Around My House – Guest Bath Redo Over Again

Five years ago, we added a bathroom in our basement.

The vision was to have a guest suite where our company can comfortably (but not too comfortably) stay for the duration of their stay. It also would give them (and us) some privacy.

Only half of our basement is “finished” and unfortunately after we remodeled our kitchen, we ran out of money so we couldn’t build a guest room to go with the guest bath.

The guest bathroom though still is one of the nicest and cleanest places in the house and the reason is simple. No one really goes down there.

I put some of our most prized antiques in the room. Our antique Chinese chair and our old Japanese kotatsu that I turned on the side for a side table.

I hung our favorite prints from the art gallery in town where we lived in Japan. I loved that place and have several pieces from their collection.

The bathroom is wonderful but the rest of the basement really needs a lot of work. Anyone want anything from my basement? It’s full of finds from flea markets long past. Some of it is cool too.

But this post is not really about our guest bath.

It’s about this…

Our guest bath is really illegal. Illegal in the sense that with all of the permits we obtained and passed, there was one that we missed. Two weeks ago, the county contacted us and said they needed to come back and inspect the work.

We said, “Really? It’s been five years.” I guess it doesn’t matter.

So the inspector came and inspected – and we failed the inspection.

The short story is this, there have been contractors, workers and inspectors in and out of our home for the past two weeks. There were holes cut and dry wall taken down. There was insulation pumped into the walls and there was insulation that burst out of those same walls.

I actually ran over one of the contractor trucks with my van.

Once the work was done, the inspector came back but didn’t sign us off.

I don’t know what else it will take. But I do know that the contractors we initially used have been dolls. Absolute dolls.

I haven’t seen Bill or Jimmy in so long. They put in my kitchen after they put in the guest bathroom. Then they put in the upstairs powder room. They were like part of the family. I missed them, but I didn’t want to see them again like this. I was hoping the next time I saw them was to put in a new deck (sorry honey.)

The inspector on the other hand is a real…bureaucrat.