It's been a terrible month for blogging. There was the earlier crisis and then  a ton of home improvement. All those lingering projects that we've ignored over the years have suddenly become imperative. 

The biggest project has the been the bathroom. In houses from this vintage, they used to pour cement under the floor boards in bathrooms. A full foot of cement that encased all the pipes and the beams for the house. I asked the contractor why they did that, and he said he didn't know, but it was probably a bunch of new immigrants who used to make houses that way back in Italy. 

So, there was a leak in one of those 100-year old lead pipes, but the plumber couldn't get to it, because it was encased in 100-year old cement that could fall through the kitchen ceiling. We didn't even know there was a leak until they took down all four ceilings in the kitchen during that renovation three years ago. The many ceilings sucked up the bath water like a big tampon.

We discovered that if we took two showers and didn't use the tub, water wouldn't leak into the kitchen. And that's how we've lived for the past few years. Yes, there was a minor problem during the holidays when the relatives used the shower, too, but we looked past it.

We also looked past the fact that it was an incredibly ugly bathroom.

Well, we weren't allowed to ignore the problem anymore and we had to put in a clean, sensible, leak-free bathroom.

Here's what it looks like so far: 

Two more days to go. And then I'll get my office back and I won't have to shower at the gym anymore. Wahoo!