The Marriage Exam

Who knew that a curved strip of wood could wreak so much havoc. Mi Miguel had to go it alone with this chore. I just didn't have it in me to sit for hours on end and try to figure out how to do angle cuts on curvy wood so that it would fit an inside or outside corner. 

If you've ever bought custom cut crown moulding you know that it's expensive and doesn't leave much margin for error if you want to keep your cost down that is.

The math of it all became mind blowing to me. So I sat out while Mi Miguel figured it out and placed it all. I just need to do some touch up paint over the caulked areas. And this little test of our marriage project is over.

With the crown moulding behind us and me feeling even more math illiterate, we've now moved onward with the tiling by invading the dining room. This living room/dining room area is huge. To us it feels like forty acres huge. If there were a master's degree for tiling Mi Miguel and I would've earned an honorary one by now. We could write an entire thesis just on choosing the right tile. 

But while all of this has been quite an education and worthy of a mortar board and diploma, it has mostly been a true test of our marriage. We all need to exercise our faith, our intellect and our bodies. But we don't usually think about exercising our marriage. This is probably why.

Should you ever need to strengthen your marriage just choose any room in your house and then the two of you go tile it. But go into knowing that you have to stay together no matter how much work it is. And just like when we exercise our body, every muscle of our marriage is sore. We feel strengthened and much stronger but very sore. Yeah, that's what we've been through and that's what we look like afterwards. 

This tiling project has definitely been a team effort.  You don't know how much you are needed until you help your man spread thinset and space out ceramic planks. But even I needed a break from it all. So yesterday, I go out for the evening to have some intellectual girl talk with my fellow bookies.

The whole time I'm thinking Mi Miguel probably can't get a thing done without me there. The incredible guilt I felt for leaving him to work alone. All I kept thinking is that he needs me, I'm sure of it. 

After a few hours of fireside bliss girl time, I come home, he has three whole rows of tiling done. He gets more done without me than he does with me. 

Maybe I'm in denial about my mad tiling skills. Maybe I'm not the expert tiler that I think I am. Maybe it's back to class for me.

Hopefully my next post will be the big reveal of our living room and dining room.

I haven't forgotten the big reveal of our first guest bedroom. We've finished it but had to store things in there so we could do the LR/DR. Once the house is finished I plan to do a before and after of each room.

Now to get moving and try to drop five pounds in a week in order to look presentable in this new Christmas get-up I just bought with my early bird shopping coupon. It's okay to say Christmas, right? I get so confused over the holidays. Wait, is it still okay to say holidays?