Joe the Plumber

Well we had another fun round of house projects a few weeks ago. It's a good thing I let the dust settle (literally) for a couple of weeks before posting because, seriously, this one was a doo-hoo-hoooozy. It involved tearing out old plumbing and putting in new plumbing for the entire house (I'll let your imagination run wild for a moment...)

I'm going to give you list of random things/places and I'll let you guess what they all have in common:

-friend's house
-neighbor's house
-church
-local grocery store
-Best Western motel
-bucket

Have you guessed?








**TMI Alert**








Yes, that's right. Those are all places I went to the bathroom over the course of about 30 hours during this project. Now onto the good stuff...

So the day started out fine. I took the kids and ran errands all morning while Glen and our neighbor across the street went to work. In my extreme naivete, I believed (probably more like hoped) that by the time we came home around 1:00 they would be close to finishing. Mmmmm, no. When I came through the door, the kitchen looked like this (the kitchen sink is moving to where the big hole in the wall is):



The bathroom sink was here:



And the toilet was here:



That's right, no running water, and no toilet in the house. I said a little prayer of thanks that Caleb is not potty-trained, and also that I had decided to use my friend's bathroom before I left her house to come home. So at this point I decided to attempt to put the kids down for a nap and hope that they sleep through all the sawing, banging, and grinding. Not likely, I thought, but what could it hurt? Miracle of miracles, they both slept for like 2 hours!

I was amazed because (totally unrelated side note) we seriously CANNOT sneak into these kids' rooms at night when they are sleeping, because they wake up. Every time. Without fail. We live in a very old house, and the floors and doors make all kinds of loud cracking noises. This has always upset me because, is there anything more precious than watching your children sleep? I think not. And I wish I could do it, but alas, creaky doors do not sleeping children make. It's like that scene from What About Bob? when Dr. Marvin tries unsuccessfully to wake up Bob by yelling and shaking him and jumping on his bed. But then his little alarm clock goes off and Bob wakes right up. It's like that. I digress...

So Glen and neighbor are working for the rest of the afternoon and neighbor goes home at around 5:00 p.m. Glen continues to install plumbing for the rest of the evening. At around 9:59 p.m. (Saturday night), an extremely panicked Glen runs upstairs, grabs the phone and frantically dials the phone number to Lowe's. Turns out there was one little bag of small parts that Glen needed more of to seal off the pipes. Lowe's closes at 10:00 p.m. (along with all other hardware stores) They would not sympathize with our situation (didn't really expect them to, just hoped), and we were stuck. No running water. No toilet. Tomorrow is Sunday. Meetings for Glen at 6:30 a.m. Church at 9 a.m. No showers yet that day.

So at 11 p.m. I drove over to the Best Western motel down the street and rented a room so we could at least shower and get ready for bed. Glen finished up whatever he could do without those parts, then took his turn at the motel and checked out. We both got to sleep around 3 a.m. Alarm went off at 5:40 a.m.

So after church Glen's doing tithing and the Bishop says to him, "Why aren't you home getting that ox out of the mire?" Glen comes home, makes a trip to Lowe's (no judging, please) and by about 5 p.m. on Sunday, we had running water and a toilet!

Here is a picture of Glen with his Dad on the cell phone talking Glen through how to install the toilet:


Well we survived that one, but the projects are far from over. Here are some before and afters (note- the afters are not finals)




Before (the toilet was on the opposite wall behind the door):












After (or better, "in progress"):

(that's a $300 pedastal sink we got on Craigslist for $75!)







Here's sort of a "current" (I'm going to stop saying "after") picture of the kitchen. The sink is now in front of the window instead of in the corner like in the picture at the top. The cabinet and dishwasher have actually switched places since this picture was taken. We like playing "musical cabinets" around here. In the end, we will have new cabinets, flooring and windows, but this is where we are right now.


If you actually made it through this entire post, I'm very impressed.