Bathroom Facelift

When my grandma told me that she still checks our blog, even though we have obviously slacked for a long time, I felt pretty bad.  With work being so busy and stressful on top of house projects that take way too long, blogging has completely slipped past me.  I’m not sure how many other people will look at our blog, but I’ll try to keep at least grandma updated and hope that some others can enjoy as well.  I’m not make any promises though, I tend to lose steam pretty quickly!

I figured I would post our bathroom progress.  It all started with a bath fan.  I’ve been complaining ever since we bought the house that there was no exhaust fan in our only full bathroom.  Every few weeks, mold would start growing and I would curse the whole time I’d be cleaning it.  To make matters worse, the tub area was enclosed by a soffit (I’m not sure if that’s the proper term, but there was ~2 feet of wall from the ceiling that ran along the front edge of the shower).  This created 4 perfect corners for the mold to call home.

Now, installing a bath fan should not be hard, so why did it take us so long?  We have a flat roof and the “access” in the attic is probably less than a foot.  There is no way anyone is crawling up there, not even Jimmy or Kylie.  This means that we had to bust the ceiling open to install the fan and repatch it.  Since we don’t have much experience in doing that my dad said that he would help us.  After awhile, we realized that he is way too busy to help with something that is probably something he considers to be an easy job.  That’s when Mark got tired of listening to me and decided to do it himself with the help of Jim.  On March 27th (yes, 3 months ago), Mark and Jim started busting up the ceiling and tore down the soffit thingy.  That weekend we had a bath fan installed.

Over the next few weeks, Mark worked on patching up the ceiling.  Drywall compound is not fun to work with and seems to take forever.  While he was at it, we had a lot of other imperfection in the old plaster walls, so he touched some of that up too.  The dust in this house over the past 3 months has been unbelievable.  There is still a lot of cleaning that needs to be done to recover!

I actually lied before.  It all started with a toilet.  The old toilet was stained from years and years of well water.  If you know me at all, I will scrub and scrub until I get something clean.  This wasn’t happening for the toiler.  It started to have some water spraying issues so it was the perfect time for me to insist on a new toilet.  As soon as the beautiful, new toilet was installed, it got us both motivated to keep going on the upgrades.

The second thing on my mind was the paint.  The bathroom was flamingo pink.  I’m not sure why they even make that paint color.  I wanted a nice, relaxing pale blue.  Well, with new paint and nice clean toilet, we decided that the old vanity was going to be an eyesore.  Mark and I are very bad at making decisions, so it took us longer than normal to pick out a new vanity.  We ended up going with a tall one (which makes Mark happy) that was special ordered.  Then came the sink.  That should have been an easy decision, but no, we made it complicated.  We can only squeeze a 31″ vanity into the bathroom, so we finally went with a plain white top with a smaller than normal bowl to give us more counter space.  Of course that had to be custom ordered as well.  We could have went cheaper, but it’s the main bathroom and we wanted to be happy with our upgrades.  We also got a new medicine cabinet while we were at it to gain some more mirror space.

The only other intention we had was to rip up the old flooring and lay down some new stuff.  We didn’t splurge for tile or something really nice since the floor is uneven and we were weren’t anticipating everything else we were doing to the room.  It still looks nice and fresh!  Then I started looking at the cast iron tub, which is a tan color and old.  Resurfacing that sucker would have cost a lot of money and work.  All of the kits are for white tubs, the tan would need special ordered.  I decided just to scrub the hell out of it.  It came pretty clean, but the bottom surface no longer has a gloss to it.  We will live.  The surround had to go though.  It was supposed to be a cream color, but it looked light green compared to the tub.  That was also an unexpected upgrade, but I’m glad we did it.

The rest of the struggle has been the little stuff.  Tub caulking is a total pain and I am awful at paining trim that already has layers of paint on it.  We replaced the moulding and caulking that is the only thing left to do, besides heavy duty cleaning!

Ok, here’s the fun part… pictures.  It doesn't look like much, but we did a ton of work.  Also, this is why I don’t blog, I write way too much!