Every black cloud has a silver lining.

We've been in our home for 22 years. We bought it 6 months before we married and couldn't afford to do much renovations because, well, we could barely afford the mortgage payment.

Over the years we've worked on the outside and the inside, but we've never renovated the bathroom (except new paint, paper and we've replaced the mirror and the light fixtures over the sink--well, I guess we kind of did some renovations in the bathroom--lol) and though we did update the kitchen with new wallpaper, wainscoting and floor, we never updated the cabinets, but we did paint them.

Well, yesterday we discovered a teeny, tiny leak in the bathroom that has turned into a homeowner's nightmare. Our tub is an antique claw foot, it's beautiful. It turns out our beautiful antique tub has been leaking and leaking probably for years.

I discovered water on my kitchen counter where there shouldn't have been any. I look up and see a drip coming out of a cabinet I never use (it's the corner cabinet I use for storage of things I only use occasionally). Opening the cabinet I see everything in it is full of water and the top of the cabinet is sagging into the cabinet itself. On top of the cabinet I've got a huge silk ivy plant, it's so big you can't see through it to the ceiling and it drapes down the front and sides of the cabinet. It looks beautiful, but it hid a big problem. I pull down the ivy and part of the ceiling came with it (I guess if I cleaned up there more often, maybe I would have seen it sooner).

Well, to cut an already long story short, I now have a 3 foot hole on my stairs, where my BIL cut through to get at the back of the tub (my BIL is a plumber, every family should have one-lol) and two 8 inch holes in my kitchen, one on the ceiling and one on the wall, it's actually one big 16 inch hole, but there's molding that kind of seperates them (the molding there isn't actually attached to anything). All the plumbing around the tub itself has rotted, the drain, the overflow and the faucets all need replacing.

The good news--we're going to renovate the bathroom this weekend. Nothing can be done to actually save the tub's hardware, but we'll be puting in new hardware, flooring and a new sink (yeah!! they wont be able to manuever the tub without taking out the old sink, which I've hated for 22 years). After repairing the hole in the wall on the stairs and repairing the ceiling and wall in the kitchen, I'm getting new kitchen cabinets (can you see me doing a happy dance??)

So, every black cloud really does have a silver lining.