My Shimp Doesn't Stink

I need to take a minute to brag, just a little bit: I married a handyman.

{Also handsy, but that's irrelevant.}

When we bought our house, we knew it was going to take some fixing-up. But we also knew that we are young and vibrant and we can do hard things, so we went ahead and got it.

Then a bunch of couples came to look at buying our apartment contract, and Stephen accidentally told one of them that they could move into the basement.

*Clue: We were not planning on having renters until August. Because there were quite a few things that needed to be fixed about that basement.

Here's a short list:

-the poop-colored walls in one room and the submarine-gray color in another room
-the flickering haunted house fluorescent lighting in one room
-the 2 missing cabinet doors in the kitchen
-the rusted bathtub
-the falling-apart ceiling in the bathroom
-the older-than-Betty-White vanity in the bathroom
-the carpet. Just, it had to go.

Plus a few other smaller things.....so things got a little rushed as we tried to pick out paint colors and renovate an entire bathroom before the renters got married mid-January and wanted to move in. Things got even MORE rushed when Stephen was about to get started on the downstairs bathroom and suddenly discovered a leak coming from the toilet upstairs, which led him to discover that the floor under the toilet was rotting, which led us to Home Depot for tile, which took a week to do upstairs before he could get back to work in the basement.

And of course, all of this happened while he continued to go to school and I continued to teach.

Which brings me back to my bragging! Every day when I got home, it was like I was coming home to a new house. There was always some MAJOR project that was finished, or well underway, when I walked through the door.

Here are some pictures of the most impressive transformation: the downstairs bathroom.

PHASE ONE: Demolition.

I wish I had pictures of how it looked originally, because Stephen took down all the walls first. So it didn't look quite this bad until like, 3 minutes in.

Here are all the walls that he tore down. They were this terrible mauve color....

PHASE TWO: Fix other problems. 

Here's the rotted floor under the upstairs toilet. So, that had to be fixed before work could really progress downstairs. 

In the meantime, at least Stephen was able to take out the old rusted bathtub while he waited for the upstairs tile to set. 

PHASE THREE: New basement bathroom!

Reportedly, this ceiling was a PAIN. I believe it.

Shoutout to myself, for all my help installing that toilet. That's a true story. I helped move that thing. 

No shame in a good old-fashioned selfie.

Brand-new tub!

Seriously, is this not an amazing transformation? 

I'm sorry, I'm still not over it. Let's just do a side-by-side comparison:

 

And with that, I will drop my mic and end this blog post. 

Stephen is bomb. 

Okay I'm done. 

Hashtag, handyman. Bob the Builder wants to be Stephen when he grows up. 

Alright bye.