In about a week, carpenters will arrive at our home and start demolishing two of our three bathrooms. One slated for renovation is just off our bedroom. The other is in the basement.
In order to prepare for the carpenters, we had to move three large bookcases in the basement that were full of vinyl record albums, sheet music, and all our cookbooks and various other books. The carpenters need access to the basement ceiling which is under the upstairs bathroom and right above the bookcases. As long as we were moving them, Husband decided to cull what he didn’t want or need anymore. His pickup is now full of what we threw out. We are exhausted but feeling accomplished. We were able to eliminate the contents of one bookcase entirely.
Next, Husband has to move all the things from the bathroom off our bedroom (the one which he uses) into the one I use that isn’t being renovated. For a couple of weeks, we will have to share a bathroom. This means I have to go through the cupboards in my bathroom to make room for Husband’s stuff from his bathroom.
We will be “at all sixes and sevens” most of November until the renovations are done. We are spending Thanksgiving with our son and family in Brookings, so no pressure to have the house all up to snuff. I am glad we don’t do this on a regular basis. I like having a bathroom to myself.
How many bathrooms do you have? What are your experiences with remodeling. How are you at sharing?
Trail Baboon 
Well done, you two! Good prep for when you move in however-many years…
Huh – before getting married, I lived by myself twice, so had my own bathroom. Since being married, I’ve always shared one, even the one time we had a second one. Another thing you just get used to.
Only time we had anything close to remodeling was adding The Screen Porch, which I’ve written about here. Since it was an add-on, not internal, it wasn’t really very disruptive.
I like to think I’m really good at sharing, perhaps to a fault. Husband is always trying to pull me back from giving everything away, esp. garden produce, but how many butternut squash can we process and freeze? We harvested 18 of them! (Anyone want some?)
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We have two bathrooms now—one we share outside our bedroom and one upstairs in Robin’s studio space. I added the upstairs one when I was converting the attic into a livable space.
Thinking about it, I realized that I’ve remodeled every bathroom in each of the four houses we’ve owned, some extensively, including building two from scratch, and some just replacing fixtures and lighting. I also completely rebuilt the kitchen in our second house.
As I get older, I find that my ambition and energy for taking on big remodeling projects has gotten somewhat less. I still have improvements I want to make in this house but they’re proceeding slowly. If we do a big project like a kitchen remodel I’ll hire it out.
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Three and a half for us. No remodeling of bathrooms other than a few cosmetic changes like paint, towel racks, shower heads, etc.
Early on in our marriage, we did some pretty healthy remodeling in our first house. Taking a sledgehammer to old sheetrock is weirdly satisfying. But most of the work is tough, dirty, frustrating when you’re not a professional, and hazardous (bumps and bruises and nicks and slivers).
I’m okay at sharing, I guess. I don’t seem to do much of it other than sharing my wisdom with the world. 🙂 But we make charitable donations (cash, unwanted things, time), give away extra tomatoes to neighbors, share in the planning and expense of group outings or events, etc.
We used to share books by lending them to others, but after not getting most of them back, we switched to giving them away (either buying an extra copy for ourselves or knowing it won’t be returned and calling it lending).
Chris in O-town
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I’ve only ever lived in places with one bathroom. My parents talked about adding a half bath in the basement, but it never materialized. It might have been an issue with the plumbing setup, but I suspect Mom was thinking sure, it’d be nice sometimes to have a second bathroom, but it’d be yet one more thing to clean. She was a very practical woman–being the only daughter of a farm family and living through the Depression and WWII probably tended to make one that way.
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Only one bathroom currently. If I could get The Birds to use the toilet I’d share it with them.
As part of an own home remodel, the tile covered all the walls, ceiling and floor. Nothing unusual in that except that I used fluorescent grout. Imagine the holodeck from StarTrek: Next Generation. Unique.
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We have just one bathroom here. Most of the time sharing isn’t a problem because I’m not someone who spends a lot of time in the bathroom. And YA does all of her cosmetic stuff at a table in her bedroom. When I was in high school, my sister and I shared a bathroom upstairs in our house. It was not a pleasant experience. While I don’t consider myself a neat freak, my sister can’t even say those two words out loud without being struck by lightning. Luckily, my mom intervened repeatedly. (Nonny was not a great believer in letting teenagers make massive messes and just closing the door.).
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The bathtub/shower in the basement has a surround made from vinyl flooring in a very gaudy 1970’s pattern. Lots of red and gold. That is all being removed and replaced with a proper surround.
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Our house, being a duplex, has two kitchens, and two baths.
For the first six years we owned the house, we lived downstairs and rented out the upstairs. During that time we renovated the downstairs bath and kitchen. That was one major project that took months, but was a major improvement. Then we moved to Inver Grove Heights, and while we lived there we rented out both units. When we moved back into the old house in 1992, we decided we no longer wanted the headache of renting the upstairs out, besides, having that extra space was nice. At that time, we did some cosmetic upgrades to the upstairs bathroom and kitchen, replacing the old tub to a whirlpool, and the old, dark kitchen cabinets with modern, light ones from IKEA. We also replaced the old, worn linoleum tile floor with ceramic tile in the bathroom. In the kitchen we put down a bamboo floor.
Both bathrooms are used as such, while the upstairs kitchen serves as Hans’ office and studio space for his various artistic pursuits. We took the fridge and stove out, so the only things that make it look kitcheny are the cabinets and the kitchen sink, both of which are really nice features in a studio space.
Throughout most of my life I’ve shared with others. First with my sister, then with the other kids at the boarding school. Later with a series of roommates of both sexes. Wasband and I always shared both a bed and a bathroom, and that was never an issue. I find, though, that I’m at a stage of my life, that I really don’t want to have to contend with another person’s “issues,” whatever they might be. I have enough of my own.
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This house has four bathrooms and now that my two dollar chef move to Chicago and it’s me Debbie and my son for bathroom just plenty
I am a bathtub guy. I love to soak in the tub and I taught all my children to love to soak in the tub so the fact that this house only has one tub was an issue when my two daughters, my son, and I all shared the tub. Debbie rarely uses anything other than the shower.
The tub does there now get used by me and my son fairly often but nothing like it got used when I had the two daughters that used it daily. One of them was a morning shower person. The other one was an evening bath person.
The bathroom at our house is kind of a non-room as far as sharing goes
A single drawer for my razor my toothbrush, and my hairbrush is all I need on a regular basis with a stash for my homeopathic medicine and beard trimmer, which needs to be accessible but rarely get used
I’m curious as to why you’re fixing up your house two years before you’re going to retire and move to Pipestone I can’t imagine that the renovation is going to add whatever it is that you’re spending to the value of the house or do you think it will?
your TV that you don’t watch your freezers and now we learn a spare bedroom that hasn’t been slept in in years is down there and there’s another bedroom next-door to yours upstairs. That only gets used when your daughter comes home for the holidays. What are you thinking about?
we are entering the rental market again as our lease is up in July and we will be downsizing substantially and probably looking at substantially less than four bathrooms and certainly less than all the bedrooms that we have in our current house. It’ll be interesting to see what we come up with the criteria is that we need a bath and a half two bedrooms and a fenced yard for the dogs even though they’ll be dead within the next four or five years
I have already figured out that I’m gonna have to transition from my baby grand piano to an electric keyboard, and that I will lose my music room pretty much all together
hopefully, I’ll have a workspace for working on cars and doing woodwork but we’ll see how it goes. My storage space needs to be brought under control and dispersed of in a monetary purge.
I am plotting to get my new programs often running in hopes that I can find a way to enjoy these golden years doing business from my home office and doodling around with hats and coats and woodworking projects I have decided to begin collecting motorcycles and classic guitars, along with my LPs
my wife is very good about sharing our space and all she requires is a spot for her teaching stuff and a place to set her laptop down probably in front of the TV
I’ve never had workers come in to my house to fix stuff I became a do it yourself or when I bought my house at age 21 and learned how to do, plumbing electrical sheet, rocking, stucco roofing, painting, siding, deck building, etc.
my friend Justin laughs and makes a comment that when you do your own work, you’re stuck being aware of where the flaws are, which is something you would never run into if you have someone else do the work
i have books lps and coats in storage
hats guitars and art in my house
downsizing will be interesting
my inclination is to earn more so i can bask in the glory of my stuff
but i’ll share
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I remodeled the caravan I lived in from 1981 until 1990,when I burned it down. Priority was to use waste materials, to avoid having to part with money, an unbearable prospect. I’d say that two fifths were workshop, which when the fire occurred, contained the workbench that Angus and I built of four by three cowshed timbers as hard as iron, the engine, gearbox and aluminum cafe racer tank from my Bonneville,a diesel Fordson Major engine, and a kerosene (TVO actually, Tractor Vapourising Oil, very similar to kerosene) David Brown Cropmaster engine. I was still working on the living end.
I rebuilt the kitchen in the house Jane and I bought in Southampton, put new boards on the landing one time, and put a floor in the loft, knsulating both floor and roof, I job I hate. But I dislike that kind of work generally, while liking to be able to do it. Plumbing and electrical work, I can put it all together, but not interested enough to learn where everything goes. So someone else gets to do it.
.If it was absolutely my kind of house, and I could fix everything the way I would like it,
I’d take a pride in doing all the work myself.
Dad could do every single thing, from digging the footings to putting the cowling or whatever on the chimney. I could learn if I wanted, but prefer to cherry pick the jobs that are slightly more bearable.
Outbuildings etc, that I will do.
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Luckily, I’d moved the cement mixer out to make room for the tractor engines, so at least that was saved.
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Well, the bathrooms are in pretty bad shape and we did to make it more sellable, and because we want to have some nice bathrooms our last years here. We plan to move to Luverne, by the way. Pipestone! the very thought!
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I don’t know where either of those places are, but I did know you were moving to Luverne.
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luvurnne pipestone worthington
it’s all the same isn’t it…
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So you moved all of your “stuff” out of your warehouse and into rented storage space? Did you cull anything, and if not, how does that make sense? Are you considering buying a house when your contract on your current house is up? How does it add up financially to keep renting?
OT – Ben are you getting enough rain in your area to make a difference? We have a beautiful, quiet, steady rain her in St. Paul at the moment.
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The above comment was in response to tim’s, but I’m sure most of you have figured that out.
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Evening- we’re at about .7” now. A nice rain. It isn’t helping the crops at this point anymore, but it will add subsoil moisture and make fieldwork easier. (Really dry ground works up hard, which equals more wear on machinery and more fuel used to do it.)
We were lucky to have good rains through the summer so this area is only a little dry and not abnormal or severe drought.
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i culled so much i thought i’d be good but i’m not too much stuff that needs to be sold
i will be getting on it and spending the next 5 years clearing it out and getting it organized
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I don’t mind sharing bathrooms, it’s not something that ever entered my mind. We have to now, since someone else replaced the roof and did other work on the house, while I was still working in England for one last year before I retired. I actually would have sooner been here helping the builder, that year being so unpleasant, with agencies ringing at five in the morning to say today’s job was cancelled, etc.
But sharing in general, I’m not too averse to it. That’s why I’m broke.
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We have two now. Bathrooms.
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OT. Gatitos Palomar
Politics, politics, politics.
Jordi was extremely busy, the first week when we looked at the field. We got there, and Chelo texted him for a key to the padlock. Jordi told Dani to bring one down. It was Sunday, and Dani no doubt felt put upon. On the other hand he’s totally commandeered the electric car(they call them cars, it’s a little van with side windows, very popular here.). He gets to take it home. He arrived, gave Chelo the key, along with his opinion that people are more important than cats. If addressed to me, I’d have countered that with, feel free to help some people, by all means.
So I’m pretty certain how it happened that very soon, four kittens had been caught by council workers, and were available immediately for lucky us to take care of. Dani is in charge of the workers, and he told them to catch them, give us cats if we wanted cats, that’s how it happened. Who needs proof? Let’s just shoot the b*****d, is my opinion.
He continued to be difficult.
Rafael was taken on relatively recently, and is from Alicante. Jordi tokk him on to work on the gang, and said, don’t buy a vehicle, you need a van for work, and can use it however you like when you’re not working, along with any equipment. Now I got to do that on some farms I worked on(mainly by not asking), but this is a good deal, I would think. Rafael brought an angle grinder down to the field, in the van, on his dsy off, to help us. So Dani banned ALL workers from taking vehicles home, as of immediately. Still gets exclusive use of the electric car himself, 24 hours a day. That is the pits, and Jordi has done nothing about it. Now Chelo’s told us, Rafael is so sick of Dani getting on his case, he’s thinking of leaving his job. We don’t really need him, it’s true, except he’s another ally and a good guy, AND Jane is eyeing up Axelle, his Belgian wife or partner, as a fiesta and partying friend. The pair of them get on like a house on fire, and in fact I’ve hardly come across anyone who’d be shch a good friend to her. If Rafael lesves his job, they’ll most likely move on.
Meanwhile, slowly, painfully, getting nearer to getting some cats down there. The mother cat comes in and eats in the field, and I’ll slowly put less food out in the concrete works, until I stop altogether. She can still come and go if she wants.
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Oh man, that whole situation sounds like a nightmare to me. I’m not sure that I understand the evolution of this whole “gatitos Palomar” project, but I get the distinct impression that it lacks some pretty fundamental planning, guidelines, and resources. I fear these poor cats, and you and Jane, will end up with more problems than you started out with. I sure hope I’m wrong. Is there any one person assigned to coordinate the efforts of the various volunteers? Does anyone have to approve whatever someone hauls to the site and leaves there as a potential “gatito casita”? To me it sounds like a free-for-all.
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One bathroom here. I have ever lived anyplace that had more than one, although sometimes I have dreams in which I’m living in a house with many rooms and extra bathrooms. All the space in those dream houses seems a luxury.
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Evening. Tech week so a long busy day.
Three bathrooms in this house. One is Kellys, one is the mudroom, but basically mine, and the basement one still has the 1968 decor.
I shower down there, otherwise it’s the guest bathroom. (But we don’t really have a guest room right now… it’s full of random basement crap. We really need to do better.)
I can share to a point. Some thing’s I may not be as interested in sharing as other things. 🙂
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