A Completed Project

Here is the big reveal. Our bathroom project is (nearly) finished! Okay, so we still didn't get a towel rod. But a towel rod is boring blogging. What I am going to share with you has actually been finished for about a week and a half now, but I suppose I figured the towel bar would have been installed by now. But to install one, you have to buy one. And I just haven't done that yet.

So, here they are: our beautiful bathroom cabinet and lights! (And a monkey shower curtain-only slightly less new.) A bathroom is the Worst place to take pictures, the room just doesn't allow you the appropriate space to get the shot. But here they are. And they didn't get there as easily as one might expect.

Remember the old light/cabinet? Right. The one with the lights IN the cabinet, making a quick change-out impossible? That's right. So, I enlisted (thank you!!) the help of my Dad, the expert on EVERYTHING. He came and removed the old cabinet and light fixture. Guess what he found under them? An electrician's WORST NIGHTMARE. The wires were spliced and bare and scary and I don't even know what else. Plus, behind the cabinet was a gigantic hole where an old medicine cabinet had been recessed in the wall. AND the wires were not even in a ready box. The original ready box was about 6 inches or more above the spot where the wires were.

So, after two evenings of amazing electrical work, (my Dad even put in a new electrical outlet. The old one was connected to the light fixture. Weird?) plus some drywall patching and spackling, I painted the repaired wall, and my Dad came back on Saturday to hang everything. And I could not be happier. It makes my bathroom new and nice and feel bigger (a mirror will do that) and awesome. My boys said it looked like a hotel bathroom. I suppose that's a compliment. Now, to find a towel bar....

Phase 3 of the Bathroom

Phase 1 was the removal of the paint. Check.

Phase 2 was putting Spackle in all the holes and getting the walls sanded and washed. Check.
I've learned that I like to Spackle! But that makes for boring pictures. I used the pink kind that turns white when it's ready for sanding or refilling. Makes it easy for a novice like me!

Phase 3 then, was painting! CHECK! I spent yesterday morning/afternoon painting the bathroom. I really like the job. My oldest boy was not in school for the end of the quarter, while my youngest was at preschool. So my oldest sat in the doorway and hallway with paper and pen and we chatted while I taped and painted and he drew. I painted the ceiling, around the toilet and the sink/cabinet, and then a second coat on the ceiling before lunch. After lunch we picked up the preschooler and came back ready to paint some more. I taped around the ceiling, shower and doorway, and painted, painted, painted! I was finished (with 2 coats!) by 4:00. A fantastic job, if I do say so myself. I left part of the wall where the light fixture and new medicine cabinet will be unpainted. My dad is coming over next week to help with the removal of the old and the wiring and installation of the new. (Thanks, Dad!)


Such satisfaction comes from hard and careful work. I walk in there and it just feels nice. I can't wait to get a new towel bar and have the new cabinet and lights put in. Phase 4 will be the new fixtures and final paint touch-ups. Can't wait. This is so exciting! And for those interested, the ceiling color is called Crepe and the wall color is called Tea Time. It's quite the change. And at first look, I was thinking "It's SO brown!" But the more I look at it, the more I really like it.

The One Where Life Got in the Way

So, I've  been a bit distracted for the past week. I set up my blog with some scheduled posts, but haven't had a chance to sit down and read comments. And the weird thing is, the comments don't show up in my e-mail until AFTER I post them. Strange. SO, sorry if you have tried to comment and it didn't appear in a timely manner. All comments have been now read and taken care of. Thank you for your interest!

Why am I so busy? Story time.
Once upon a time, 3 years ago, my family purchased a home. In the bathroom, there was a tiny little spot above the light switch, perhaps an inch in size where the paint had been peeled off the wall. Just this little hole. I picked at it a little, making the spot about 4 inches across, in a sort of circle. I like to pick at things, and the paint came off fairly easily. My husband said, "Don't do that." So I stopped.

Fast forward to now. I went in the bathroom about 2 or 3 weeks ago, and turning on the light, I noticed that the circle of missing paint was no longer a circle. It had branched out into a weird shape. It was definitly bigger, to be sure. Now, I was curious, because I had restrained myself, and hadn't touched it in all this time. I asked my two boys if they had picked at it. Telling me it wasn't them, and believing them (lying isn't currently a problem in our home), my mind turned to the only other option, however unlikely it may be. So I asked my husband, "Did you pick at the paint in the bathroom?" To which he replied, "I'm thinking it might be time to paint."

 --A little back story. When we moved in, the upstairs bathroom did not have a shower. It had only the bathtub. Our basement bathroom does have a shower, but it's a metal, military-style shower (super small) that has been painted (that's right PAINTED--on the INSIDE!) several times. This made showering tricky, as the paint in the shower began to remove itself when water was applied to the surface. Pretty hard to avoid, when showering.
SO, father-in-law offered to tile and plumb a shower for us in the bathtub upstairs. In the process, a bit of paint around the edges of where the tile was put in was chipped off. When my father-in-law first noticed this, he asked, "Are you going to paint when this is done?" "Of course," we replied. He was relieved because that made his job a bit easier (not having to worry about the paint). And, he did a fantastic job. So, shortly after moving in our lovely new home, we now have a working shower/tub upstairs and a paint-peeling shower, that we have chose to ignore for the time being, downstairs.
But the upstairs bathroom has never been painted. Time, means, desire, all these have delayed the lovely project, and what's a bad paint job, when the shower works, right?

So, back to my original story. So, here I have found that my husband had started peeling away at this little hole. So then I picked at it a bit. Each time either of us went in there, the wall looked a bit different. One day, after a shower, I returned to the bathroom to dry my hair. The bathroom was still a little steamy, and I just grabbed a little piece of paint and was surprised to find that the humidity in the room made the paint come off in considerably larger pieces! Suddenly, it's a competition to see who can get the most paint off. By the end of the week, we had pulled off paint from the doorway to the edge of the shower.

In these pictures, we have taken down the towel rod and the mirror that was hanging on this wall. Because, now, it's time to get rid of the rest of the paint. It's not like we can just sand the edges and call it good. But the paint pulled off so easily by hand, I figured a few paint scraping tools would speed up the process and clear the wall in no time. Very funny. Turns out, the paint scraper (like a flat, metal spatula, sort of) mostly just chipped away the paint, rather than getting under it and loosening huge chunks like I imagined. The other scraper I bought has a sharp blade that scrapes the paint, but it needs just the right amount of pressure to get it right, and sometimes it scraped too deep. 

Finished Wall!

Saturday the 18th, I spent about 2 hours, with very little progress. So I put away my tools and made dinner instead. Not yet feeling discouraged (after all, this had to come down somehow) Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were spent clearing the bulk of the wall. In fact on Tuesday, I went from the bottom of the 'hole' to the floor, and Wednesday I did from the top to the ceiling. The thing that made those go much quicker (but still taking several hours each day) was that I remembered on Monday night that (duh!) it peels better after a shower! So, each day, I delayed my shower until after I took my son to school and then(keeping the bathroom door closed while I hurried to put on my working clothes) started right in while the bathroom was still moist. It came off SO much easier.

Thursday I spent the morning clearing the rest of the spaces that I didn't finish on Wednesday, and then started to pull down the wallpaper border that had been painted over. Last Friday, I finished off the wall paper border. Now we are ready for the next step. (Sanding, filling holes, removing cabinets) Hurray! We are only clearing one wall, because the paint around the cabinets on the other wall isn't as urgent to remove. In other words, we didn't pick at it over there.

We are also going to get rid of both wall cabinets. I am opting for a wider medicine cabinet with 3 mirrored doors instead of keeping the two existing cabinets. That way, I don't have to rehang the mirror that used to reside on the big wall that I cleared. (I can see the back of my hair with the side mirrors on the new cabinet!) We are also getting a new light fixture because the current one is attached to the medicine cabinet. And the wall space over the sink and toilet will feel a little cleaner. I don't know what color we are painting yet. I'm going to pick up some paint samples this week. And we still have to deal with the electrical.

But I'm really excited about all this. And now you know why there was no Bradbury Friday last week (sorry!) and a lateness in the comments. In addition to the bathroom, I also had PTA stuff and 2 Young Women activities to supervise. All in a week. Fun stuff!

PS, the Book Club has a bit more time to finish the Scarlet Pimpernel. I have been delayed in my reading time. I may have to re-learn how to read.