August 30th, 2021

I can hear you thinking. I can.  It's something along the lines of, "Sam, why on earth is there a sailboat in your shower?"  Excellent Question.  Easy answer.  We couldn't find another place that it would fit.   That's the guest room shower by the way. It's not currently in use by any guest so the space was available.    See, simple solution.

The word solution suggests that there was a problem.  And of course yes there is.   The problem is that the ceiling in the family room leaks.  Oh, you don't see the connection between a sailboat in the guest room shower and a leaky ceiling in the family room?   Allow me to explain.

We are about to embark on our next  house project and it's a biggie.    The layout of our house is a derivation of a very common Florida house plan.  The center of the house from front to back is the common room. That means kitchen, dining, living are one big area.  In today's designer parlance it is called an "open plan" and it is the latest/greatest most popular thing.  Which makes me giggle a little bit because our house was built in 1964. So I guess it was ahead of it's time.  Then too, it's also referred to as a "split plan" because there is a bedroom/bathroom on one side of the house and the other bedrooms/bathrooms on the other side of the house.  LOTS and LOTS of Florida houses are made this way.  

The difference between our house and some other houses is that our house also has a big room that runs across most of the back of the house. A bonus room I suppose.  We call it the family room. That's where the TV and the comfy sectional sofa are.  The big round table for meals, or puzzles or games or writing letters or wrapping presents  is also out there.   It's a spacious wonderful roomy place with windows on three sides.  We love that room and use it every single day.  It  also developed a leak in the ceiling. Dang.  And then a second leak.  And then a third.  Double Dang.

So Tim took a bit of the ceiling down to look up inside to see if it was a problem he could quickly and easily resolve and that's when we learned that part of what is now our family room, was, at one time, a porch. In fact it was a porch with a metal awning over it.  And the reason that we know there was an awning was that it was still there.  In the ceiling.  What on earth?

Our guess is that at some point the owners gathered a bunch of friends or their kids friends and had a pizza and beer party while they closed in the porch to make it part of the family room.  Awesome.  (insert much sarcasm here). The job was not well done. So rather than compound the problem with a quickie solution, we decided that we would call in the experts and have it done correctly.   Ultimately the decision came down to it being smarter and actually easier to just tear down the entire room and rebuild it, rather than patch and bandaid and bubble gum it together.  So like I said, a big job.

So Tim reached out to a bunch of builders, we got quotes, we asked questions, they made suggestions and ultimately we made our choice.  We were ready to get the whole process started and then.........lockdown.  Dang.  The entire project got postponed for a year.  But now, finally, we are ready to go!  Which meant clearing out that room, completely!  And we did that this weekend.

This involved moving the contents of the living room into the guest room and then the contents of the family room into the living room.  So, for example, our pretty display cabinet which normally looks like this:

Instead, now looks like this:

The family room used to look like this:

And currently looks like this:

Nothing is where it normally would be.  I hope nobody needs a coaster because they are in a side table drawer which is somewhere in the guest room

The house feels so much smaller now. I suppose because in the short term, it is! But it's manageable for now.   It's a little strange but it's okay because in the end we will have a much better looking, more functional, more energy efficient, family room that does not leak and has no awning in the ceiling.

​So there. Now do you understand why there is a sailboat in the shower?