Lowes – Penny Zeller

It was a scary decision made by the man of the house…

No, it wasn’t a decision to parachute from a plane or bungee jump from a bridge into the Snake River Canyon. It wasn’t the decision to sail the Atlantic Ocean in a canoe or board the space shuttle for a trip to Saturn. No, it was a much scarier decision – the decision to remodel our upstairs bathroom.

My innocent-seeming husband, Lon had a secret identity as an extreme bathroom makeover artist. He hid this identity well, so how could we have known?

“We would never have guessed. He seemed so…so normal,” said a neighbor who chose to remain anonymous.

Picture 028 (3) — Innocent-seeming Lon had a secret identity

The weekend started out peaceful and calm. A nice breakfast and a relaxing day could have been in order, but that wasn’t the case. When I saw Lon heading up the stairs with enough tools to make the tool department at Lowes appear lacking in comparison, I knew that our bathroom would NEVER be the same.

So perhaps I should back up a bit and start at the beginning. Lon decided that we needed a new bathroom faucet. He could barely fit his hands under our current faucet and he mentioned that the current one seemed so “blah.” So, off to the store we went and found a beautiful brushed nickel faucet. Thus began Lon’s obsession with brushed nickel.

Picture 500329 (2) — The innocent-looking faucet that started it all...

That evening, Lon announced he had to run up to the hardware store to buy something to fix our upstairs toilet. Inside I panicked. After all, I don’t do well without indoor plumbing.

He returned a short time later with a brown bag and unknown contents within it. “I have to fix the toilet,” was all he said as he hastily retreated into our upstairs bathroom and shut and locked the door, leaving me to fear the worst…that our toilet was leaking everywhere.

Moments later, Lon emerged with a grin on his face. He beckoned me to come see the “fixed” toilet. With a wave of his hand, he showed me the latest brushed nickel addition to our bathroom.

Keep in mind while gazing at the picture above that this bathroom is a small one. The special super-sucker toilet is standard size, but even so, the over-sized toilet flusher took up a large portion of the tank.

During a moment of weakness the prior week, Lon mentioned that he’d never liked the bright colors I’d chosen for our bathroom years ago. Now I admit, I like bright colors, so at first I couldn’t understand his concern. But as he began to detail the prospect of remodeling our upstairs bathroom, I began to become more open-minded. After all, I could adjust from bright colors to modern browns and creams.

Sadly, the paint we first chose for our extreme bathroom makeover was the wrong color. No, not a soft chocolate brown as we had hoped, but more of an avocado poop brown. We only noticed this after I had painted the entire cabinet. Off to the store we went to for different paint. We then began the process of repainting the entire bathroom in cream-colored earth tones for the walls and accented by a true chocolate brown…