If we aren’t able to send you a Christmas card this year, consider this our card to you!

For many years now, Laura and I have enjoyed going to Saum Family Farms to cut down our Christmas tree. The sprawling farm always has a huge selection of trees at great prices, and after we’ve found the perfect Canaan Fir, we head into the barn for a cup of hot chocolate and a warm cookie before we leave. Last year, we got to take my parents along and our first baby, Gus. This year, it was exciting because we were blessed to bring along our second baby, Kiley. It was a bit rough trying to wrangle Kiley, the ever squirrely Gus, a camera, a saw, a tree cart, and still look for a good tree, but somehow we managed. With the tree all bundled up, it fit nicely in the back of our Elantra while Kiley made quite an impression on the staff in the barn.

Getting home always starts the least fun part of the “tree experience” for me: getting it mounted straight. Years ago, I bought a tree stand that is large and sturdy enough to hold the White House Christmas tree. The only problem is that if one doesn’t purchase a tree that large, the threaded bolts aren’t long enough to reach the small trunk of a tree like ours. After the tree almost fell, twice, carpel tunnel in my wrists from twisting and twisting anchor bolts, and five shims later, the Cline family tree was up!
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With our move to Texas in the next few months, we are going to need to sell our house in Ohio. We’ve considered renting it, but the tax implications don’t make that a viable option. Either way, there were some serious projects I needed to start to get the house into sellable shape. Once I was deep into those projects, I lamented to Laura that the reason these projects remained on my to-do list for eight years was because they were the hard ones!

The big to-do, the elephant in the room, was the upstairs bath. It was old, nasty, and in need of repair. For years, it sat up there, laughing at me, taunting me, daring me to try and replace its old cast-iron pipes or fix the old plaster that was falling apart. It howled with delight every time I would think about fixing it up but determined that it was just too much work and “maybe next year” would cross my lips. Each time I would use that bathroom, it mocked me. It was a constant reminder that work needed to be done, but there was no easy way to go about it.

The idea of selling the house with a bad master bathroom was what finally got me motivated enough to take up the challenge of ripping it all apart and starting fresh. Yes, I should have done it years ago, but better late than never. We both felt like the money spent on the bathroom remodel would pay for itself after a sale. The problems with the bathroom were that the water lines were galvanized steel, which rust from the inside to the point the water pressure drops to nearly zero. We were not at zero yet, but close. The plaster on the walls near the floor were coming apart from all the steam and the electrical wiring was twice as old as I was. The pedestal sink didn’t offer any storage, the light fixture was rusting and nasty, the toilet was rusty red from all the water passing through the old pipes, and the shower fixtures had so much scale and buildup, it was hard to tell that they were actually chrome.
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