Remodeling 101 - Adapt, adapt, adapt

A realization hit me this past year that a) our only daughter will be graduating college soon and won't be living here at our house much longer and b) this house is too big for two people. The solution to my new revelation was: it's time to sell the house and downsize.

But a quick look around our house made it painfully obvious that we had some significant work to do before it could ever be placed on the market.  Here's just a small sampling of my "Get the House Read to Sell To-Do List."

• Repaint Kitchen
• Repaint Master Bedroom
• Repaint Front Door
• Replace rotting wood on deck and re-stain
• Neutralize the purple room - (yes, I have a bedroom that is a violet color)
• Clean out basement
• Remodel Master and Hall Bath

A monumental list if I don't say so myself.  But that last item, "Remodel Master and Hall Bath" rose to the top of the list in January. 

Here's a photo of my master bath shower prior to remodeling. 
Brass fixtures and Hollywood lighting may have been the trend in the late 80s, but let's just say, I'm not seeing any of those on HGTV these days.

The goal was to remodel both baths by May 9 when our daughter, Kelsey, moves back home for the summer - the last time she will likely live here.

You'd think four months would be plenty of time to pull this off, right?  Well, it was tight.  It took me a good 6-7 weeks alone to drag tile back and forth from the tile store to the bathrooms and to FINALLY pick out the tile and order it.

That would end up being the EASY part of the job. After I watched a contractor rip out my old master shower, I soon began to understand why people complain about remodeling.  It seems that every step of the remodel we encountered a problem. 

But being the daughter of a man who was in the construction industry, I understand that challenges arise all the time during construction, and I think I did a fair job of adapting to issues as they came up.  I think I did my best adapting (albeit after taking some deep breaths and telling myself, it's going to be ok) on the day that the tile installers laid two different colors of tile in the hall bath.  I, nor they, unfortunately, noticed their error until all the tiles had been "set" overnight in the adhesive so the poor guys spent an entire morning breaking apart the tile they had laid the day before.  Talk about adapting! 

As this huge project winds down (Kelsey's bath will meet the deadline - Mine?  Not so much), I must say I've learned a lot.  I've learned:

• How to install a new toilet - It really isn't hard at all!
• That some people will try to take advantage of females (I emphasize the word TRY)
• That there are some really decent people left in this world too! Thank you Merik, Andrew, Dave and Gary for a phenomenal job!
• That buying a paint sample can save you a lot of extra work repainting a color you decide you don't like. 
• That taking a shower in the basement for over a month is no fun.
• That brown is the new black

And probably the biggest thing I've learned throughout this process is that you really shouldn't "let the house go" while living life because if you ever want to sell it, the to-do list to get it ready to sell will haunt you!