Definition of Adulthood

 

A couple weeks ago Chris and I met up with friends for dinner, and I said I wasn't feeling this adulthood thing. My wonderful friends and husband listed a million reasons why adulthood is awesome, and as I eat my dinosaur chicken nuggets for breakfast, I'm agreeing with them.

The definition of adulthood:

Knowing how to remove a toilet, and trade out toilet seats. It is waking up in the morning and water is coming through places it should not be. It is scrolling through Facebook and "liking" pictures of my friends babies, when it was only a short time ago we were hanging out in bars.

It is watching DIY Network and HGTV, and being excited about the boring floors and trim. It is wanting to have movie nights more often than bar hopping, and conversations center around work than who is hooking up with who.



It is being less concerned about what people think of me and more what I think of myself. It is eating puppy chow for breakfast and all of my vegetables at dinner. It is cleaning the house, and sleeping until noon. It is bill paying, equity building, beer festivals, and super soaker fights.

Adulthood is fun, and exhausting, and not everything I thought it would, but I'm having a lot of fun.
 

The best and worst of adulthood

My seven year old self would be so proud of me this weekend.

Chris and I along with two friends went camping,  and with the fun camping brings, it also comes copious amounts of junk food and beer.

So, before there was actual breakfast, there were Oreos. And I high fived the child who would be so excited I wasn't a fuddy duddy.

And I am indeed eating what I want when I want, food pyramid of healthy eating be damned!

I then high fived myself and did an awesome dance and died from a sugar rush.

And then I paid for it dearly at the gym Monday morning. But that's okay; because my inner child isn't completely dead.

Which is a good thing, because for a while life threw way to much adult stuff my direction, and I was not okay with it. First I had to go through the car buying process, and then when that was finally under control, there was water in my ceiling light.

It started simply enough. My sister was over before we were to embark on a bike ride to several breweries and tasting rooms with our parents and family, when half way through her shower we noticed water in a ceiling light.

And as much as I enjoy fish tanks, I did not appreciate the one on the ceiling.

After calling five plumbing companies a couple days later (we had beer to drink) I taped the light switch and saved the problem for another day. Of the five companies called, three companies showed up.

Also, when stereotypes are confirmed I can't help but laugh. Plumber butt cracks are no joking manner, but hilarious!

The people from the company that will do the work, has total control of the butt crack situation, and I am forever grateful.

Anyway, plumbers come to try and figure out where water is coming from.

And one plumber is staring at the ceiling of the main floor pointing out water damage EVERYWHERE. Dude, we have textured ceilings and walls. Not every bump is water damage.

And then he says, I need to cut a couple holes here, here, and here (all are very far from where the water made an appearance).

And I'm like:

There is a hole, one hole, a small square hole close to the light where the water was hanging out. The leak was spotted, work will be done to fix the water, but it is on me to fix the hole in the ceiling.

Everyone, begin chewing bubble gum!

So, now on Tuesday the plumber is here, and it smells like he lit several gerbils on fire as he used fire to repair several of the busted, broken, pipes which were leaking water EVERYWHERE!

But now I have a couple holes.

And I wanted to redo my bathroom (the one that now has a hole) so this might be a good time to do so. Or I can just put the tiles back on the wall and call it good, but that doesn't seem quite so fun. Oh, the decisions.

I'll go eat an Oreo and make a decision...

Legit Adulthood Checklist

Let me just say, Adulthood sucks. 

 

Bills, groceries, cleaning, house stuff, responsibility sucks.

Adulthood sucks. There, I've said it, can I opt out?

I've technically been an adult for nine years; however I've been able to avoid actual adulthood for those nine years.

Sure there are bills, and a mortgage, and I don't eat candy for breakfast like I promised myself I would. But I do have infinite Cocoa Krispies, and that alone keeps me from having both feet in adulthood.

Being an adult was supposed to be fun. I was supposed to be able to do anything I wanted whenever I wanted. Except there is far more responsibility than I ever imagined.



Until this week I'd never considered myself a real adult. Somehow I got smacked in the face with a sign that says "WELCOME TO ADULTHOOD!" Unfortunately the sign smacked me as I was on a test drive for a new car. Luckily I didn't crash.

Like every teenager in the country I took drivers ed, and let me tell you, test driving my potential car was a massive flashback.

I checked all my mirrors, adjusted my seat, and tried not to terrify the guy in the passenger seat with my driving, and then slammed on the breaks and sent us all forward into our seat belts. The salesman practically hit the dash.

Sorry.

Engine breaking, touchy break pedal, all those things, and suddenly I was fifteen again. Awesome.

Use the turn signal for every turn, crawl over speed bumps, slow for pedestrian crossings, yup, all of that.

I have yet to buy a vehicle, but I'm close, and it is stressful, and overwhelming, and hard.

I have a theory about adulthood. There is an adulthood checklist, and not until is every item checked off do you become an adult. Buying a car is one of the biggest items on that list.

I'm checking off more items than I'm happy to admit, ever so slowly life is pulling me into the adulthood realm, and no matter how much I'm screaming, it's happening. I'm slowly turning into an adult, like a slime monster.

Oh man. I needed a car, and now I'm an adult. Abort! Abort!

And there is no coming back from adulthood. It is a horrible place with horrible things and horribleness.


I'm trying to find the things that I thought were so cool when I was a young and silly child, and besides Cocoa Krispies and no real bedtime, and being able to do whatever I want when I want, but still within the bounds of society.

And I really want the second star to the right, grab some Fairy Dust, and have a new car without having to be an adult. Is that so hard? 

The Bathroom Remodel

I had this great idea to remodel the half bath on the main floor of the house.

And it really was a great idea. While the bathroom was functional, it was not aesthetically pleasing. 

The walls in the bathroom were white like the rest of the house, which is fine. Nothing some paint can't fix.

The floor on the other hand, was gross. No amount of scrubbing could ever make the floor look clean. And since the house was a rental for twenty years before we bought it, I don't even want to think about the junk the floor has seen.

Out it goes!

And if you're going to take out the floor, you might as well cut out some drywall and throw some soundproofing insulation in between the wall for some added privacy.

Not a large project at all.

So let's begin taking everything out!

I started with the towel racks, not sure why a five by five room needed two towel racks but it had two.

And in case you wanted to preform pullups on the towel racks, very long screws kept those suckers mounted to the wall.

This is when I began questioning what the people prior were thinking. A question I had for the next two weeks.

 It was also amazing what I found once I began taking stuff out and down. Hello space for a medicine cabinet mirror which was covered by a giant mirror. A mirror so large Ms. Piggy couldn't fit it in her dressing room.

 One of my wonderful friends called me on Friday for a phone chat, and asked what I was doing. I was unhooking the toilet and draining it of water to remove it --The definition of adulthood, by the way. And once it was removed we got to see the grossness of our floor at a whole new level.

Everyone please join me a resounding EWWWWWW. 

So, I began peeling back the vinyl sheet and was met with this. Apparently, you do not need a subfloor across your entire floor, but only where the vanity will be resting.

For the record, it made it easier to pry up the particle board subfloor that was stapled every inch apart. It was very secure.

The last piece was the hardest to pry up, as it had the consistency of hamster cage lining.

It took about a week for me, Chris, and my wonderful friend Becky to pull up the particle board which was glued and stapled to the floor. And where there was no glue or staples it had fused itself to the floor.

Again, who did this?!

So, we decided to leave the floor for another day and start demoing the walls. I greatly enjoyed my drywall knife, which cuts through everything, except studs, heating vents, and anything not drywall.

Ok, it just cuts through drywall, but it does it very well. Also, Becky is very safety conscious and says eye protection is a must while cutting drywall.

So I grabbed my eye protection.

Yup, those are ski goggles. 

And at the end of the first day we made great progress. The walls were cut out, and most of the floor was ripped up. And I was feeling really good about destroying a bathroom.

But it was a little weird using duct tape for it's intended purpose. We took down a wall with the hope of moving a light switch closer to the door. Instead, we found a heating vent with puncture holes.

So I just taped those, and began padding the walls with insulation as Becky attacked the floor.

 Yup, that's a belt sander. And that is Becky using safety precautions.

Neither one of us used one before, but I've seen a few people using one to figure it out.

And keeping stereotypes alive we decided the best way to use one was like an iron. Keep it moving, and don't put a hole in the floor.

She got the glue and particle board chunks up pretty quick.

And we got the drywall up pretty quick. It was surprisingly easy to cut drywall. It's not that easy for us to read a ruler. We had measurements like: 34 inches and seven lines. Or 20 inches and two lines past 3/4.

While it was not legit ruler reading, it was pretty accurate.

(** We are capable of reading a ruler, and had legit measurements as well.)

Although, I had a wonderful moment of trying to figure out how many 16ths are in an inch.

I blame the dust or something.

I admit it was not my finest moment. But look, the walls got done.

We only had one issue of hanging it. A ninja nail snuck itself in a corner and made us crazy on why the drywall would not go flush. We figured it out. It was fine. Made us feel kind of dumb. But it was fine.

At 3pm on Thursday I was leaving for Whistler and I was on my own for adding texture to the wall. I could not get the texture to be consistent. Which is why it looks like a drunk sailor added texture with a seagull.

The theme for the bathroom is Great Lakes Winter, so I guess the seagull texture goes with it.

What was fun, as seven people walked into the house were all surprised I was remodeling the bathroom. And being engineers all had the question of why I was doing this right before we were supposed to leave.

It was supposed to be done by the time they got to the house. Oh well. 

A sore and broken Mo was back to work in the bathroom on Monday, with a quick paint job with paint leftover from my bedroom, it was time for the floor.

Oh the floor. It looks awesome, but it was a pain to grout.

Becky came up huge with methods of cleaning the grout off the rocks.

And floor went from this:

To this:

This all took a little more than a week, which involved a four day ski trip. So you would think the finishing touches would be a quick thing.

No.

It took us longer to put the bathroom back together than it did knocking everything down.

I thought four weeks before the Superbowl would give me plenty of time to finish the bathroom before thirty people came over to watch the game; and yet it was Friday night before the game we were installing a door.

For the record,  installing doors are a pain in the ass. But once Chris recognized his lovely wife made the drywall 1/8 of an inch longer than the header, and therefore impeding the top of the door jamb from being raised as it needed, and then sent lovely wife up a ladder with a knife to undo what was done, it was installed in under two hours.

And plumbing on Saturday morning for the sink. Chris took over because I could not get the PVC to connect on Friday:

I also struggled getting the connector piece to connect the 1 1/2 pipe to the 1 1/4 pipe.

Chris claimed he liked plumbing, or wouldn't mind doing it. And he completed the project with less than 26 hours remaining before people came over.

And this is how it all looks minus a mirror and four canvas prints of Great Lake lighthouses.

Not bad huh?

And surprisingly I still have all my fingers and there were no accidental holes in the wall. So that's a win.

Next project?

Well, because we are pros at hanging doors now, we're going to switch all the doors out in the hallway, and I'm going to be painting and removing the old baseboards. Woot!

New Year Resolutions

Happy 2014!!

We brought in the Eastern Time Zone New Year as we flew over eastern Washington on our way back to Seattle after going home for Christmas.

For the record, I'm never flying on New Year's Eve again.

Sure, the fireworks from the plane were cool, but you know what's not cool? Falling asleep on the couch.

When I booked the flight I didn't think it would be that bad.

It was bad.

One, I was exhausted before we began our journey back.

Two, it was a connecting flight through Minneapolis. Which was the easiest connector in the world. We got off the plane, and got back on the same plane for our second leg.

I got the awesome seat assignment of the same seat, on the same plane.

Yeah, that was the highlight.

We landed at 10pm in Seattle, waited for our bags, with the intention of going over to a friend's house after we dropped our stuff off at home.

Did not happen.

We spent New Year's Eve opening our Christmas presents and sleeping on the couch. 

So with the new year, it's time to reflect on last year and start all over, and blah-di-blah-di-ty-da.

So now it's time for resolutions.

 

I think any year you're not arrested, and your family is still talking to you, it's a good year.

 

I will not be inspired. I will not be original. I will not work hard. I will not enjoy. And you can't make me!

 

No, in all honesty, I'll just keep doing my thing. 

I don't smoke. So there's nothing to quit.

I don't have to lose weight, or go to the gym more (I'm there four to five days a week)

I'm not in debt, so there's no spending I have to cut back on.

I'm happily married, so I don't have to figure out the relationship thing.

Yup. New Year Resolution's suck when you have your life together.

Here's to a year of friends, family, and fun!

Happy 2014 everyone!