Do I see a bathroom in the near future?

My husband (then boyfriend) bought this house in September 2005. It isn't your typical house. It is (was) a church in its former life. Our dear friends lived in it as their first home for about 9 years. Then they sold it to Matt.

Matt lived in the house for a few months before he asked me to marry him in December. I requested two things before our wedding: a redone bathroom and laundry facilities (he had none at the time). I actually had a washer and dryer, but he needed to re-work some stuff in order to hook them up.

So he began working on the bathroom. Ok...not right then. I think he actually began about 6 weeks before the wedding. Ambitious, right? Or procrastinatious. (That's my made up word in honor of you, Nate.) Here's a picture of the demo night:

The bathroom proved to be more daunting than he expected. He had moved back into his parent's house since his shower was now gone, and he and his dad spent as much time as they could working on the remodel. We picked out a lot of things together: the vanity, sinktop, lights, shower, floor tiles, and more. It was fun. Matt had a great floor plan that didn't pan out, so he re-designed it a number of times before coming up with the final version.

At any rate, I began to realize that this wasn't going to happen before the wedding (April 1). So I gave him a pass a couple weeks before the wedding. I didn't want the last few days before the wedding to be so stressful for him, and I knew it wouldn't happen no matter how hard they worked. So when we returned from the honeymoon...it was time to get moving on the bathroom! It ended up taking until mid-July to get the shower in working order. If you're calculating, that's 3 months without a shower. THREE MONTHS. Now it's hard to remember it, but we trucked to his parents' EVERY morning to shower and get ready. I do not miss those days.

So the shower was finished in July. Of 2006. Why am I writing about this in 2009? Because progress basically stopped at that point and has trickled since then. We had some other things going on in our life and marriage, and I chose not to make the bathroom my battle for a while. A long while it seemed. But a few weeks ago Matt and his dad started working on it again. This is a picture from about two weeks ago:

I thought I had a picture with the drywall, but now I find that I don't. However, this is all covered in drywall and, as of last night, they framed out the soffit to hide the pipe that runs along the ceiling in the left side of the picture. The next step is drywalling the soffit and the large beam in the middle/right part of the ceiling. (It doesn't look so large in this picture, but it is really big.) There is some more drywalling on the wall that is opposite the one you see here. But it's starting to look more finished and...gasp...the progress has given me hope that I may yet have a full bath in my own home!

Now, as I sit at my in-law's house working on 3 weeks' worth of laundry, if I could only get some progress on the laundry front.

A girl can dream, can't she?