Binjo Feng Shui

Elysia has been hating our bathroom for a very long time. Its small, its cramped, its old, and its Ugly. And I mean U-G-L-Y!! She has been dreaming of redoing the whole bathroom from start to finish. She has entered bathroom remake contests, spends time looking at bathroom pictures, and has recently had someone come in to take a look at it, listen to some of her ideas, and give her an estimate on what it would cost, just for the labor, providing that we purchased the materials. The minimum five-thousand dollar price tag for the bare-bones labor costs almost made her keel over! Not to take anything away from the guys who do the work, now... they work hard, and they do a great job... they deserve to be well paid. Neither of us has any heartburn over that... the sticky part is that we simply don't have the buckage to do it. Period.

There are only so many slices in the pie, and at this point, we can't afford to pay that kind of money, period.

We had grand dreams of a dormer on one wall, and a new vanity, replacing the tub with a tiled shower stall, and tiling the floor. There is a ventilation fan that is loud enough to wake the dead, so we disconnected it so that everyone in the neighborhood isn't forced to wake up when anyone in the household uses the toilet at night. We wanted to have a whisper fan put in on its own switch.

The tub had been sort of leaking at the seams, and someone had tried to recaulk the seams with what turned out to be shower and bath adhesive, which turned nasty brownish-grayish-yellowish... sort of like a decaying corpse color.. nice! Not the first thing you want to set eyes on when you get up in the morning..... its absolutely disgusting.

The estimate made us crap our pants, and it seemed that most of the dreams were just that... dreams.

I have made a decision, though. While I can't hope to be installing dormers, and replacing tubs, I can do a lot of other things, and I can learn to do a great deal more.

My first step was to test the disgusting 'caulk' on the tub-surr