Camping

After the month long bathroom renovation/moving our stuff to the house my parents and Tyson drove out to visit during Josh's vacation week, which just so happened to start the day we officially moved in. It was a tad bit crazy. Since the pipes in the house all looked like this in the beginning...

(That's rust.) Josh had decided to redo all the plumbing in the house in one go. That meant the kitchen sink had to be torn apart. Luckily after getting the plumbing back up and running, and the week before my family came out, Josh's mom came out to help us clean and organize. She was heaven sent. Without her I don't know when I would have gotten to cleaning and our kitchen wouldn't have been livable.  

Luckily the day after my family showed up we got out of there anyway. After a month of hard nonstop work we were excited for a break. And it was awesome. we headed out to the Olympic Peninsula and pitched our tents in a campground with an insane view of Lake Quinalt. 

We had a blast exploring near camp, and playing games.

Some of us (the crazy ones) did some swimming in the freezing lake. And always at night for some reason.

Poor Josh had been working SO hard. We're pretty lucky to have him.

We met some funny critters that stuck with me and became inspiration for baby boy's nursery.

Have you seen the Hoh Rainforest? No, I mean the Hooooohhhhh Rainforest. You should. It's quite amazing. We spent a large part of our time singing the Jurassic park theme song and were really tempted to ask the park rangers where you go to see the T-Rex.

Camping while pregnant is not advised. Unless you have a really comfy pad to sleep on. I remember getting almost zero sleep the first two nights until I complained enough that my parents remembered they had some extra bleacher pads in their car and I stole them to pad my hips.

On the way home we swung by La Push and hiked down to second beach. It was the first time we'd really seen the sun and it was beautiful.

I think my mom saw the whole peninsula through binoculars. ;) She's a birder and had fun trying to spot some she'd never seen before.

We also collected a mountain of driftwood. I wanted to collect enough to make a mobile for the nursery, but we all couldn't stop picking pieces up. Driftwood is cool, but probably the coolest piece was this ring found by my mom. It was an awesome trip and a much needed break from the house. We can't wait for our next camp out!

Getting to Work

Upon purchasing our house we immediately, you guessed it, got to work! We still had a month left on our apartment lease which made it a perfect time to tackle the only bathroom, and it pretty much needed an entire gut job. I didn't do the best job of taking before pictures, but it being a small bathroom I didn't have very many options for good picture taking angles.
The floor tiles were cracking and gross. The shower door was black mirrored glass. I didn't even know shower doors like it existed. The walls were wet behind the shower so we knew there was some sort of leaking going on. The mirror was rusty. There is/was knob and tube wiring throughout the house, and rusty pipes. I could go on, but pictures are more fun anyway.

That's painted black tile in the shower. The only light in the bathroom was the one above the sink. With the combination of no light, black shower doors, and black tile I'm amazed anyone was able to see what they were doing in there. I'm so glad I never had to take a single shower before we gutted it.

The first thing we did was spend a day spending oodles of money on supplies.

Next we demolished. Lath and plaster. Uuuuuuuuuggggggghhhhhhhh.

                                                                              

Then we cleaned.

Then new sub-floor.

Discoveries of buji tubs. That was a bad day.

Vapor barrier for the shower.

Cement backerboard for the shower and floor. (Pretty much everything was done in darkness since the only time we could work on it was when Josh got off work, and the electric still needed to be done.)

Waterproofing.

Drywall. Are you sick of pictures yet? :)

New plumbing and electrical.

TILE!

This was an exciting day, but boy was it was getting hard to work around that baby belly.

And then more work was done. After several more weeks we got to the other things. We replaced the door with a not disgusting one, and also switched the way it swung so we would have a little more room in the small bathroom. We made the sink base from a cabinet I found on Craigslist. The sink and faucet we got at Lowes. Trim, paint, light fixtures. Pretty much everything from Lowes. We still have a custom medicine cabinet in the works that will house our electric toothbrush and everything else still stuffed in the little cabinet. Currently we are still using this super attractive mirror I got years ago at goodwill. 

I stole these picture ideas from pinterest. I made them with rocks from our favorite park and really like how they turned out. 

The shower curtain I got from Wayfair and we kept the original shower faucet, but replaced the sprayer. So there you have it. The before.

After

 Before.

And after.