"How I Spent My Summer Vacation (The Boring Middle-aged Married Homeowner Version)"

Alternate title for this post: the bathroom renovation from hell. Two weeks, including a full two days with a heat gun just removing the old, ugly, cheap vinyl peal-and-stick flooring the previous owners had slapped down and the linoleum beneath that, then five days prepping the floor, laying the natural stone tile, and fixing what I'd screwed up, misc time replacing and re-painting the trim, then a day and a half playing plumber to replace some old shut-off valves and supply lines.

But it does look great:



My wife indeed has the whole "vision" thing going on and her taste is impeccable and I'm not going to block HGTV like I swore I would do in the middle of all this. In fact, as much of a pain that it was to do this job - and it really only took so long because most of the time I was either being very careful doing something I'd never done before or fixing something I had screwed up because I had never done it before - the bad parts of it when I swore to myself I would never undertake such a big job again are fading from my memory in light of the completed project, and I'm confident I can do the other bathroom just as well and in a lot less time. But my wife says we can wait until next summer for that.

Best discovery during this process? Lowe's offers a 10% discount for veterans ALL THE TIME! But they seem incapable of registering you AS a veteran and I had to keep showing them a copy of my DD214 so I'm debating just getting it tattoed on my chest:


(NOTE: Stunt chest used, not author's actual body.)