we have actually been pretty busy the last few weeks, and i have several things i wanted to write about. most importantly, we are still making progress on the floors! i swear, this is the never ending project. it's funny that i thought we'd be done in only a few weeks when we started this before thanksgiving. 3 weeks... or 3 months... yeah...

the good news is that we're more than 1/2 way done with the kitchen floor. most of last weekend was spent on bathroom demo so that we can continue the new floor into the half bath, and then finish up with the kitchen floor. we're so close! well, close to being done with the floor, we will still need to put the bathroom back together. it's only been a few days but i really miss having a second bathroom already!

the old toilet came out with no big issues (other than removing a toilet is just gross), but removing the sink took longer than anticipated. the water shut off knobs had been broken off so we had to do some unexpected plumbing work just to remove the sink. it only took one trip to lowes, so i consider that to be a success.

but now we're all ready for the new sink!

in order to replace the valves, we had to remove a section of the drywall (you can see the middle section in the photo above) - and that meant i got to look inside of the wall! it's really sad how excited i get about looking into the wall, but i found a couple of interesting things. of course i took pictures!

looking to the right, you can see that they just left most of the trim for the old stairs. the stairs used to split and go into the entryway and into the kitchen, we already knew that they had closed off the stairs to the kitchen to put in the half bath. we need those trim pieces for our front stair repair, but there's really no way of removing them without doing significant demo/damage to the bathroom. oh-well. i did pull out a piece of newspaper that was stuffed into the debris in the wall, fun fact, it looks like the bathroom was built in 1989.

and this picture is looking to the left. it's difficult to tell what's going on, but the white in the middle is actually a tile wall in the kitchen. this is strange for several reasons - this means that they built a new wall in front of the original kitchen wall. we knew that there is a hidden window behind the fridge (that we are planning on uncovering at some point) but i didn't realize that the wall was built out too. and, based on some difficult measurements and math, i believe that the wall is actually a good 9" in front of the original kitchen wall. i have been working on the new kitchen layout for awhile now, and i could really use another 9" in width! i might need to move the fridge and do some more wall/window exploring at some point... just don't tell mike ;-)

and since i know that you all want a better look at the fantastic wallpaper, here ya go: