I think that in all the goings on here with lawnmowing and dario fo plays and what not, I may have forgotten to mention the most important news of all-- our master bath is tiled! We started on the master bath in August, and it didn't get finished until October, but my god-- all the tile is in, and we are ready to stall on the last two elements of the bathroom-- the glass shower door and the painting. (I'm excluding the fixing up of the closet that we have built. That's like an entirely different room! We solved the bedroom to bathroom in a surprisingly elegant fashion-- glass sliding doors. We had originally planned to have one humongo door that slid across the whole way, but when the track was bought, Stephanie realized that we could do two sliding doors that slide to one another. The great thing is that it fit in perfectly, and really does look like it's been there forever. I don't know why we didn't think of it before. As for tile, it looks great, although it came at a price. Our tile guy told us it wouldn't be much of a problem to replace the hexagonal white tiles with glass tiles, and he quoted us the price to do it. Well, he didn't quite figure how much work it would be, and his guys were there an extra four days (and still never got it right) So he started losing money, and started cutting corners, and ... well, it stopped being pretty. An example: the top bullnoses when they were installed were not full tile pieces-- they were pieces cut in half and sewn back to back. S went surprisingly ballistic about it-- saying that she wanted the full pieces. At first the guy insisted they didn't make them, that this is how it was done, that when they were grouted you wouldn't see it-- all kinds of excuses-- but after a quick call to the Queen of Paint (who turns out, is a Tile Queen as well!) S insisted, he relented, and the guy said he would try to find it. The good thing is we still owed him half the job, so he had a real incentive. Suffice to say, he found the right tile. The tile work was at first installed relatively sloppily, but having Stephanie as our Tile Bulldog worked out well. I highly recommend having a tile bulldog to go over the stuff with a fine-tooth comb. It's still not a PRISTINE job, but it's a lot better than what they were going to leave it as-- and to the untrained eye (that would be mine) it looks fantastic! I liked our tile guy a lot, and I think Stephanie did too, except for the inevitable trying to cut corners aspect. Somewhere around here I have some photos of the quasi-finished project. I'll post them if people are interested. Or better yet, stop on by!