The Pink Sink Project

With only the finishing touches left on the Man Cave (woo-hoo!), we're already thinking about what our next project will be.  The list of projects to choose from is never-ending, but we've decided to focus on the kids' playroom next.  We've still got nice weather for at least another month, but I want the playroom ready for the winter, to have somewhere to keep the kids entertained (more accurately, to keep them from driving their parents crazy!). Is it any surprise that the single largest room in the house belongs to the kids?!  When the house was on the market, this room, which is on the lower level, was advertised as the "second master bedroom."  M and I both had the same first thought when touring the house for the first time:  When Little Lady is a teenager, it would be great to have her move her bedroom down here.  She would have her own space, and there is a full bathroom downstairs that could be all hers, too.  I had the luxury of having an entire at

You know how they same that some things are worth the wait?  Well, the Man Cave is definitely one of those things!  I had wanted to have the room done by September, and here it is the 28th of September, and we finally have the flooring completed. More accurately, I should say that my husband, M, completed the flooring.  Except for a few rows that I did earlier this week, M used every spare minute he had this week to get it done!  Each night, after the kids were in bed, he would head down to the garage to cut some boards and lay down a few rows.  I have to be honest and say that I thought we might have a tough time with this floor, being the first one that we did ourselves.  The first few rows were tough, especially making sure that everything was lined-up and level.  M really pulled it together for us, though.  Here are some pics of the first few steps (the red stuff on floor is the vapor/moisture/sound barrier that we laid underneath the laminate). Hard at work!

So, first, the bad news.  Our oven died.  Actually, that's not even the bad news.  The oven decided to conk out on us quite a while ago, longer than I care to admit.  It was summer, we had a new grill, and we try not to turn on the oven a lot when it's that hot out, anyways.   We were honestly just lazy about finding a new one, but we finally settled on a new model a couple of weeks ago.  We're upgrading from the 1980's era black model that came with the house, here: I was looking forward to the install finally happening today, just as the weather is starting to turn colder around these parts.  I have been craving some homemade pumpkin muffins, and had planned to take the new oven for a new spin this afternoon. The bad news comes during the install, when the dude discovers that the previous owners had hard-wired the oven into the wall!  There is a single hole in the Sheetrock, where this giant, original, 1965 wire comes out of the wall.  It had been stri

Football is a pretty big deal at our house.  Little Lady knows that Sunday afternoons are dedicated to watching the game.  After the end of last season she was confused as to why the TV wasn't on for the game - she had gotten so used to watching football on Sundays! Alas, the Man Cave isn't quite ready for today's season opener.  All we need is the flooring.  Oh, and a couch.  Oh, yeah, a new TV would help, too.  M has been scouting out a new TV and we both have a pretty good idea of what we want for furniture, but we don't want to pull the trigger on either until we get the flooring done. We finally finished up the painting, which took a lot longer than it really should have.  We had aimed to have the entire room done by the end of August, but life has kind of gotten in the way.   I wanted to wait and show pictures of the room when it was completely done, flooring and all, but that might be a while... To recap, here's what we started with: And he