::friend::

This is my friend Christina.

She is the mother of two beautiful and charming little girls, Skylar and Piper. She is an artist and painter and gardener and handy-woman extra-ordinaire. On Saturday she and her girls came over for the weekend and we went out to Greenbluff to get pumpkins. This is our yearly tradition. Well, ok, we've only done it two years in a row, but it's our tradition now.


So we hunted, we gathered, and we carved. Then Sunday morning we woke up and had a brief conversation about my bathroom, specificly how the tiles are falling off the vanity because the dork who "remodeled" our house before we bought it ATTACHED THE TILES WITH A HOT GLUE GUN. And also? The vanity itself is butt-ugly, white with black trim and I honestly believe the guy found it at the dump, painted it and called it good. But not before he did some handy work with the hot glue gun, of course. Now, David has had A LOT of work done to make our house beautiful, and we love it. But the bathroom has been ignored because while ugly, it is functional. And we had other priorities, like getting rid of the approximately 40 tons of volcanic rock that was embeded in the living room wall in the form of a fireplace, for example. And room after room of shag carpet. And an upstairs to remodel. And walls to be painted. And a large yard to landscape. You get the picture. We agree that the bathroom will get a major over-haul one day, but probably not for a couple of years.

My point (and I do have one) is that Christina said "We can do something about your bathroom that will make it more tolerable until you can really remodel it, you know." This sounded like she actually meant WE and I was having none of that. I whined, and claimed to be helpless and might have suggested that anything involving power tools was man's work. But Christina rolled her terrible eyes and gnashed her terrible teeth. And then she took measurements, drew some diagrams, and plotted and planned. As soon as David walked in the door from the grocery store, we threw 3 children at him and said "We're going to the hardware store! See you later!"

So Christina and I went and bought supplies and she went to work on our bathroom. She hammered, she drilled, she painted and those fugly falling-off tiles are no more! She even installed a hand-towel rack. I'm officially a grown up with a real hand-towel rack! And all it took was a pencil and a little drill and about .05 seconds! It was quite impressive. The vanity still needs to be painted, and we got the supplies to do so, but it is extremely smelly paint and we had people coming over later that night, so we decided to hold off on that project. But I can't tell you how impressed I am with her carpentry skills and her ability to ignore a whining 44 year old. I guess she's had practice, what with her 3 and 5 year olds. She is a serious stud and I love her. Now we can tolerate our bathroom for another couple of years. Woohoo!

Tomorrow I'll tell you about the AMAZING dinner we made yesterday and the brilliant plan behind it.