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This week we started the process of remodeling our bathroom. With a boatload of excitement and optimism, I bounded out of bed the morning the plumbers were to arrive for the first time and gleefully prepared coffee and got donuts for my precious bathroom saviors. After doling out the provisions, I got out a blanket and settled into a chair with a book for a quiet day of reading. I stayed home because I wanted to be available if the plumbers had questions, but thought that in reality, I would spend most of the day catching up on my paperback pleasures. Apparently I thought the work in the bathroom would be done by quiet, clean little plumbers that would noislessly toil while I read. I envisioned them working hard with their itty-bitty hammers, their teensy-weensy nails, and their cutesy-wootsey jackhammers and eventually, I would tear my eyes away from the absorbing text of my novel to find that they had (much like red suited Santa Claus) given me a beautiful gift while I read.

Unfortunately, that is NOT what really happens during a bathroom renovation. What actually happens is as follows:

1) Excited home owner empties all cabinets and removes everything from their bathroom. Put said things in plastic bags.

2) Put plastic bags into bedroom- the only room in the house that does not have piles of crap in it from your other "projects".

3) Corral your cats, their litter box, their food and their toys and place all in bedroom next to plastic bags of stuff from bathroom.

4) Listen to cats cry, scream, moan, and try to desperately claw their way out of the bedroom.

5) Try not to get a splinter when going into the bedroom to comfort them and stepping on shards of wood torn from the door by an attention starved cat.

6) Cover EVERY SINGLE PIECE of furniture in your house. Even furniture in rooms sealed away from the costruction.

7) Watch the plumbers take a sledgehammer to your tub and walls.

8) As walls are torn down, find termite damage in studs.

9) Cry.

10) Argue with spouse, cry again, eat a bagel.

11) Say goodbye to plumbers, enjoy the silence of your house, wait for tomorrow.

12) Next morning- act like you are happy to see the plumbers.

13) Try not to hear the jackhammer as it hammers through your floor.

14) Watch the dust fly out of every air conditioning vent in your home and cover every imaginable surface (see step 6).

15) Cry.

16) Watch plumbers bring your new bathtub, toilet and sink into the living room. Wonder how long it will actually be there.

17) Wonder if it would be considered "normal" to keep said items in living room, simply to avoid more dust and banging from the plumbers.

18) Say goodbye to plumbers.

19) Wait and see what pleasures await you Monday.

20) Repeat

With my optimism rubbed away like the silver coating on a losing scratch-off ticket and my home, hair and laugh lines covered in dust, I no longer bound out of bed when the plumbers arrive. I begrudgingly trudge to the door in my dilapidated bunny slippers, avoiding the chunks of concrete that block my path. I no longer read while they work, now I stand and stare in wild eyed wonder at the disaster that is my home, and beg them not to extend their finish date....again.

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