It all started with a leak.

Isn’t that how these things usually go?  First a little dampness on the ceiling, then a trickle, and the next thing you know…bye bye ceiling that can’t be replaced until you gut the whole bathroom above it.

So yeah, that happened.  We’ve been living with this bathroom ceiling (or lack thereof) in our house for over two years now.  I like to joke that it has rustic charm.  Aren’t exposed beams a “thing”? That’s what Pinterest tells me anyway. 😉

We aren’t strangers to home improvement projects.  We bought a fixer-upper, after all.  Young, naive, and house hunting with our first baby still attached to my hip, we had vision.  At least that is what we called it at the time.  Looking back, blindness was a lot more like it.

Just to give you a little visual, here’s what our master bedroom and bathroom looked like when we bought it.  Yeah, hurts my eyes too.

But slowly and surely, we’ve made some transformations.

 

 

And now, nearly three years post-plumbing disaster, we (I use that term lightly – it’s really all my husband) are finally on a mission to rid our ceiling of “rustic charm” once and for all.  Anyone who’s ever DIY’d knows that these projects involve a certain guarantees.  There will be blood.  There will be sweat.  There will be cursing.  And there will be a real mess.

When we bought this house we gave ourselves a timeline of two years to fix it up.  8.5 years later, we still have a (growing) list.  Home ownership has a clever way of throwing your best made plans around like that.  I have a feeling many can relate.

In the spirit of our Keepin’ it Real blog circle, check out the mess my fellow photographer, Debbie, has gotten into this week!