Hooray for tape!

I decided I hated the tile I bought, so I went out and found some new ones. They're stripey, and match the walls better, and I hate them slightly less.

Well, I DID hate them slightly less, until I tried to lay them out. I'm having trouble making the layout work with the size of the tile, and I think I am going to need a lot of cuts. There's also way too much mathing involved for me right now, so I'm waiting on some help from my dad. 

 

Since there's not much else I can do in the bathroom until the tiles are figured out, cut, and laid, I found something else to do. This morning, my cat was hell bent on making as much noise as he could to try to wake me up, and in doing that he broke the fancy cardboard penthouse he got for his birthday.

So I taped it back together. At which point I decided I liked it better black anyway, and it got a thorough gothing. Pharaoh approves, and has decided to be batman.

 

 

 

Tiles

The walls are all painted now, and I'm working on a tile layout. Now that I can see the tile up against the color of the walls instead of just a paint chip, I'm not wild about the combination. The tiles wind up being a much warmer colour of grey than the walls, which look like more of a slate blue.

 

I'm not sure if I can get used to the combo, or if I'll need to go on another tile search. 



 

The other vote in favor of returning these tiles in favor of other ones is the layout. I measured incorrectly when I went to get the tiles, and forgot that the bathtub was set back 2 inches from the closet, so I'll either have to cut more tiles, or figure out how to be creative with the smaller mosaic tiles.

 

The paint is looking decidedly nautical with the white and khaki tile in the shower. Maybe I'll hang anchors and stars everywhere.

Paint it whiteish-black

So I started painting the bathroom using the leftover paint I had from my kitchen cabinets. I used the lightest of the two colours I used on the cabinets, which is Behr's Silver Hill. The reason I have an extra gallon of this is that I was suckered in to paying extra for the Paint + Primer version, which still took 3 coats to cover bare wood, and even then was scratching off easily so I called and complained and they bought me more paint. That wasn't extremely helpful, and I wound up sealing the cabinets with a poly just to keep them from being scratched up. They also told me I needed to let it cure for 4 weeks before I could seal it, so it took almost a year to finish my cabinets.

This gallon hasn't proved to be any better in terms of coverage. The first coat came out... super thin. I got it free, but I kinda want my money back. I definitely don't recommend this paint.

 

The second and third coats came out slightly better, now I just have a few touchups and some trim to do tomorrow. It's not as dark as it looks, but its hard to get a good picture of it. The crazy swoopy lightness is thanks to the heat lamp in that area, which is casting neat shadows now. 

The tile is a charcoal grey, so the room will be a lot darker than its previous pinkish incarnation.  My mother, who is a white-walls supremacist, won't like it, but I like it a lot better than I did before. Hopefully it hides kitty litter well.

Vanity



 

Anyone who has ever stayed (or peed) at my house will recognise the downstairs bathroom as the super-butch Hello Kitty room. I don't have any good pictures of it in all of its pink glory, but I think I'm going to go in a different direction this time. Most of my HK paraphernalia is destined to be rehomed shortly.

The decision to change up the design is causing me a bit of delay, which is why I haven't written for the last week or so. The floor has all its screws and is ready to receive tile:

But I haven't found a tile I like. And before I buy a tile, I have to figure out what kind of vanity I'm getting so that I know whether I have to tile underneath it or not. I've looked at more than a thousand vanities and so far only found a handful that I like, most of which are out of my price range. I'm currently trying to figure out other options, but it leaves me with not much progress. In the same boat with tiles, all of the ones in the stores right now are HUUUUUGE (16 x 16 and up) and I think that'll make the bathroom look small. This has taken about eleventy bazillion trips to home despot and lowes to check and recheck tile, and a bunch of smaller local places. I've seen so many vanities that I'm having dreams about them.

Since I can't work on the floor without making some decisions, I decided to start on the walls. The former vanity left big splotches of goo and gross on the walls, so the first order of business is sanding it down and filling holes.

Once that was done, I washed the walls using my grandmother's secret wall-washing formula of vinegar and water. Once that's dry, I'm going to spray it down with antibacterial gunk (again) because when sewage has touched stuff, there's just no such thing as too much antibac. Then comes the spackle, tape, and paint. I haven't fully decided on a color yet (blame the vanity again) but I have a gallon of a grey colour that is left over from my kitchen cabinets that I might use. I'm not wild about using the same colour as I have in the kitchen, but it's practically free.

Comeback

I retired as a professional nail pounder at the height of my career, which was sometime around the age of 8. My mother's family owned a hardware store, and family weekends often meant spending time at the local hardware shows, where I would enter all of the nail pounding competitions. And while I often swept the 8-year old girl bracket, it seemed best to go out on top.

Today I have staged a comeback. My father offered to lend me his air compressor/nail gun, but I find it loud and obnoxious and am pretty sure I would wind up with some sort of stigmata-ish incident. So instead I opted to pound in a million finishing nails by hand.

An hour of angry girl music and some touch up paint later, and the ugly carpet pieces are covered. (Thank you, the Dresden Dolls!)

 

The moulding matches to the grey on the floor, and gives it a nice frame. I'm happy with it, overall. Other than a few finishing touches, the room is mostly done except for the closet, which is waaaay down on my project list now that the bathroom and hallway have to be redone. Pretty sure it'll involve tentacles though. Anyone know how to draw a spider leg? 

Last Year's model

Last year we decided to finally pull up a piece of rotting linoleum that had been here since before we bought the house. When we did our first walkthrough, my dad stabbed it with a knife (presumably to kill it) and so for the last five years it's had a tear that let more water and grossness into the particle board.

Somehow we managed to go from floor to expanding the bathroom a few feet into the hallway, and tearing out a closet. This doubled the size of the bathroom, but the whole project took almost a year to be finished. This is why I'm not entirely looking forward to doing it again so soon.

Here's the before:



The During.. you can see the stud there where the old bathroom ended.

 

And the mostly after. We used a lot of Ikea cabinets and sinks, so that we could try to make the space seem a little bigger, but still have the storage from the closet we tore out. So far, its worked really well, though there are now a truly frightening amount of mirrors in there. Pharaoh also now has his own separate bathroom, and a cat door that goes from the bedroom into it.

 

 

 

Subterranean post-inspection blues

Ok, it's been kinda a busy time lately.

The clownroom remains at 90% completion, it's awating its moldings right now, which are currently drying from their final coat of paint. Hopefully they'll go up later this week. Overall the floor is holding up well, and not as slippery as it was.

The insurance inspector came by for the post-poopstorm inspection, and we found out that water had indeed gotten beneath the vanity. this means the whole floor has to be ripped up in there, as well as in the hallway. The insurance is going to pay to replace all the carpet in the house. I am going to replace most of it with painting. Hooray!

I don't have may good before pictures of the bathroom before we tore out the vanity, but I have a few from before I moved in that show almost nothing.

 Seriously, I can't even figure out why I took these pictures.

So here is the start of the after photos. My dad came in and took out the vanity and the particle board floor, and we cut some under-tile-floor-crap so that I can tile. 

 

 

It needs screws every six inches, so I've been working on that. My cordless drill will put in about 3 before the batteries die, so this is either going to be a long process or I am going to borrow a good, old-fashioned drill with a cord. 

 

 

 

This will be the second bathroom we've redone in this house in the last two years. Hopefully this one will go faster than the last, there's less plumbing/electric/walls to do. I'll post pics of the other one this week while I'm slowly screwing in the floor.