Christmas is almost upon us.

My posts have been getting further and further apart. My apologies. Lemme tell you what has been going on and perhaps I can use it as an excuse.

Well as I mentioned before, Karen and I are doing some renovation to our house. It is 8 years old and has withstood the punishment of 6 people and 2 cats and... well, it shows.

The initial plan was that we would have someone tile the Master bathroom shower and Karen and I would do the floor in the master bath, the kitchen and the powder room. Well to make a potentially long story short we figured out how much we would save doing it ourselves verses having the tile guy do it. After all said and done, taking into account my lost pager pay for a week and materials etc it ended up having a professional do it was costing us only an additional $700. Never mind it would have taken me at least twice as long.

I won't go into excruciating details about the process other than to say They Started Monday Morning and completed this past Sunday. I worked from home all week so I could watch and learn from them. Unfortunately I ended up getting another Critical issue in that occupied much of my time. But I did learn a few pointers. I think Karen and I could have done as good a job on the floors etc but I am glad we hired someone for the shower. It was pretty involved. I am a little disappointed because I like doing that kind of work and I didn't get to help other than I did get to put the show molding back on....

Over all we are pleased with the tile. The grout in the bathroom is lighter than we imagined bit it still looks good.

The glass guy came Monday morning to measure for new shower doors. They will probably be in after Christmas if not after new years.

We got the carpet order straightened out finally. Instead of the 2200 sq. ft. they re-figured it and was able to reduce the required carpet to 1900 sq. ft. The carpeted is at the installer's shop and will be installed next Wednesday, after Christmas. We could have gotten it installed before but then we would have to take the tree down etc... The tile was disrupting enough we did not need to tear the rest of the house apart before Christmas.

The next project is to strip all the wallpaper in the master bath, repaint and replace the light fixtures. I don't mind painting too much but I HATE taking down wall paper!

Anyway I am in the process of re-doing the family web page so it is easier to update. It's been over a year since it was updated and Karen said if I could make it easier she would take care of it. So that is one task I have over the Holiday.

Take it easy and have a good Holiday!