The Not-So-One-Week Bathroom

Remember that guest bathroom in our house that we renovated in just one week?!  Our master bathroom was sort of the opposite of that experience.  We gutted it way back in December and then winter illnesses happened, and Disney happened, and Malibu happened, and lots of other stuff happened...

On a side note, our Facebook friends loved this picture.

So anyway, we gutted the bathroom.

Then we started the very slow process of putting it back together, plumbing and flooring slowly.

We also poured our own shower base.

It was pretty nuts.

We are pretty nuts.

But Norman approved, so that's all that matters. Then we did, like, one million water barriers for the shower area.

And we tiled of course.

This brings is up to, oh, Valentine's Day (we started all of this in December, remember) which we spent tiling, by the way.

Good grief, there was so much tiling happening in this bathroom.

Sometimes, I just had to take a break and just sit in one of our beach chairs in what was previously known as our master bedroom before we turned it into the temporary bathroom renovation staging area.

Aaaaaand more membrane layers for the shower.

Also so much painting.

Finally, we started putting furniture together.

We also tiled the shower.

That only took about 4 times longer than we expected. (Impromptu Tiling Vacation for Eddy!)

Did I mention we are nuts?!

Whew!

Well, here's what our bathroom used to look like before we embarked on all of this craziness.

And here's what it looks like now!

We even have our master bedroom back in good order!

You may have noticed, the shower is not quite finished yet. We have yet to have the glass surround installed. Like I said, this is the "Not-So-One-Week Bathroom."

Bathroom Quilts, But Not in a Weird Way

Bathroom quilts, you say?  Yeah, weird, right?  My friend Veronica thought so.  This is what she envisioned for our master bathroom.

But seriously. I wanted to make some quilts for our master bathroom renovation (just trust me on this!) and I wanted to simultaneously try my hand at curved piecing. Cutting the initial pieces was pretty straight forward.

But then I had to piece together all of those curves! Eep!

It may look like those guys line up just fine and should be a piece of cake to sew, but, once you get everything in place, sewing them together actually looks more like this:

It took some time and much watching of online tutorials, but eventually I ended up with these:

Eddy helped me pick a couple of layouts and decide how to do the quilting,

and I framed them up and hung them in our new master bath!

Curved piecing = the holy grail of quilting.  Pretty sure I just reached some sort of insane expert status here.  

Malibu Molly

Am I the only kid who grew up in the Springfield, MO area who still sings this in their head?  (Like, all of the time?)

We recently took a little road trip to Malibu and you better believe I sang this the whole time we were there.

Probably the most exciting thing about visiting Malibu was that it was Molly's first road trip! We had Molly for about 4 months and we had been slowly working her up to a road trip by familiarizing her with the car:

and taking her out to a few new places around town:

When Eddy's work trip to Malibu came up, we thought we would see how she did traveling. She had tons of new experiences like drinking from cups when we forgot the travel water bowl in the car,

and lounging on hotel beds.

She also got to spend a day at the beach

and a day hiking around Solstice Canyon just off of the PCH.

But everyone's all time favorite thing we did on this trip was visit the Madonna Inn (twice).

We stopped there for lunch on a whim, and whoa boy, was this place ever crazy. They're known for their (BRIGHT!) pink champagne cake, which we figured would be gimmicky and whatever, but was totally delectable.

They are also known for their over the top Swiss Alps decor. This shot from the ladies' room is just the tip of the iceberg.

Our canine companions especially enjoyed touring the grounds and communing with the horses.

We can't say Molly's first road trip was without worry face,

but we can say we are proud of how brave she was. We can also say that she slept for about a week after we got home.