I did get to shower yesterday

Right now I'm feeling a little numb about the bathroom situation. It's far from finished but if I let myself get too concerned about it I'm going to have a mental breakdown. I've cried at least once each day since it happened. Not just over the bathroom, it seems that it is the proverbial straw on the camel's back. The culmination of events of a shitty past month or so has left me in a crumpled heap this week. I worry that JQ is worse than I am. What we both desperately need is a break. If some greater power could just ease up on the hardships we've been dealt—even if just for a few months—that would be awesome.

Don't you think?

But anyway, the bathroom. If you missed the debacle I wrote about on Wednesday, go ahead and read it. I'll wait.

Want to see a picture?


Lovely, right?

That's what the bathroom looked like Tuesday night after the initial tearout/freakout. The door isn't entirely open so you can't see the right hand side of the tub, but it looks pretty much like the left side at this point. Minus the faucets of course. The arrow points to the section of the wall that was right below the leaking soap dish. It was pretty nasty.

The entire shower was covered in those ugly plastic tan/cream swirled tiles that you can see directly above the little white door on the left (t's a laundry chute, btw). I'm cursing those crappy tiles to no end. Not only were they in the shower area, but they're in the entire bathroom—about 3 feet up the wall. But that's a whole different project that I can't think about right this second. The shower is the priority.

After much freaking out, researching, and doubt about how to handle the situation—followed by lots of encouragement from Nobody (thanks!)—JQ picked up some supplies to, at the very least, get walls back up around the tub. From there we'll decide how to finish. The biggest bitch is handling the window. We want to put up a shower enclosure but we have to cut out a hole for the window. At the price these walls are going for, it cannot be screwed up. We (and by we I totally mean JQ) only get one chance. Taking out the window is not an option. We just put in new windows in January. That's would be like throwing away money. Our other option is tile but I really don't want to go that route. We could save ourself the headache and hire somebody else to do it but that would cost three times what it would for JQ to do it. That's about four times the money we have in our budget for this project.

And the bitch of it is that we don't have TIME for this. JQ has work and a full load at school as well as taking care of G-tot when I'm at work. He can't really do anything after G-tot goes to bed because the bathroom is right next to G-tot's bedroom. That leaves about an hour a day to work on rectifying the situation. And an hour? That's almost enough time to just get into things. We also only have one bathroom. I like to shower daily. We have some friends and family that have graciously offered up their facilities to us, but it's not the same. Trust me.

So here we are on Friday.

With the very little attention JQ has had to give to the bathroom, we have some progress. The walls will probably go up this evening. I don't expect to be able to shower at home until sometime next week.

Wish us luck.