It's a new dawn, it's a new day... it's a new house project for me!

It's official!  This is the first post of the new year and the official start to my blog.

This year I'm finishing projects and the most pressing one is the brown spot on the living room ceiling (under the bathtub).

I was planning on just replacing some grout and re-caulking the bathtub, but it's so much worse than that!  I popped off a tile and found that the underlayment for the tile was sopping wet and the consistency of spackle... oddly enough, because it was SPACKLE that had been wet for at least 6 months!  More and more tiles popped off easily and the supporting 2x4 was the texture of BBQ pulled pork (minus the yumminess, but with 1000x the fiber!).

Note the tender morsels of pine, falling off of the bone.

My neighbor Freddy stpped by to take a look and he removed even more tile and some of the backer board... what a mess!  After 3 days of drying, the bathroom is ready for us to tackle.  So, tonight Sarah and I are talking about how we want the bathroom to look, instead of how we want the brown spot to go away.  We're thinking white, 3x6 subway tile in a brick pattern with a marble or granite shelf for shampoo.

Thank heavens my dad just retired last week and he's driving up first thing in the morning to help make this problem go away! While I am a crafty beaver, my dad is a true handy man!

Cross you fingers!