Yellow. How you haunt me from the seat of my toilet.

So, I love yellow. It is my favorite color. Yellow is full of joy. Yellow is soft and kind, strong and full of heat! Yellow is happy. Yellow is the color of the sun, the ruling planet of the fierce and loyal Leo woman (I'm a fierce and loyal Leo - or at least a stubborn one). And yellow looks good on me (of course there is a little bit of vanity thrown in...I mean, I am a Leo. Olive green makes me look sick and atrocious, therefore, olive green is not my favorite).

There are times, however, when a color will haunt me - with its brightness, for example (any neon color), or putridness (like olive green - again, not my favorite - funny, olive green is my husband's favorite color - go crazy with that you marriage counselors) or what a color represents.

This is one of those times.

Yellow has become my enemy because of this:

and this...

Our bathroom.

Go ahead and make icky, pukey faces. I do it every time I walk in there.

Now, I've had a yellow bathroom before. In my single lady days, I lived in an apartment with my best friend and this apartment had a canary yellow bathroom. And I LOVED IT. The color would have been a little much for most people, but that color sang happy songs to me every morning when I took a shower. Almost made up for the fact that the landlady didn't tell us before we moved in that two people had been murdered in our apartment a few years before. Almost.

Anyway, my husband and I bought this house three years ago and my husband remodeled most of it. However, we couldn't afford to remodel the bathrooms. So, both bathrooms look like abandoned subway bathrooms. I think even a homeless person would turn his or her nose up to my bathroom. No thanks, I'll bathe in the sewer system. It looks like it smells better.

This bathroom in particular has been the bane of my life for three years. I dread taking showers because the bathtub is so old and porous that it always looks stained and dirty. There is a window in the shower with a wood sill that is rotting from the moisture. The shower is encased in cheap, yellowed, plastic panels instead of tile. Mold and mildew grow on the caulking at a rapid rate and we can't keep re-caulking it. The flooring is a pattern straight out of the disco in Saturday Night Fever.

I cringe when someone comes over and and asks to use the bathroom because I don't want its appearance to reflect negatively on my family. We really aren't swamp people, but if you judge us by our bathroom, you would think we are filthy pigs. Or that we at least have a drug problem.

Sitting on the toilet is the worst. There is nothing to do on the toilet, besides the obvious. So I sit and stare at the dirty color of the bathroom until my disdain for the cowardly wood paneling becomes so great that I finally pull out my phone and play Bejeweled so I don't have to look at it anymore.

Now, psychologically speaking, this bathroom represents things about me that I don't like and have tried to change over the years...blah blah blah...which is one reason I am so embarrassed and frustrated by it.

In my family, I have been perceived as the unorganized, messy member and I have tried very hard to change that perception of me in recent years (although, since having 2 boys, I've pretty much given up on ever being organized or clean again). Second, my embarrassment of it obviously brings up some self worth issues. And, I don't want the bathroom to ever affect our boys. I want it fixed more than anything before they get old enough to be embarrassed by it, as well. Also, the continued presence of this ugly bathroom has just been a constant reminder to me that we can't afford to fix it. It represents financial strain and failure. And emotional exhaustion.

Now. This is all about to change. Look at it now!








Ta Dah!

Okay, so these pictures are a little anti-climatic. The bathroom actually looks worse, but these pics are signs of progress! And progress is gooooood...

This past weekend, after a few sincere, fed up, and embarrassed tears from me, my husband ripped out the shower paneling, then found that there was moldy sheet rock underneath, so he ripped that out, then found horrendous 1960's aluminum pink tile underneath that, so he ripped most of the tile out. Then, he thought he might as well get rid of the bathtub too, so he grabbed an axe and a sledgehammer and busted out our cast iron tub.

Now, we have no real plans about what is going to happen next. This was kind of an impulse demolition spurred on by emotion and a need for change. My husband loves me and didn't want to see me continue to be upset, so he crushed that ugly bathroom like an ant.

And I have complete faith that this will work out. Don't know how or when, but the progress in itself has given me a great feeling of hope and excitement. I never have to look at that rotting window sill or moldy caulking again. And that makes my smile really, really BIG.