Remodel.

When Rob and I were house searching back in the fall, we saw a lot of houses that would need a lot of work just to get the house to a "liveable" state. When we walked through the house we're now living in, the first thing we realized was that any work that we did to it would simply be to update it and make it our own - it was completely move-in-ready, save a few leaky faucets - but really, who doesn't have those?

We've done quite a bit of updating since we moved in - removing paneling and nasty wallpaper from the kitchen, new trim in the living room/dining room/hallway, new paint, etc. - and now we're ready to move on to another project: the bathroom. Right now the bathroom is painted a gray color (well, except for the pink section behind the toilet because the last person who painted didn't feel like moving the toilet to paint...), has some lovely gray laminate on the floor and is adorned with a variety of mismatched cabinets including an old school medicine cabinet and a falling apart light fixture.

The picture doesn't look too bad, but believe me, it looks different in person. Take a look.

So, starting this weekend the updates begin! I must say, I'm fairly proud of our low budget project so far. We're using some leftover paint from another project, I found a mirror on Craigslist and I'm going to refinish the frame, we found a great light fixture at Home Depot on sale for under $30 and we have a project in the works that involves 3 vases we found for $0.99 at a Salvation Army Thrift Store!

After the improvements are made, I'll post some more pictures. I'm excited to see if it will all come together like the picture I have in my mind right now. I'm certainly hoping that it does!

As strange as it might seem, a lot of times when I think about the bathroom and the shower, I always bounce back to a class I took at Kuyper College. And no, it didn't involve anything about bathrooms or showers. It was a class lecture about baptism. At one point during his lecture, our professor suggested that every morning when we wake up, we ought to exclaim: "Thank God I'm baptized!" He then went on to suggest that when we got in the shower in the morning or after mowing the lawn or a major workout - we ought to be reminded of the same thing: our baptism in Christ. When he first said this, I wasn't sure why he was making the connection between my taking a shower and my baptism into God's family.

I think the Heidelberg Catechism, Lord's Day 26, Question & Answer 69 explains the connection best.

Lord's Day 26
Baptism

Q & A 69

Q. How does baptism remind you and assure you
   that Christ's one sacrifice on the cross is for you personally?
A. In this way:
   Christ instituted this outward washing
   and with it gave the promise that,
      as surely as water washes away the dirt from the body, so certainly his blood and his Spirit wash away my soul's impurity, in other words, all my sins.

(Acts 2:38; Matthew 3:11; Romans 6:3-10; 1 Peter 3:21)     http://www.crcna.org/

As surely as my morning shower washes away the dirt from my body, so certainly does Christ's blood wash away all my sins. Just like the dirt and sweat and grime flows down the drain, never to be seen again, so certainly does Jesus Christ remove my sins as far as the east is from the west.

So tomorrow morning, instead of spending my time in the shower dreading the fact that I'll have to blow dry and straighten my hair when I get out, I think I'm going to spend my time thinking: "Thank you, Jesus, for washing away my souls impurities (and I have a lot of them) just like this water is washing my body clean."

Our bathroom might be getting a remodel, but more than that I'm eternally thankful for the way the forgiveness and grace of Christ allows us to be remodeled to be more like Him every day.