Renovation Apprehension

We're about to have our bathrooms worked on. The main (upstairs) bathroom - which we frequently refer to as "Christopher's" bathroom - is just getting some tweaking. But the basement bathroom - "my bathroom" - is getting a full-on remodel.

You see, when the house was built in the '50s, there's an odds-on chance that the house only had one bathroom, with a "rough-in" for the second one. This means that the basics were there (big drain for the toilet, drain in the floor for a possible shower), but that's about it. Somewhere along the way, though, someone added the second bathroom.

It's pretty basic, with a toilet, sink, wall-mounted medicine cabinet, and a shower which was built into one corner, with a wall built out between it and the sink. It's a nice wall, but it houses all of the shower pipes. When the shower stopped working about a month ago, there was no way to get to anything without totally ripping the wall apart. So I've been showering upstairs, then running up and down to finish getting ready every morning.

Also, we've learned, over the years, that the drain in the shower - the one in the actual floor of the shower cabinet - may not be connected to the actual drain in the floor. Which, according to our contractor, is fairly common. Gross, when it backs up and floods out under the floor tiles, but common.

I'm not sure how common having a shower light that is, in essence, a bare bulb floodlight in the ceiling is, though. I'm also guessing that most showers have the hot and cold going the right directions when you turn the dial. (Once or twice I've forgotten to warn guests about that... oops...)

Hopefully, sometime in the next couple of weeks, my bathroom will be both much more common in some ways and much less common in others. They'll be tearing out the whole  thing and putting in a new shower, sink, and toilet, and possibly even a vent fan. And - thankfully - they'll be working on the drains, too.

The catch is that we have to get through it all before we can enjoy it. So, in the next couple of days, I'll be buying plastic sheeting to kind of "wall off" the bathroom from the rest of the basement - in the hopes of not getting absolutely everything covered in drywall and concrete dust.

And Christopher and I will be sharing a single bathroom for a while. We do this all the time when we travel, but not usually while we're at home. It's going to be an adventure.

Hopefully, when we come out the other side, neither of us will be wrapping anything gruesome in that plastic sheeting and trying to hide it in the dumpster...