Remodeling - A Marital Test

If you want to test your marriage tackle a remodeling project. It will stress you and you either learn to work together or you quit.

I'm serious y'all. It has been a test of our ability to work together and to be nice. We are remodeling the bathroom. We did great with the light fixtures. Popeye did the wiring and putting the light fixtures up. I patched the sheetrock.

We did well when we pulled up the carpet and the tile. We worked together, got the old junk out. We patched the holes in the concrete well. He did one part I did another. Things were going great.

Then, we began the flooring. It is a pain in the butt. I had read the instructions and watched the tutorials online. Which made me the "expert." Poor Popeye did not agree with my expertise.

We did not agree on how to do it. We couldn't agree on which direction to lay the vinyl planks. Then we could not agree how long to make the first plank. It was a mess.

We got through the first section okay after a few minor disagreements. We only worked a couple of hours the first night. The second day we worked from 11am until 12:30am with only a few breaks.

We finally found a system that worked for us. After a few mistakes and a few arguments, we realized Popeye should measure and I should do some cuts and check Popeye's cuts before he made them not after. We both made a few mistakes and wasted some flooring.

As it got late Popeye and I started getting irritable and snapping at each other. It had been a long day. We needed a break, but we wanted to keep going. We had been hoping to finish by the end of the day. We did not. We finally realized for the sake of our marriage and our sanity working until 12:30am was too late.

We quit for the night and had a nice rest. We finished the next day. Our floors are laid down and now we tackle the next portion of the task, baseboards, and painting.