Growing Pains

Doing a home improvement project is like growing out your bangs: they both look worse before they look better.

This is the bathroom yesterday morning:

And this is the bathroom this afternoon, after a visit from the dry waller, some quality time with the tile saw, and several hours of crawling around on the floor and cursing silently (okay, quietly):

Slow but noticeable improvement. The drywall patch still needs priming, painting, and tile. The floor needs grouting and sealing, and another trip to Home Depot for baseboards is in order. But the ugly yellow sheet vinyl (and some very scary stuff that was stuck to it) is now history. I would be ecstatic if I weren't so tired. Tiling always wears me out. I think it's the crawling around on the floor and getting up and down a thousand times with heavy pieces of tile. But with a couple of tiling jobs under my belt, I was confident enough to try something a little more difficult and laid this tile on the diagonal, instead of in straight lines. I really like the result. Much more interesting. It's kind of like quilting, without all the sewing.