Grout and Wheels. Lots of Wheels.

The upstairs bathroom shower area is now grouted.

Still lots of work to do. My plan for tomorrow is to put sealant on the grout, clean up and re-touch the caulking on the edges, clean the tub, and get the finish plumbing in, thus freeing the shower up for use.

Other things to do include:

- Fix the trim around the base of the cabinet

- Patch a little hole on the ceiling

- Patch plaster on one edge of the tub surround

- Paint.

The painting, of course, should have been done a while ago with only touching-up to do, but that's not how this project worked out. No matter. I'm hoping by the end of the year that this project will be behind me.

That'll open up a few others, including fixing the kitchen ceiling, fixing the kitchen tile, and then getting to work on the basement bathroom.

But toss into that something else: I have to get "my" side of the garage cleaned out so we can park a car there. I don't know how I'm going to do it. I've got three bicycles to stow and nowhere to stow them. I might have to put them in the utility trailer, leastwise until I can get the shed cleaned out. But it's also stuffed with bicycles . . .

We have to get the garage cleaned out because we need to parking space. We now have no fewer than SIX cars soon to be at the Davidson household. Who would have thought that possible? The latest acquisition is for Isaac, a 1998 Ford Escort. Squeezing one more car into the garage will help temporarily, but the cars are piling up like bicycles here. I might have to build a shop(!) in the back yard to store a few more of our treasures, and to get me a workbench area once again. This is the major thing I miss from our house in Sugar City. We didn't have a garage, but the little shop we had in the backyard was perfect for storing bicycles and for doing projects. What we've got here in Ammon is only a pale shadow of what once was.

Yes, certainly First World problems, I know. I'm grateful to God for what we have, even if I don't know where to put it all.

Building a Garage

In the fourteen years we’ve been married, we’ve owned two houses. The first was a little crackerbox on a tiny lot in Rexburg, a block north of the Ricks College stadium, so we got lots of cannon noise when they played football and lots of people parking in front of our driveway as they went to games. The second is the one we have now, in much quieter Sugar City.

Neither one has had a garage.

That is a problem, given we live in an area where it snows five months out of the year. We’d like a garage where we could park the cars, maybe a bicycle or two.

So without moving to a new home that already has a garage, that leaves us building one where we currently are.

That’s another problem.

Sugar City, of course, flooded in 1976. A lot of people, when they rebuilt, bought additional lots next to theirs. Not the intrepid owners of our current home. Instead, they built on a rather narrow lot, not leaving future owners a lot of options, garage-wise. We have two, as I see it, and that means only two options for the driveway, not the garage. The garage itself would have to be in the back yard somewhere, preferably to the south, since the only exit to the front yard is on the north. Our other option is an exit to the alley, but since it’s not plowed during the winter, we’d have to plow it ourselves. Not a fun option.

Then there are the setbacks and the size limitations and the fact that if we build, we’d kinda like a bonus room atop the garage – which presents another difficulty. So I’m doing the homework on sizes and setbacks now, and, this weekend while Michelle is away at Scout training, I’ll go out into the back yard and stake out a few likely options. I have to see how things’ll fit visually – as does Michelle – before I can really envision things. I’m plenty worried we’ll end up with nothing but garage and driveway in the back yard, which is something we’d like to avoid. That is, unless we take the alley exit option. That’s what I’m leaning towards, but Michelle isn’t sold on the concept. So we’ll have to see what I can figure out this weekend.