What’s that you say? You can’t stand to go through another weekend without seeing just a little more of our in-progress-since-the-beginning-of-time master bathroom? Right. Well, this post is for you, then!

I always feel a weird explaining/apologizing about projects taking (much) longer than I expected. Because, I mean, I don’t think most people are losing sleep over our master bathroom and how much they want to see it finished (that’s just me that does that). But I’ll do it anyway.

Summer is usually a great time for us to knock out some bigger projects, because school’s out and there’s a lot of free time, relatively speaking. But this summer there is no free time. Dave is finally getting his master’s after years of thinking he should probably go ahead and do that but it never being a good time on account of our millions of small children. Now we only have one small child. So he’s working on that, and it’s all online, but it’s a massive time suck. So far our summer is mostly about Dave being sequestered up in our bedroom working while I try to keep the kids occupied and out of his way and then attempts to fit in a bit of house stuff and the occasional family bonding activity here and there. We haven’t even started the new season of Orange is the New Black! If you can believe that.

So anyway. The bathroom is coming along, but slowly. Faucet #1 has been installed (with more issues and trips to Home Depot than anticipated, as usual (which means we should probably start anticipating it, really)) and work on faucet #2 is in progress. The last big task is painting the damn cabinets, and then it’s all fairly little details and we’re done! It sounds so easy when I put it that way!

But here’s one little space that’s all finished that I’ll show you. Draw out the incredible suspense and all:

I’m very excited about all the black and white in here. I hung that poster up today, just so I’d have a finished wall to take pictures of. I mean, also because it’s about time I started hanging things up. Other things to hang up are piling up against the wall in the bedroom.

This room continues to be a challenge to photograph. I was sitting in the tub for these.

I still need to finish repotting some of the plants. Don’t look too closely; I bought just really simple (plastic) black pots to put them all in, but some of them right now I just stuck the pots they came in inside the bigger pots and didn’t do a full scale transfer.

Who wants to share their best tips for not killing house plants?

Here’s my house plant selection and care method so far:

1. Go to Home Depot

2. Buy prettiest house plants that aren’t too expensive

3. Pay no attention whatsoever when doing this to what they are or how to take care of them

4. Water them when I think of it

5. Cross fingers

They’re all right across from a big sunny window, and they seem to like that and my haphazard watering method okay so far.

I bought that plant stand at the thrift store a long time ago. It was 18.99, which seemed like kind of a lot to me, but I couldn’t resist. Then I managed to break three of the five glass circles in it and had to get a local glass place to cut new ones for it, so it ended up costing way more than $18.99 (I think we paid $15 per circle).

I’d originally figured I’d find some use for it other than plants, but it really seemed to want to be a plant stand. And I liked the idea of a lot of green plants with all the black and white. I just doubted my ability to make it happen. But, after briefly considering fake plants, I dove in. We’ll see!

Most of my houseplant experience before this involves getting talked into taking peace lilies home from loved ones’ funerals and then gradually killing them. Which makes me feel guilty. I won’t take plants home from funerals anymore, because the symbolism just gets all screwed up when I kill them.

Here’s hoping Dave gets enough done with his endless school crap tonight and tomorrow that he can work on the bathroom with me all weekend! Yay–summer!