Finally…electricity and indoor plumbing

This may only be incredibly exciting to me - but we have a toilet! We don't have the faucets connected for the sinks in the bathroom yet. But, still, a toilet that flushes? What person wouldn't love that after more than a year of a Porta-Potty?

It's beautiful :-)

We also have all of the lights installed now (thanks to Jeff with Teague Electric). I was so happy to see last night that the kitchen is well lit. Our stove is also in place and we discovered that the countertop for the island needs to be rebuilt because the opening for the slide-in range is a little too deep. Other than that it looks great.

All lights are installed.

Brent and I did a lot of work shopping at ReStore and on Craigslist to get most of the light fixtures. We even got our ceiling fans - and they are really cool! It feels good to re-use these things - and in almost all cases it saved us a ton of money.

Even the bathroom cabinets, countertops and faucets came from Craigslist. Yesterday we did some shopping and found more things at ReStore. Our "new" toilets are a matching, pristine set from the 87th Street store. They were complete with working flush mechanisms and cost us $25 each. That's an incredible deal! And they look brand new. All that made it easy to get over the idea of a used toilet. And what is there to be squeamish about after a year of using a Porta-potty?

Brent will focus on getting the bathrooms totally functional this weekend. Then he will shift his attention to the monumental task of staining and finishing the main level flooring. This will include an intensive cleaning job for the upstairs to eliminate all of the construction dust.

The rest of us will continue to "chip" away at the painting job. That job gets closer everyday to being finished. We will finish up the downstairs and start on the master bedroom. Logan painted the entire half-bath side of the master bathroom yesterday. We are very lucky to have such a hard-working son :-)