My Vacation - 2012 Edition

Today is the last day of my vacation.  Around here vacation time is not for relaxing or travelling.  Two weeks with no childcare schedule or programming.  Two weeks without young children in my home. Vacation time is when we tackle those big projects that can’t be completed in a weekend.
So, what did we do this year you ask?  First I’ll give you a little history.

We’ve lived in this 100 year old house for 16 years.  It is relatively small – 1040 square feet with three bedrooms and two bathrooms.  It was in rough shape when we moved in but over the years we’ve fixed floors and shingles.  We’ve had new windows, doors and a furnace installed.  We’ve painted, built cupboards, put on siding and done many landscaping projects. The bathrooms have been on the ‘project list’ since the beginning but we keep putting them off.

The basement bathroom gets the most use.  It is dark and dingy.  It has an ugly plastic shower stall that leaks but it works.  It is permanently dirty – stained — cleaning seems pointless.  Upstairs the vinyl floor is cracked and buckled and there are pieces missing.  The bathtub finish is rough and uncomfortable – I never use the bathtub but some of my sons do.  The plaster walls are ugly and the paint is bad.  Both the floor and the paint are yellowish from age – I hope.

The dilemma was which bathroom to attempt first.  I want to replace the plastic shower in the basement with a tile one but I’ve never installed tiles before.  What if we encounter issues and the project takes longer than two weeks to complete? The daycare children use the basement bathroom and although I could let them use the upstairs bathroom temporarily I didn’t really want to.  So, even though it doesn’t get much use, the upstairs bathroom would be this year’s vacation project – the ‘practice’ project.

Of course I didn’t remember to take a ‘before’ picture because we started demolition as soon as my ‘vacation’ began.  I think my husband and I make a good team for these projects because we have different skills.  I’m more into details – the plans, the lists, and the finish work.  My husband is better at the loud, messy stuff – and I rely on him to use those scary power tools.  (shudder)

We have different methods of working too.  Even when he doesn’t need assistance he likes to have someone (me) nearby so he can ‘vent’ – I ‘help’ by ‘listening’.  There’s always a sense of urgency when he is working. Sometimes I offer suggestions and he retorts ‘Do you want to do this?’  I prefer to work independently – slowly and methodically – analyzing and pausing often to reflect on the progress.  My husband helps by pacing and ‘encouraging’ me to stay on task.

In the last week I spent a lot of time here;

I wasn’t sleeping in the bathtub (although it is comfy enough that I could have); the sheets and quilt are there to protect the new tub from paint, caulking and grout.

Tiling was something new for both of us so there was a lot of trial and error and many trips to the store.  I discovered that there are special tile nippers for glass tiles – the ones I was using worked but they left tiny little shards of glass on the floor.  The slivers of glass were easier to find if you just followed the trail – took me a while to figure out what those red streaks were, I felt no pain.

The walls are painted ‘Liberty Gray’ to match the lighter parts of the wall tiles.  It is a shade of blue but I had a mild anxiety attack when I first opened the paint can – it looked purple (mauve). I don’t like purple and I detest pink and red.  I usually stick to earth tones so even blue is unusual for me but I’m really happy with this color scheme.

Overall it was a slow process – not as physically demanding as some of our projects but there were so many steps and periods of waiting for caulking/grout/paint to dry.  Two weeks of time and a $1500 budget and the upstairs bathroom is now complete.  I need to find/buy some towels that match.

It functions well but we don’t use it.  I often turn on the light and stand in the doorway to look at it – like a piece of artwork.  We use the bathroom in the basement so we don’t get the new one dirty.

That's Not a Christmas Tree

I used to do a lot of decorating for Christmas.  I hung garland and swags on railings and door frames.  I put decorations on every available space on walls and shelves.  There were lights for all the windows.  My children helped me decorate our tree – we had more ornaments than we could possibly fit on the six foot tall tree.  I put the tree on a two foot tall table so the top of the tree touched the ceiling and there was plenty of room for plenty of gifts underneath.

I began all this decorating on the first day of December and took it all down on Boxing Day.  I felt it was a lot of work – it was something that I considered a duty not something that I actually enjoyed.  Some other members of my family would occasionally agree to help but I found out that they only did it because they thought it was important to me.  Huh?  I only decorated for them.

As my children got older I decorated less.  We bought a four foot tree and later I recycled the old six foot tree as part of the nature area in the playroom.  It was still difficult to persuade anyone to help me decorate the four foot tree and no matter where I put it it always seemed to be in someone’s way.

I got a two foot tall tree – I selected all the smallest ornaments and only decorated the tree once.  On Boxing Day I put the still decorated tree in a box and tossed it in the attic to wait for next year. It took just minutes to get it down, plop it on the table and fluff it up a bit.

This year I forgot to get the tree down at the beginning of December.  Maybe it was the warmer weather and lack of snow but I didn’t even think about decorating until it was almost the middle of December.  I put up my winter village – it stays in the window until spring.  I didn’t bother getting the tree from the attic.  I didn’t even put the window clings on the windows.  Nobody seemed to notice though.

Then last week one of the daycare children asked ‘Hey Cheryl, where’s your Christmas tree?’  I was going to tell them it was in the attic but instead I said, ‘It’s in the nature area’. There was silence as the children looked at each other – they seem puzzled.

‘There is no Christmas tree in the nature area.’ one of them said.  I pointed at the pine tree in the corner;

‘That’s not a Christmas tree’ they said in unison.

‘Why not?’  I asked

‘It has no decorations.’ They replied.

‘We could decorate it,’ I suggested, ‘but my decorations are in the attic so we’ll have to make some.’  I had seen a Christmas decoration craft over at The Crafty Crow that I thought would be suitable for all the children – and I had some sparkly poster board that would work for this purpose.

I gathered some supplies and started cutting out the circles and some pieces of yarn.

The preschoolers were most interested in the scraps that were left over after I cut out the circles.

The cats liked them too.

We got busy making decorations.  Everyone had their preferred method.  There were intricate designs with multiple colors and simple designs that had really long loops for hanging.  Some children spent a lot of time on each ornament and insisted that each one they made was different from every other one.  There was one child who mass produced a dozen identical ornaments in less than 15 minutes!

We hung all the completed ornaments on the tree;

There was still plenty of room on the tree and enough supplies to make many more ornaments so I’ve left the tray out in the sun room.  Each day there are some more ornaments to add to the tree.

Now we have a Christmas tree.  It’s ours and we love it.  There are no Christmas tree rules – each tree is special and unique.  Small or large, exquisite or plain, artificial or real, traditional or unconventional; it’s your tree – you decide.

Go check out some of these interesting Christmas tree creations