Phase Two

So, it's official, our friends are moving out on the last day of October and Kate and Trevor are moving into our house!

To celebrate, we decided to bash out a wall...Ok, not exactly to celebrate. More like, to start plotting the remodel of our lovely upstairs...and its closet-sized dysfunctional charming bathroom.Wait...I didn't show you the shower. This space is less than 32"x32" -- that is super tight.Nice, huh? Anyway, no matter. It's all going away. We're still hashing out how we're going to configure the bathroom and looking at some creative options, but it's exciting to be moving forward. (I'm also pleased because this means I get to go to the Home Depot--more saving, more doing...I'm not a sucker...)

Meanwhile, outside, here are the laurels Todd's dad planted in July to fill in the gap that the now-gone dead tree left.
There are actually four total, two on each side of the tree stump. The right two just lost a lot of leaves, but they're doing fine now.

One other SWEET little discovery that we are soooo excited about...One of the things we contemplated as we're trying to plan out the bathroom remodel was moving the shower out to be even with this (apparently) useless wall. So we poked a hole in it to find out whether that was an option, and this is what we found...
This is the chimney vent from the oil furnace (removed three years ago when we moved in) and it is fabulous original-to-the-house red brick, so we're going to expose it when we redo all the drywall. That should look legitimately charming and add a lot of character (in a good way) to the upstairs. Cool, huh?

One more down, lots left

I've been meaning to post this for a few weeks, but we FINALLY got that dead cedar tree cut down! I have video, too, but my new camera takes much higher-quality videos than the old one, so it's taking a really long time to upload. I'll post it later, probably. Anyway, you may remember that we used to have this lovely tree in our hedge:
I'm referring to the one right in the middle. It looked much worse in person. It's been on our list to cut down for about two years, but we didn't know if we wanted to put up a fence or plant more shrubs, or put up a fence while we waited for the new shrubs to grow.

Then we discovered that city ordinances placed restrictions on fences near roads, so we decided to just put in new laurels. BIG ones. (This may have been done, but Todd's dad did it for us. We weren't around for that part.)

So we had a good old time borrowing Tom's chainsaw and creating a new pile of firewood.

And here's the hole it left. I didn't take a farther-away picture...maybe next time. As you can see, it left a big gap. So that's the story of the great tree-cutting-down.

I also have some very exciting news in the remodeling category: it looks like Kate and Trevor might be moving into our house in a few months, and we've arranged a work-exchange agreement, so we're going to be able to finish our house, with their help!

On that happy note, I think I might use this river rock pebble stuff in the upstairs shower pan. But I would pull out all the black/gray pieces and replace them with white. It's probably going to be an all-white bathroom. EXCITING!!!