Home Improvement

Back when we were dating, my husband and I agreed to watch each others favorite TV shows. I'm pretty sure the idea was mine. My favorite show is Firefly though, which only ran for one season. My husband's, to his glee, was Home Improvement, which ran for eight seasons. Good grief. Since we made the original deal, we've watched both together and a number of other shows as well. And okay, we might re-watch Firefly as much as one to two times a year. Anyway, watching Home Improvement gave me some interesting ideas for what to expect from our own home improvements. The good news is that it set a really low bar.

Originally, we had planned to spend the fall "finishing" our currently unfinished garage. We decided to set that project aside until later for a number of reasons and then both immediately looked around and started listing off other things we could do. High on my list was our shower. We knew we didn't have the know-how to remove the whole thing and re-do it and, with Thanksgiving approaching, didn't have the patience to try but our caulk and grout was in pretty bad need of repair in some places. I'd like to say we dove into fixing it but our approach more closely resembled a child cautiously dipping their toe in an uncertain lake than anything else. We read articles and watched videos and hemmed and hawed and eventually got to work.

We chose not to do the whole shower both, I believe, feeling pretty sure that we would fail the first time and need to re-do everything anyway. We cut out the worst of the grout though and all of the caulk and, a week later, had a re-caulked and partially re-grouted shower. It's not the prettiest thing in the world but the final product is a lot better than what we started with so I think we'll call this one a win. Of course, in the end, we didn't mess up so badly that we needed to immediately re-do anything so our shower grout is just going to be a little mismatched for a while. It's not the worst thing that could happen.

Hilariously, while our shower was out of commission, we used one of the other bathrooms. Now we have a list of projects to attack in that bathroom. Apparently this is exactly what being a home owner is like.

Before

During

After