Beware of home improvement

Our renovated bathroom is pretty much done. It is lovely – tile floor, tile up the walls, actual storage. There are a few minor details to complete: towel rack, tp holder, handles on the cabinets, a shower head that is taller than we are, but we’re 90+% done. It only took 8 weeks of construction (on a 4-week plan), 7 weeks of showering in the basement in Dave’s garden-hose-kiddie-pool-and-submersible-sump-pump wonder shower, several contractor bills (no overruns!), and a weekend when my aunt and uncle stayed in our house while the bathroom had no door.

You’d think we’d be done with home improvement, but somehow the restless energy has spread to adjoining rooms. It happened when we redid the kitchen, too. The nicer kitchen shamed us into sprucing up the mudroom at its end. This time, after we replaced the light fixtures in the hall outside the bathroom, the one in the foyer I’ve never liked had to go too. Dave took the opportunity to finally get the monster TV he’s been needing. And, after the construction crew returned the hall closet to me, I invited some friends over for a reverse fashion show – they helped me decide to finally toss/give away schoolmarmish and unworn items before they rooted in the closet again.

Now, displaced by the hulking menace of the new plasma TV, I’ve taken to doing my yoga in the study. My DVDs will play on the computer, and on the computer monitor Shiva Rea isn’t the size of a small truck like she is on the new TV. The study is narrower, but at least it’s all mine, and I don’t have risk throwing out my back dragging the coffee table from the TV room into the hall just to make space for my mat. Now that I’m in here, stretching and moving around on the floor, this place could use a bit of renewal too. Maybe it’s time to replace the rug, or the light fixture, gotta be something around here I can change, er, fix.