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This is what we ended up with!
It went shockingly well. The box said it would be between 8-10 hours. I had read reports online of others who purchased and installed playgyms and they were several days and broken pieces or missing pieces. It only took an actual 6 working hours. The kids love it.
This is the original for sale sign from the man who built and lived in our house until his death. His name was Ray Seger. We have pictures from when he was building the house and the final one has the for sale sign so we know this exact one was not from our house (at least not at that point). We do know he built the house across the street so maybe this was from that house. It is very similar to the one that is in the pics of our house. I love the phone number! Our builder found it nailed face down in the attic for makeshift flooring. It is very thick and in pretty good condition so we will likley hang it on our wall somewhere when construction is done.
This is kind of hard to see but Ray loved to sign and date all of his home improvement work. (I LOVE THAT!) The cabinets in our basement have also been dated. We found this name, date and age underneath the vanity on the sub floor. At age 73 Ray felt it necessary to add a second bathroom onto his house. He also signed the shower base. The vanity was 2-20-78 and the shower base was 12-13-77. Guess the bathroom was a few month long project! Hopefully the remodel will not be the same..jpg)
This is a shot of the exhaust fan/light/heater in the ceiling. Wow! 30 years of dust and crap really don't look that great. Let that be a lesson to ya'll...clean out your exhaust fan housings every decade or so! Chris always said he was worried it would catch fire if we used the heater. The thing worked great, though! This also shows the tile was indeed on the ceiling, too! I wouldn't lie about this stuff :)
The builder is threatening a 12 hour day tomorrow (I am not holding my breath) so maybe there will be actual construction photos soon!
This is the bottom corner of the shower. The black stuff you see WILL NOT come off not matter what product I used or what I scrubbed it with. I guess at some point there was some kind of leak behind the wall so they took the tile out along the bottom and then just stuck it back in there with a lousy caulk job along the seam. Or maybe the tile was just falling off the wall. The whole bathroom is tile...everything...walls, shower and even ceiling in the same tile. It is blue nd white but at some point someone painted over it with white latex paint. The paint on the shower tiles was starting to peel off and the blue and white design was showing through. Even better was that in some random placement there were tiles that had fish, swans and seahorses in shiny gold. The "chair rail" tile trim was also a swirly design in shiny gold. I am sure it was lovely. Hmmmm..jpg)
This shows our lovely vanity. Take note of the places where the white with metallic sparkly flecks laminate peeled off. Harder to see is the top was lifting up but held down by the sink so just one edge did not lie flat. We did replace the knobs after we moved in because one broke off in my hand with the water running. We did have a period of using the pliers to turn the water on and off. The blue sink was chipped and would not stay clean. The odd khaki border you see along the wall used to be a wallpaper border that has long since peeled off and just left behind the wallpaper backing. Yes, that is the only outlet and it is not GFCI and only works if the light is on..jpg)
This was our tile floor...again, before demo began. The two brown spots are holes were a few tiles would pop up every couple of days and we would just throw them away. When we moved in the floor was a big sheet of rolled out vinyl which was gross and in bad repair. It was not glued down with any adehesive and under that was peel and stick vinyl squares that were not stuck. My mother in law helped me remove it within 2 days of moving in and this floor was better! Actually we did not see the hole by the door until we had damaged the vinyl but really, it was too gross to put back down. The toliet also had white paint overspray around the base which we think was from someone trying to spray paint a previous toliet white. I can only ssume it was blue, like the rest of the bathroom.
This photo shows Bumblebee's first "catch". We got the kids rods and reels and let them fish off the pier in the back of the house. Double A was actually quite good at casting. Bumblebee didn't cast as well but he did get the only catch of the trip...an oyster! We all agreed it was much harder to catch an oyster than a fish! :)
This is July Fourth and the "big" fireworks had not started yet but some individuals were setting off thier own. Bumblebee did not want me to miss a single one so he grabbed my neck and kept pointing me in the right direction.
This photo turned out surprisingly well considering I took it in the pitch dark and I couldn't even see that Tammi wasn't there! Sorry Tammi! Thank goodness for the red eye pre flash thing which got everyone to look and allowed me a split second to line it up.We had a nice time but had to leave Saturday July 5th to begin our long trek home. We stayed somewhere in Mississippi that night and finished the trip on Sunday. The sad part about it is that Saturday the 5th was our 11th anniversary and we spent it driving, stopping every 30 minutes to let Bumblebee pee (once on the side of the road) and spending about 9 hours in some random, but very nice, hotel in the middle of nowhere Mississippi. We did treat ourselves (and the kids) to dinner at Crescent City Grill in Hattiesburg on our way through town. And note to ourselves...don't stop at Lambert's "Home of the Throwed Roll" on Sunday around lunchtime. The wait was almost 2 hours and when we decided not to wait the kids were distraught over the fact we could not eat in a restaurant where they actually throw food at you. There's always next trip...or pretty much any meal at home!
