Getting ready for our first houseguests

After a year in our house, we’re pretty well settled in. There are still some boxes stashed on the third floor, but the rooms where we spend most of our time feel comfortable and homey.

Just as I was getting the itch to start some new projects this spring, we got the perfect kick in the pants on a couple of the ones we’d planned for some indeterminate date in the future.

Aaron’s sister and niece are coming to visit from Wisconsin, so that put a deadline on our “one of these days” projects of creating a guest bedroom on the third floor and adding a shower to the guest bathroom.

On the plus side, this means tons of shopping for fun home goods.

On the other hand, it’s a lot harder than I expected.

The biggest hurdle so far has been the bathroom. My claw-foot tub is oriented oddly, or at least unusually.

If the options for adding a shower are any indication, most tubs are oriented the other way: with the plumbing against the wall. Then, the riser that holds the shower head gets mounted straight back to the wall. Except in our case, we don’t have a wall there. Dilemmas.

The faucet is not on the wall side of the tub, the way most tubs apparently are oriented. So we had to find a full-enclosure shower curtain rod that didn’t tether to the wall on that side.

The shower kit we finally found to match our strange bathtub needs.

That proved far more difficult than I expected. But we appear to have found one, and we ordered all the pieces to make it work. (Aaron had second thoughts after we placed the order, but I’m holding out hope that we’ll be able to make it work. He’s good at that.)

So in three to seven business days, we’ll be able to see if it works.

And by “we,” clearly I mean “Aaron.”

Next up: Mattress shopping. Need to give Angie and Emma somewhere to sleep, after all!