Average Jane Starts Another Home Improvement Project

I know I said I was finished with spending money on remodeling projects for this year. We got our lovely TV room. I finally painted the half-bath adjoining that room just this Monday night. That should be enough, right? However, this one is different.

Thanks to current economic conditions, my husband's recording studio business has been sloowww this year. He had a great idea for a demo package he can offer bands that will allow them to record live for an hour – as many songs as they can fit in – and then he'll mix for the next hour and send them home with a demo CD for $100.

The problem with this idea is that it would mean moving away from the word-of-mouth marketing model which brought vouched-for friends of friends into the studio (and thus, our house), to marketing via advertising. That would be all well and good except that the studio does not have its own bathroom, which means that strangers would be trooping through our living area to use one of ours.

Now I (mostly) don't mind his friend-clients coming downstairs to use the facilities, even though they almost always catch me vegging in front of the TV or doing housework dressed like a rag-picker. However, I can definitely understand his security concerns with having random musicians off the street casting their gaze over our limited store of valuables.

This leads to our latest home project: building a half-bath in our basement.

The way our house is set up, there's a stairway that leads down from the studio, past the garage, and around to an outside entrance to our basement. It's not completely protected from the elements, but it's close enough.

So, we have guys building us a bathroom this week. They've already jack-hammered the concrete floor, installed the below-ground plumbing, and framed out the bathroom and foyer. By the time I get home tonight, I imagine it'll be sheetrocked.

Because we're the type of people who will tell a contractor, "Here's what we want, this is what we want to spend, and we don't care about the particulars," the wall that separates the bathroom area from the rest of the basement is not quite where we'd envisioned it, but I'm just going to plan to shuffle stored items around to different shelves until the stuff we use more frequently is accessible again.

No matter what, the end result will be very handy for the studio and for when we have parties out on our deck.

This is the last project this year, though. I swear it!