Tatting? What's that?

As you can see by the sad dearth of tatting content, or any content for that matter, I have been busy with other things. Not necessarily fun things either.

We have decided we'd like to move. Well we decided years ago that we wanted to move, but we haven't found a place to move to yet. Luke 6:38  says Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again. We  have hit the running over point. With all of his great organizational skills my dearest has run out of places to put things and the only solution seems to be a double car garage. Unfortunately, the budget doesn't allow for such a thing in our current location and to improve the sale value of the house we have been working on some over due maintenance and upgrades.

Each little job we did created several other jobs in an ever expanding cycle. Some time ago we had a leak in the bathroom upstairs the made it's way down to the kitchen on the main floor. This required fixing the leak re-caulking the bathtub and repairing the damaged floor. When we came to re-tiling the floor we needed to put down new sub flooring first. Then we discovered that the flooring didn't extend all the way under the vanity, so we had to build up the existing floor to a consistent height before laying down new sub flooring which raised up the floor one quarter inch. Of course the sub flooring meant that the toilet was no longer flush with the flange and a new flange gasket was installed to compensate. Once that was done the tile was laid, the room was painted and we could move on, except of course that the door had to be cut shorter.

Next we tackled the kitchen where the leak had resulted in several water stains on the ceiling and a soft spot where the drywall has disintegrated. A spot that looked about 3 inches across resulted in a square foot hole needing to be cut in the ceiling to bring it back to solid drywall. My amazing hubby cut a very precise drywall patch that was so tight, not even a razor blade would fit between the original ceiling and the patch. Then it was taped plastered and sanded, and sanded, and sanded. Sanding something over your head is a lot of hard work, not to mention dirty and dusty, and it's even worse when you're dizzy all the time like my sweetheart, so it was a job we took turns at. When we got that sorted out we painted the whole kitchen, but of course we had to remove the wall paper border first. Just one more little job.

Then in a fit of enthusiasm I decided to strip the wallpaper off the master bedroom which took about a week of soaking and scraping. The mirror tile came off easier, but left behind a glue-y mess and missing chunks of drywall that required giving the whole wall a skim coat of plaster that needed to be sanded and sanded and sanded ... and you get the idea. Eventually it got down to bare walls that were painted and we took a breather.

That was when we noticed the new tile in the bathroom was lifted up and thinking that we had set the tile incorrectly, we carefully pried up a corner added more adhesive and some heavy weights and hoped it would hold.

A week later we noticed water coming up between the tiles. This is NOT a good thing. After kicking around several options we lifted off the toilet, pulled the vanity back out and pulled up all the tiles where the water was coming out. It turns out the we didn't need the extender that we used under the toilet. It had raised the toilet up too high and water was leaking out between the flange and the gasket. Of course soaking the sub flooring made the plywood separate so the sub flooring had to be replaced and of course so did the tile. Which kind of put us back where we started when the whole "fix up the house" project began. Only worse, because we had to clean off all the old stuff first and just to add a little more challenge the plastic nuts that hold the taps onto the vanity cracked off. The taps were new this summer and both of the nuts broke at the same time. What are the chances?

We THINK this time we have it fixed properly, but we noticed a water stain on the ceiling in the garage which is below and to the side of the wall where the bathroom is...

I haven't done much tatting. I haven't had much time. And when I've had time my hands have been swollen, my wrist have been sore and my thumbs have hurt from scraping and sanding and painting. Then the other day when my hands had just about gotten to where I could tat again I was trying to rub a tea stain out of the dish cloth after washing dishes in very hot water and I rubbed all the skin off my knuckles.

For the entire Christmas season I tatted 2 snowflakes, one which I gave away before taking it's picture and the other I noticed a mistake in right after I hid the ends. So, there's no tatting here and it doesn't look like there will be any, any time soon.

I think I'll just go curl up with a good book, it's easier on my hands.