I know I said posting would be light over the previous week, but I didn't really intend to check out altogether. My house and my family had other plans entirely.

If there's one irrefutable law of the universe of home ownership, it's that when you break down and decide to drop a buttload of money on one home renovation project, there will be blowback from the universe. The blowback may be delayed, it may take various forms, but oh, let me assure you, there will be blowback. Sadly, we forgot about that law and decided to drop a buttload of cash last month on supplies to rebuild our broken and failing deck in the back yard. After all, if we ever hope to sell this house someday in the distant future, the deck (which no longer met county code thanks to our neglect) would need to be redone, so why shouldn't we at least get to USE the new and improved deck before it gets to that point, right? It's similar to my theory of why we put another bathroom in the basement last summer.

So anyway, a couple of weeks before my Big Work Thing, the home improvement store finally saw fit to deliver the materials. Of course they dropped them in the street because the forklift they brought was too big to fit in our driveway and then we ended up moving them all, piece by piece, in the dark because we are terrible, non-trusting people and didn't think our neighbors would abstain from stealing building supplies left in the street, but that delivery fee was still worth it, I suppose. (full disclosure: I don't really suppose.)

Anyway, The KoH thought he might get to the Deck Project over the Thanksgiving Day weekend, since he'd have the full brunt of child care while I was out of town the week before. It was a great plan and I was back in town just a couple of days before Thanksgiving, so it'd work out. But then I came home to a hot water heater that decided to leak all of its precious hot water out, underneath the wall and into The Dormouse's room. So instead of working on the deck, we did something I swore I'd never do: go into a retail store on Black Friday. That's where we bought this:


Bye bye, $500... it was nice knowing you.

You might think we at least got a decent deal on it because we braved the crazies the day after Thanksgiving, but surprisingly, these babies aren't the new hot item on everyone's Christmas list (Honey, don't worry about those diamonds, all I want is a HOT WATER HEATER), so we didn't even get it on sale.

Then The KoH went about the business of demolishing the old deck.


While he was doing that, I decided to pull up all the ceramic tile in the kitchen that has been broken for ages and use the left over bamboo flooring from our basement bathroom renovation to cover the area where the floor moves so much we have no hope of replacing the tiles and keeping them whole for any length of time. I got this far:


And then this happened:


Completely unrelated to every other project going on in the house, the infamous pinhole leaks in copper pipes finally got around to affecting us. So instead of spending a leisurely Sunday afternoon popping in bamboo flooring, we instead spent the bulk of it pulling the ceiling apart and searching for a pinhole leak in a pipe that The Dormouse suddenly noticed had filled the ceiling with water which was dripping down through the light fixture. This is now the ceiling of our guest bedroom. But since we have few guests, it may stay that way for awhile.

But then, because we are diehards, and because Monica had come over specifically to watch us put in the flooring so she could decide whether or not she wanted to attempt the same project at her house (Danger Will Robinson! Run away!), we did go ahead and install the floor anyway and use our television free babysitter to keep the ankle biters out of our hair while we worked.


Of course the deck still looks like this:


...and we have no idea when we will next get back to that particular issue, but I'm thinking of making friends with some gymnasts and having balance beam practice/barbecues this summer.