What a Week!

Whew! It's Friday! This week is just about over. What a week it has turned out to be. I've been feeling such angst over my ill-fated attempt to re-caulk our tub, but I'm getting over it. Especially after Steve was able to rig up a modified "shower within the shower." It's working pretty well, too! He bought a shower rod and a shower curtain liner. That, with some cable ties, turned into this:

This is what you see when you walk into the bathroom

This is the top part of the back end of the shower.

Looking down a little farther you can see more duct tape and some clothespins holding the liners together.

This is the front end. You can see how the shower head is tucked into our "tent" shower.

And this is along the side next to the wall.

I thought he was all kinds of clever for coming up with this. He admitted though, a guy at work told him how to rig it up. I told him he didn't have to let me in on that part and I'd keep on thinking he was super clever. Well, getting it to actually work IS pretty great!

Remember when I mentioned our rock star neighbor who helped us move in my thrifty finds last weekend? Well, he works in construction and Steve's been wanting to talk to him about our, ahem, situation. He came over last night and took a good look at the shower. In his esteemed opinion, he didn't think the mold would have moved up behind the walls. First of all, when it was installed, they used the green drywall, which is the mold/mildew resistant kind. He found flaws in how they DID install it, but he didn't think we needed to remove the surround. What we do need to do is cut a hole in the wall behind the tub/shower via our entry closet and try to shim up the lip along the long wall. I told him how water pools in one spot along that side and he could see how the edge of the tub in that area was angling toward the wall. If we didn't get that fixed, we would continue to have mold issues. We do have an access panel to the pipes for the faucet in our laundry closet and there is no evidence of mold that we can see there. Whew. So my job today is to work on getting more of the caulk out. Stuff I didn't know was caulk. This weekend Steve will cut the hole and with our friend's help, work on getting that area fixed. We are hoping once that hole is cut, we'll be able to see if mold might have crept up through any gap we think might be there. Our tub is a jetted tub and there's an access panel in the front side. We've looked in there as best we can and don't see any mold on the studs supporting the tub, which is hopefully a good sign. So, keeping fingers, eyes and toes crossed, this will be an easier and less expensive fix than we feared. You don't know how badly I hope this turns out to be the case!

In other areas of our life, I was busy on Wednesday volunteering at the school for their Earth Day activities. My friend, Susi, organizes a really neat event, complete with different stations for the kids to go to and learn about the earth and how to protect it. She enlists the help of the city we live in. They came and shared their expertise. We even had the mayor there, who helped us dedicate a newly planted tree. We did the Earth Day event a day before because yesterday was Take Your Child to Work Day and the 2nd-5th grade students had a field trip planned to watch a ballet performance at another school. It turned out to be a good move aside from the other events. It's been raining most of this week. Wednesday morning it didn't rain, so the Earth Day event (which is held outside on the lawn) went off without a hitch. And yesterday morning it poured! Whew!

Jessica went to work with Steve yesterday. His company has an organized program they run for this event. Amy was more interested in the field trip, so she didn't go to work with them. Anyway, the program was scheduled from 9-Noon and I completely spaced that off when I made a doctor's appointment for myself (routine check up to have my prescriptions refilled) at 9:15. Oy! Steve was fine with actually taking her into work with him and I picked her up at the end. She really enjoyed herself. She got to meet some "new friends, not kids though, adults" (her words). She said all the adults kept saying she was cute. LOL At the program she was quite impressed by the presenter who dipped a cracker into liquid Nitrogen and then ate it! He had smoke coming out of his mouth! (Steve works at Ball Aerospace, for those of you who didn't know that) He also froze a banana! They also worked in Earth Day as well. She got some sort of footprint (she hasn't shown it to me yet) that has wildflower seeds in it that we can plant. We'll do just that, if it ever stops raining!

We started up swim lessons again this week, so that has been added fun.

Amy has a field trip today (how lucky is she, two field trips in a row?) to the Museum of Nature and Science (her favorite place pretty much) where they are going to tour a newly opened exhibit on the human body. The class has been studying the body during science time, so this worked out wonderfully for the teachers. I might have volunteered to go, but they only needed one parent. Amy kind of does better if I'm not around (I think I annoy her too much...LOL), so I don't feel too bad about not going along. I AM going along with Jessica's class when they tour a garden next week (and the forecast at this point is for it to be dry-let's hope).

And if you are still with me after all of that jabber, I managed to finish the girls' dresses yesterday! Isn't that blue fabric for Jessica so pretty?? I love me some bright vibrant colors, don't I?

I took close ups of the yo-yo stacks I made to help dress them up just a bit. Oh heck, let's be forthright here,  I made them to hide the hand stitching I had to do after adjusting the strap lengths. LOL The pattern called for tying ribbon around the strap, which would have been cute, but I thought this might be a little cuter.

Okay, I'm done now. I've got caulk to remove.

Thanks for stopping by. And thanks, big time, for not laughing too hard at me about trying to re-caulk the tub and having it blow up in my face. By the way, that Renovation Realities show appears to be on every night during the week at 9pm Mountain time on the DIY network. I've watched it a couple of more times. They show a new episode on Saturday nights. Just in case you were interested.

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