Fact: Bears Eat Beets.

Progress on the upstairs bathroom ‘renovation’ continues to move along… where “move along” means “by this time next year, we’ll be ready to install the flooring.”

For the entire past week, I’ve been staggering around with a headache on the cusp of a migraine, combined with cramps in that useless and frequently angsty girl part. As such, swinging a hammer didn’t seem like a good idea, a) because the vibrations would have made my head hurt and, b) I wasn’t sure I could trust myself to stop with the desired hammering and not move onto “knocking out walls to make more space” hammering.

And so, like most projects I undertake, this one is being tackled in baby steps.

Micromovements, if you follow SARK.

After stepping on the stupid upturned nails repeatedly over the course of the week, I went upstairs this afternoon and picked up the hammer. Then I proceeded to bang it repeatedly into the carpet “tack strips“.

I ripped, pulled, thudded, damaged and otherwise removed more than half of them – and now I need Coffee’s upper-body strength to wrench the remains from the floor.

(I stopped, also, because I ripped a hole in my jeans and bloodied up my knee with a nail and then I felt sulky and bitchy toward the room. Sure, that’s not rational, but hell, IT HURT, DAMMIT. I don’t play nicely with people or places that injure me..)

The baseboards will also need to be removed, but I can’t quite figure out how to tackle that without making a HUGE mess of the walls themselves as I pry the wood loose. I suspect we’ll be purchasing new boards anyway, since the flooring will change the layout somewhat, but I don’t want to spend the next two weeks spackling and sanding everywhere. Sooo.. yeah. I’ll get to that part.

It would also be a good idea for me to remove all the various items hanging from the walls – mirrors and shelves and toilet paper holder – before I start flipping lavender paint around. There’s a reason we’re painting before putting down the new flooring, and that reason is my inability to apply paint in a sane, sensible, linear manner. There is no way I’ll “carefully paint around” anything in that room, thus, it must all go.

What kind of an idiot puts CARPETING in a BATHROOM? Can I just ask that again? YAAAAAAAAAAARGH.

At any rate, tomorrow I’ll probably putty some of the holes from items we won’t be re-hanging, and then finish sanding ‘em, and then.. well, then I can start painting. In theory.

It’s a really good thing we have two other bathrooms in this house. It’s also a really good thing we’re not doing any plumbing or adding in a shower stall or something in the upstairs bathroom. I can’t even BEGIN to imagine the chaos. I just can’t.