bathroom remodel: during pictures part 1

Here's some mid-remodel pictures. Yesterday we went and choose our carpet and vinyl. We chose bold with the vinyl...really hoping we don't hate it! :)






I am disgusted by the mold behind the toilet. So gross.

bathroom remodel: before pictures

We've talked forever about redoing our master bathroom. It only had a shower in it and I LOVE taking baths. Plus the shower head was really low so Justin wasn't able to shower in it. We are finally redoing it! Yay! We're also getting new carpet in our bedroom (we've replaced all the other carpet in the house except our room), plastering over our popcorn ceilings (we have popcorn ceilings all through the house, hate it. We're doing a trial run of it on our bedroom/bathroom with the hopes of doing the whole house in the future), and re-painting everything. So excited!

Here are our before pictures. Ignore the messes. :) Between recovering from my gallbladder surgery and trying to pack up everything to be moved out of our room, things got quite messy!


It was a special treat for Cohen to sleep on our floor, he doesn't always sleep there!

The bathroom is so small that it was really hard to take pictures of it, this is the best I could do!

a night away

For Justin's birthday I planned a night away for us, and we decided to include Cohen in it because I knew he's love it! We rode the train from Olympia to Centralia and then spent the night at Mcmenamins Olympic Club. We had great weather so we wandered around the town, ate cupcakes, ate dinner while we watched a movie (so fun!), watched movies in bed, and had some great quality time with Cohen.



(sorry about the crazy eyes in this picture!)

January experiment: COMPLETED!!!

Well we made it.

I cheated more than my kids did. :) But I didn't cheat too much. Mostly I should have chosen different items than I did. I have a few shirts that are my total "go to" shirts. I wear them ALL THE TIME. I figured it would be a good thing to not choose them for my 6 items because it would force me to wear something else. That didn't work, I just wore them anyway! Oh, well.

The boys ended up with more than 6 items at the end of the month, but that's okay. I haven't been feeling well lately (well it's getting better now, yay for no gallbladder!) so we had a few times where my mom was taking the boys for the night and I had to dig out clothes from the garage for them to take to her house because theirs were in the dirty clothes.

My final thoughts on it:

~It was way easier to keep up with laundry. I hate putting laundry away, but it was so much more manageable with fewer items. I often skipped the folding process and just carried the laundry basket around with me to put the clothes away.
~I started the month out by moving all the boys extra clothes into Jax's closet. That didn't work. They quickly found the other clothes and started bringing them out. I finally packed all the extra away in the garage. Should have just done that in the first place.
~We really don't need as many clothes as we have. When I brought the clothes back in I majorly sorted them. I had a whole garbage bag full of stained clothes. Why in the world was I keeping the boys stained clothes??? I also filled 2 bags to donate. They still have plenty of clothes left.


I'm glad we did it. I'm thankful for what we have. We have so much more compared to the rest of the world. It almost feels petty to do an experiment like this and then go back to our closet full of clothes. Makes me feel like a rich american. I wish I could say the boys learned something from this, but I'm not too sure they even noticed. We talked about it a bit, but they can only comprehend so much! :)