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In my mind, I figured that these last days before school started would be relaxed. I somehow imagined I would be organizing folders, packing a lunch, and lounging on the couch. Maybe even spend some time musing on my blog. The aforementioned loafing, however, did not ensue.

We've had a busy couple of days! On Saturday, Alesha and I invited some people over for an end of the summer barbecue. It was just plain fun to have people over. My mom used to say that she enjoyed entertaining. I could never understand, because from my perspective, it just meant doing a lot of cleaning. Somehow, my perspective has changed over the years. Don't get me wrong, we still did lots of cleaning. Okay, Alesha mostly did lots of cleaning. My excuse was that I worked nine hours on Saturday.

And yesterday was project day. It didn't start out that way.

Our bathtub has been giving us problems for a long time. As I have probably mentioned in the past, the people Alesha bought the house from really didn't care about "quality". The plastic surround on the bathtub was never properly caulked, and we knew water was leaking back behind the wall. We just didn't know how bad. In addition, whenever we took showers, water leaked onto the floor.

As you may know from the water heater incident, we've got a contractor guy who does the home projects I'm not comfortable handling. Don't get me wrong, I'm not afraid to try to dismantle the bathtub, or even tackle putting a new surround in. But if there is water damage behind the wall, I have no clue how to gauge the damage. Do we need to replace the drywall? Spray bleach? Do nothing and just seal the wall back up? How do you tell the difference? That's not something I'm willing to eyeball and guess. We called him about a month ago to get him out here, but Sunday was the soonest he was able to get out here.

In addition, we've been trying to lay sod in place of where our rock garden used to be. The rock has been removed since Corey's ordination, but we haven't gotten to put the sod down yet. We tried last weekend, but they were all out of sod. The first time that I had time to lay the sod and Gertens had the stuff to lay was on Sunday.

Alesha realized what was going on, and I guess she didn't plan on being left out. Her plans involved redoing the planter box in our courtyard and cleaning up the garage.

Our contractor guy showed up and got right to work. With all of the demolition going on, my wife convinced him to go ahead and take out the door between our bedroom and the bathroom. What's a little more drywall?

We discovered what the previous owners had done with the bathtub. They had started tiling the whole bathtub; the wall closest to our bedroom was completely tiled. From there, they either ran out of tile, decided it was too hard, or got bored with what they were doing. Instead of tiling the rest, they simply installed ¼" plywood into the wall with 3" screws. They didn't even use greenboard, just straight-up drywall. At any rate, our contractor guy was able to knock out in a few hours what would have taken me a few days. He only has a couple of things to do here this morning before we have our brand new bathroom.

The sod project also went pretty well. It was a good thing Michael came over, being as that he had layed sod before and I had not. I even built a little retaining wall out of brick to keep some of the water from the gutters from pooling in front of the front door. It only took us a couple of hours to get all of the sod down. Michael advised that we get some grass seed to fill in the gaps. I'm pleased with how the whole project turned out.

Alesha was able to give away the plants from our planter, but we'll probably have to wait on rebuilding it until a later date. But that freed up time for her to organize and clean the garage.

Today we will vacuum the carpets. I'm not sure we even got everything up from the water heater, much less all of the soil I tracked in the last day. And our contractor guy just got done installing a kitchen light and fixing our screen door. I'd like to think we're going to get more than that done today, but I think I'm ready for a nap.