Toilets, and Showers, and Valves...Oh My!

I've always thought how wonderful it would be to design your own house, from the ground up...selecting the perfect layout to fit your needs and hand selecting every last detail and feature of the house.  I'm sure I'm not the only one who has had these thoughts.  I'm beginning to reconsider that luxury.  One bedroom and bathroom is overwhelming enough!  Overwhelming might actually be an understatement.  Any time I'm given more than two choices, my head starts spinning.

Where do you start?!  My best advice would be to start looking in magazines, online, and any available marketing material to get an idea of different options out there.  I'm glad we decided to visit the local plumbing supply store and local hardware store to just browse and get some ideas before setting up an appointment.  I was focusing more on the pictures of the fixtures in a bathroom layout to get a sense of style and color options and tying the whole look together.  Our impromptu visits gave us the opportunity to look around freely and decline any offered help so that we didn't get caught in a pressuring sales pitch before we knew what we wanted.  It also helped to be able to stand in our future bathroom and measure off ideal locations and sizes of the shower, vanity/sink, etc. which gave us a more realistic feel for how much space we had available.

Under Construction

Here's an update of the construction this week.

Day 2 - The framing of the walls and floor went up quickly.  This was a nice surprise after Monday's demo.  Gahh I'm so excited! :)  

Day 2 - Framing

Day 1 - Murphy's Law

The contractor had come by last Friday and Saturday to start removing the plaster ceiling in the garage and the garage door, nothing too exciting.  The real construction was to start on Monday.  The normal anxiety of the weekend ending was subsided by some excitement of the project officially starting.  

Oh Monday.  My morning began with a few minor mishaps right before leaving the house...I poured cold water into my tea (I forgot to turn the tea kettle on after I filled it with water).  As a side note, I use Teavana's amazing loose leaf tea blends so couldn't exactly reuse the tea after this mistake.  Anyways, after patiently waiting for the water to boil, steeping my tea, and transferring to my travel mug, I knocked the mug over and spilt the tea everywhere.  We laughed as we quickly cleaned up the mess and darted out the door (sans Monday morning caffeine fix).  Nick dropped me off at the subway station and wished me a good day, I laughed as I joked that it could only get better from here.  (But really, I don't like to complain and always try to cease the day while appreciating how lucky I am so I try to always be consciously grateful, for many things but life in general.  I like to think of myself as one of those "smile, smell the roses" kind of people because really what's there not to be happy about?!!).  Anyways sorry for the side rant but spilling my tea was not the end of my day and I didn't huff and puff into work to announce to the office about my horrible, no good, very bad day.  Nonetheless, in my terms it seemed to be "one of those days".