The bathroom is done!

That's right, folks. The third floor bathroom is finally finished, with the exception of two small pieces of trim. We finished in a nick of time, too - Markus put the finishing touches on just before we left to pick up our friends Sean and Brook from the airport.

They spent the holiday weekend with us and we had a great time. We did lots of walking, drank wine and beer, ate at a few new restaurants, shopped, and went to the Wyeth exhibit at the art museum. The weather was nice most of the weekend except for Saturday night, which coincidentally was the night we decided to grill our dinner. The guys were good sports, though, and made some awesome steaks despite the pouring down rain outside. Brook and I got tickets to the Wyeth exhibit on Sunday afternoon and both of us agreed that it was an excellent show. It only took us about an hour to walk through, which was good timing for me as I tend to get sensory overload after 1-2 hours in an art museum. The emotion and detail in the paintings affected me, and I wanted to buy a print of one of the two that spoke to me the most, but they were sold out. Oh well...

Markus jumped right back in to summer session two on Wednesday night - the final course in his Master's program! Neither of us can believe that the end is almost here after three years and are trying to figure out what exactly Markus will do when he has all of his evenings free and no homework assignments to complete on the weekends.

In the end, our bathroom project was challenging but we're pleased with the results. While there are some imperfections (we are only amateur home remodelers, after all), it does look nice. For our next two projects, though, I think we're 99.9% sure we're hiring the experts. We want to redo our master bathroom (rip down walls, install a new tub, retile the shower, modify the plumbing) and it's a pretty major project, one that's just too much for us. And, at a minimum we need some new kitchen appliances and might throw in a new countertop, possibly an island, and hey, if we hit the lottery, some new cabinets, too. These would be late fall (or early Christmas gift) projects, but we have to start thinking and budgeting for them now. We have the names of contractors who will do estimates for us, so I'll be curious to see what the costs will be since I really don't know.

Markus and I both commented on how nice it was this weekend and yesterday to just sit down at night and not have to tile or grout or paint. We're both so glad the bathroom is done! I'll load our pictures this weekend into an album so you all can see our progress. Stay tuned...as for us, we're going to enjoy having no projects to work on for the next few weeks!