Day Seven

Our big activity was spending 3 hours at a tile store, and because we decided that several thousand square feet of options wasn't enough and spent 3 more hours at Home Depot. We hit all the big departments in HD:

-- lighting: new fixtures and bulbs for most of the house, switches to replace dimmers (who puts a ceiling fan on a dimmer?), enough switch plates for the whole house

-- bathrooms: new tub, 2 toilets and seats for them, shower hardware...for the record we selected the Kohler 5 foot cast iron tub, so all of those who had "iron" on your Bingo cards can give yourselves 2 points

-- flooring: tile for the laundry room

-- miscellaneous: fire extinguishers, a cornucopia of safety detectors

A small sampling of our purchases:

Not only was our tally the largest we've ever seen at HD, but the receipt was one of the longest imaginable. The saving grace of our contractors is that we could purchase items at HD that they could pick up later. Ten boxes of 16x16 tile is heavy, two toilets take up a lot of room, but nothing compares to the 300+ pound tub that wouldn't in a million years fit into or on top of our cars.

Tile for the main bathroom floor:

Today's excitement was having a plumber come by to look at a couple items. On first seeing our sump pump he exclaimed, "What the heck is this?" Needless to say, the jerry-rigged, Rube Goldberg contraption that allegedly was acting as a sump pump will be exiting the premises.