TODAY's QUOTE We'll judge the entries and select the most hideous bathroom to receive a makeover worth up to $5,000. Your ugly bathroom could receive all new designer tile and a natural stone sink from the House of Stile (installation and granite or marble counter top not included). Imagine what that could mean to your house!~ KXTV announcement Yesterday's Entries 2001: Having a Whale of a Time TODAY's READS I read a very disturbing article from the New Yorker about people who suicide off the Golden Gate Bridge. They talked about the resistance to putting up a barrier and point out that Californians are eager to protect the spotted owl and trees which are in danger of extinction, but would rather have people jump off the bridge than change the look by erecting a suicide barrier. They also said that there is an attempted suicide off the bridge on an average of every two weeks. I had no idea it was that high. TODAY on the TELE It's West Wing night. TODAY'S FOOD Breakfast: Raisin Bran. Lunch: cauliflower soup, a WW 2-point bar, and an apple Dinner: Lean Cuisine pizza. TODAY's WEATHER Grey and chilly.
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RESCUE MY BATHROOM 7 January 2004 We’ve all seen them–those "make-over" shows. Whether it’s Queer Eye making over some slobby straight guy, or the "ugliest room in America" make overs. I’ve often wondered what it felt like to be one of those people, to have camera crews come into your house and expose your most embarrassing secrets. What drives someone to put their life/home up for public scrutiny. Desperation, I guess. I’m desperate. Now that I’ve become a born-again neat person, our upstairs bathroom bothers me more and more. This is a bathroom which has served its purpose well. It has been through five children (often fighting with each other, as the hole in the door will attest) and a continuous parade of foreign students. Anything that gets that much abuse is going to eventually starting to show the wear and tear. I don’t know how many years it’s been since we’ve been able to actually use the bathtub. It started with a leak in the shower which was "patched" by hanging a plastic curtain across the wall and over the window, to prevent water from further inflicting mold on the board behind the tiles. Likewise, eventually a wooden board was nailed across the top of the shower and another plastic curtain was hung down along the wall, cutting a hold for the showerhead (I think it was attached by duct tape–I could be wrong in that). At some point, the glass shower door shattered and when you looked in the bathroom, you could see all the exposed plastic, duct tape, and mold. Tiles were falling off the wall, holes were gouged out of the linoleum on the floor, and the door was scratched and had a big hole in it where one of the kids got mad at one of the other kids and kicked the door (apparently trying to kick it in.). We haven’t needed that bathroom in a long time and repairs just never got made. At one time, I came home from Houston, after helping my friend Lynn put tile in her kitchen. I was all enthused with the idea of doing the tile job myself (fortunately, because I am a klutz, that never happened). Walt said that the backboard behind the shower head needed replacing first and I should wait until he did that. Then before Peggy came, knowing she would be here for six weeks, I attempted to hire a tile guy to come out and do the work. But this is an area where there is a lot of lucrative work for contractors and our little job isn’t going to attract someone who could be doing a big expensive new home. I finally found a contractor who came out, gave me a quote, brought me samples of tile from which to choose, set a start date, and hasn’t been heard from since. Walt, Peggy and I shared the master bath, the only working shower in the house. Once she left, again, the pressure to get the bathroom fixed eased. We rarely have guests and somehow we never think about the fact that the bathroom is unusable until the day before someone is due to arrive. Last night I overheard an announcement on the local news. Some tile company is going to beautify "the ugliest bathroom in the area" and people are encouraged to submit their disasters to the station for consideration.
they say. Like I said, desperation drives people to do desperate things. I went and took photos of the bathroom today, put together a collage showing all the worst parts of the bathroom, wrote a pathetic letter and submitted our truly wretched eyesore, our own private disaster area, to the contest. I suspect that we aren’t "design potential" enough to actually be chosen, but heck, if we are, I’d gladly submit to the embarrassment of admitting how many years it’s looked like this, if the end result is having a working bathroom again!
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PHOTO OF THE DAY
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Weight Lost to date: 46.6 lbs
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Created 1/4/04
