Things fall apart. Updated!

Updates as of Friday evening sprinkled throughout.

If things can fall apart, they will, I suppose. The past 24 hours have not been great to us.

Remodeling 101: There will be speed bumps. All at one time, most likely.

N realized that the doorframe trim we have miles and miles of in the basement was too thick to use a conventional "strike plate"...the part of the door hardware that keeps the door latch from rubbing against the trim every time it's opened. So there was talk of, do we research and try to order and find bigger ones? Do those exist? Will this thick trim even work? Do we need to return it? Can someone else just take care of this for us?!? Update: Found larger strike plates online and ordered them. Cut a few test pieces and held them up to a few of the doors upstairs. Talked it through. Watched a couple YouTube videos. Decided to move forward with the thick trim.

I realized that all of our bathroom light fixtures were on their way, which was great, except the shipping address was...to our old house. Update: Addresses rerouted, hopefully all in time. Old neighbors put on alert, just in case.

We realized that our large, angled vents in both baths were going to look outdated and ridiculous with everything else brand new, and we didn't know what our options were or how to make them look less bulky and huge. Update: Contractor suggested getting nice wooden vents. They're still angled and big, but they look much more modern than the metal ones and can be painted to match the trim color. Genius! Off to Home Depot. Vents procured.

My back went out yesterday and I woke up this morning barely able to walk, let alone parent or work or do the dishes or run remodeling errands. Update: No improvement, unfortunately. Actually worse. Working on it...

We were notified by the tile company that the tile we so meticulously picked out for both baths/showers isn't available...they don't have enough in stock to cover our job. More is coming, but it's overseas and won't be here for a month, if not more. Time to start tile design over and pick something else. Update: Hobbled into the tile showroom late last night, narrowed it down to two new tile choices. Picked one. Set the order in motion. Went home, decorator and N didn't approve. Ugh. Contacted tile shop this afternoon to change our order yet again. Apologized for being "those" clients.

But we are embracing the chaos, along with our bottles of beer (N) and our bottle of Tylenol (me).

And good things happened, too. The contractor finished raising the plumbing and installing cement board in the guest bath. Girls' bath will be tomorrow. Update: Work continued in the guest bath today. Girls' bath isn't even started. There was no way we could have scheduled tile install to begin tomorrow. Glad we had already pushed it. Another closet was painted last night. Update: Yet another last night. Only 2 closets left. I finally settled on a paint color for the girls' bath and we have the paint here and ready to go. Update: Just kidding. We painted the whole bath and immediately didn't like the color. Start over. We finished pricing out the carpet and got our order in. And finally, I had a small credit remaining at the wellness center where my chiro is located, so I didn't even have to pay for my adjustment. A nice surprise upon hobbling up to the check out desk to pay. :)

It's freezing cold today, but the sun is shining in via the two large skylights in our living room. A is very huggy today,

doling one out every few minutes practically. The dog is quiet because of the contractor air compressor noise upstairs. This mocha I picked up on the way home from the chiropractor is tasty.

Soaking them all up, one sip and snuggle and sunbeam at a time.

Onward.

Here's hoping I'm able to actually remain vertical for more than a couple seconds tomorrow, so N can get some work done. Might need to call in the sitter, we'll see...