’t really bee

Rather than typing a whole update on the plumbing and electrical, we thought it’d be easier to have Dr. J give you an overview on camera….’cause let’s face it….typing’s hard… So click here to see the video, which will take you to YouTube.  We still can’t do embedded videos ye

It’s time to update with something OTHER than bathroom mayhem.  I need to focus on something aside from renovation dust and demolition for a change…. The big news for us (well, sorta) is that we made our dining room bigger!!  Not really, but we did get a smaller dining table which gave us soooo much [...]

This is how I saw my husband most of the day on Sunday… This is the wife’s point of view when the hubby is doing electrical work in our master bathroom.  All I have to say is that I’m glad he decided to tackle this project while I was at home.  Unlike the laundry room [...]

If you read this in a reader and/or from our subscription service, then visit the website because I’ve made some minor modifications to the real post. So it goes without saying that I have seriously been looking for a family room rug to replace our old one for well over a year now!  In fact, I [...]

Normally I wouldn’t devote an entire post to trash, but when you’re doing a renovation (big or small), you generate a ton of it and you really need to plan ahead about where all of it’s going to go, especially in a green city like Portland, Oregon.  Since I try to live a relatively “green”

So there was a lot of excitement this past weekend what with all of the demo and such (which you can read about by clicking here and here).  So exciting, in fact, that I’m pretty sure we’ve used up all of our remaining health units for a little while (too bad it’s not like Zelda [...]

Woke up Sunday feeling like I’d been hit by a truck.  But we still had to remove the toilet, all of the shower tile and the remaining floor tile.  Removing the toilet wasn’t so easy…. A shoddy (and crooked) install meant we couldn’t undo the bolts.  We didn’t care that much to trouble shoot