Back rub challenge - BEFORE

Husband has had a case of the yips with his golf drive. Work is boring right now. His lawn is trying to recover from heavy equipment driving all over it. And his fish tank is in limbo while he's getting rid of a pest. Basically, all his hobbies are not satisfying right now (um...work isn't a hobby. I'm aware). So Saturday morning, to liven things up, he issued a challenge: we each pick a bathroom to redo with zero input from the other. One week. $500. Spouse cannot change anything for one year. We will pick 5 judges. Loser owes the other 60 minutes of back rub within one week of the challenge.

This is a party right up my alley!

Oh, I should say that the spark that ignited the hay heap was me showing him paint swatches for the basement. I got accused of being boring and not using fun colors (slightly guilty...although I did just put a ginormous red rug in our front room! Here are some pics of that piece of glory:

This is not a continuous shot, if it was tripping you out - I was having too much help from little people. But you get the gist. It's huge too - 14x10 or something crazy. Got it off Craigslist for $60. It's legit vintage and just making all my dreams come true. Phew, I digress. Back to the challenge. Oh, and I'd better close these parenthesis...did you notice that I hadn't yet?).

He took the master bathroom and I took the basement bathroom. Then he started looking stuff up and the challenge parameters changed to a three week timeline (phew). Then we had a conversation about  how the master is used more and bigger, so he should have $700 and I should have $300. But in that same conversation we discussed me making my budget stretch to cover the whole basement to make the whole space inviting. I took for the convo that I got the whole basement, he took that he got $700. Ha, ha! So this turned into a $1200 challenge within an hour of it beginning.

Well, here are the before picture of the master bathroom:

Dang, you can't see the half painted wall in these shots! But you can see the singular working light bulb. I feel awesome. Did you know that when we moved in there were 9 different shades of green painted on our walls? NINE! Um, there are still eight. But, after this challenge, only three (and that's because there are three using in harmony in the front room). 

Quick thoughts on the master: it's not the worst. Okay, I know a handful of people who would call it the worst, and someday we'd like to gut it and reconfigure it, but that's like 15 years away. For now, I'm grateful for the huge tub that all three of my kids can fit it and that the tile isn't peach. 

 And onto the basement:

These were taken back in November. Since then I've been working ever-so-slowly on painting all the trim white. And we got new windows!! And I've gotten rid of all kinds of junk. Including most of the baby stuff, the ugly brown couch, stuff belonging to family, and some legitimate garbage. The basement has had a weird evolution to becoming ours: when we moved in it was the storage unit for all my in-laws stuff until they moved to CA (we bought the house from them, if you didn't know, and they let us move in before the twins were born, but it caused some juggling on their part. Grateful for them for that, cause moving 34 weeks pregnant with twins sure beat moving with 2 month old twins!). Then Husband's brother and family lived here for 4 months. So it's really been "ours" for just over a year. And most of that time has been just attempting to clear it out! 

And, last of all, the basement bathroom: 

 Typical 90's basement bathroom. I wish I could share the smell with you. Wait, no I don't. It smells like a bathroom of a house that had three teenager boys grow up in it - and was a room their mother never went into, so rarely got cleaned.

Big plans and happenings over the next few weeks! I just got my first boxes of stuff to use today - it felt like Christmas...but kinda better.