Bathroom Makeover: Chapter Two (Shades of Grey)

I will warn you that this may be one of those epic books that has about 700 chapters. Hopefully not. I mentioned yesterday that taking off the door to the linen closet (To be clear, I’m not talking about the actual bathroom door. I’m open to a lot of things but no bathroom door is definitely not one of them!) was a huge turning point for us. It instantly went from a giant unconquerable task to something that we could manage one step at a time. Why did we think it was such a turning point? See for yourselves.

Before:

After:

Doesn’t that feel a million times more open?  Imagine Peter and me sitting on our bed a about midnight on a Friday night. I say, “It’s just so cramped in there. That door gets in the way.” And then Peter exclaiming, “Let’s just rip it off!!” Here’s an action shot just for fun.

Unfortunately, removing the door left us with huge slits and holes in our door frame from where the hinges used to be.

The holes can be easily patched using wood filler. I put some in each hole, making sure to pack it into the small crevices in the back.

After letting the wood filler dry for about 24 hours, I sanded off the excess, and then repeated the process. If I was going to do this over again I would have put an insane amount of wood filler over the hole so that when I sanded it I wouldn’t have to add any extra. The reason being that making wet wood filler attach to dried wood filler is much more difficult than when it is all wet. I ended up battling the bits that were falling right off onto the floor.

When the holes were patched and the door was off for a few days, Peter and I couldn’t bare to look at the awful wall color any longer. For some reason, the linen closet was painted a terrible yellow color. You’d really have to see it to understand just how bad it was. I’ve attached a photo below but it really doesn’t do the color justice. If you want to get an idea imagine urine mixed with whipping cream and then covered it with high glass paint. It was really that bad!

Anyone who knows me well knows that grey is my absolute favorite color. (I remember asking a friend of mine if it was OK to paint my entire house in different shades of grey. The short answer is no but I still believe I could make it work.) After a trip to Home Depot, we brought home a few paint swatches and taped them inside the closet to get a better idea of what the paint would look like.

Wondering what we chose? You’ll have to come back to find out, but since I forgot to take pictures when we first removed the door, the after photo at the top will give you a sneak peak of what’s to come.

What’s going on in your bathrooms? Many of you are probably following Meg’s bathroom reno. Heather wrote in yesterday saying that she has an embarrassing bathroom as well. Does anyone else have anything to share? Or does anyone else just want to help me encourage Heather to post her bathroom photos? (Misery loves company.)

Bathroom Makeover: Chapter One

We’re friends, right? So you’ll completely understand when I say that sometimes something is so bad that you decide you’ll pretend everything is okay and work on something easier instead. Have you ever done this? That is the story of our master bathroom. No one ever sees it and we have 1.5 other bathrooms. So when I moved in I looked at it, got overwhelmed, and decided to focus my efforts on something else. Finally, it was no longer avoidable. To be clear, we have no budget for a full bathroom makeover (goodbye fantasies of a fabulous bathtub), but it was finally so bad that something had to be done. Here is a glimpse of the disaster area that we’re working with. I’m not hiding anything here, so if nothing else, please appreciate my honesty.

You can already see the clutter that is piling up on the counter space, but worse was our linen closet. It seems like every forgotten item was pushed in here.

If you look at the photo above, you’ll see that we have a huge mess of things in here. I kept throwing dry cleaning on the bottom shelf because I didn’t want to leave it on the floor but the dry cleaner that we go to seems to only be open during the hours that I am at work. We have extras of everything as well as beauty products and vitamins that I bought at some period and then disliked or found something better. At the top of the closet was the extra toilet paper and a few clean towels that I would have to jump to reach. It was a mess.

But that’s still not the worst part. I’m pretty embarrassed to show you the state of the shower area.

You can already tell that it’s going to be bad. For some unknown reason, the person who owned the condo before us decided that it was a good idea to put wooden blinds with a metal top in a shower. Why would anyone ever think that was a good idea? The result was rotting blinds with rust mixing into the rest of the ick. Let’s see a close-up of all this.

You may be thinking, “How on Earth could you live  for one moment in a house with such disgusting grout?” Well, instead of cleaning the grout like a normal person might do the previous owner caulked over bits of the grout that looked bad. He got mixtures of caulk and grout on the tiles and everything just looked gross.

Now obviously we didn’t just have issues with caulk and grout. The tiles were stained from hard water and just generally gross. Take special note of the floor of the bathtub. The grip of the floor had actually worn off in places, making it somewhat dangerous to use. Thankfully we have another full bathroom, and aside from the time we had a dinner party and paraded all of our guests up to the bathroom to see what a mess it was–I’d hate for people to ever think that we are without fault–no one ever saw it. Until now. I’m sharing it with you.

Peter and I were debating about what to fix in the condo: the dining area so that everyone would think that we were that much more fabulously put together, or the real issues of the bathroom. While sitting in our bedroom, staring with terror into the bathroom, we decided to take off the door to the linen closet. Immediately we had a bit of hope and we were committed. It is a pain and we’re nowhere near done. This weekend, albeit very productive, left us screaming and cursing at this horrible room. Go ahead, judge us, but stay tuned for the cathartic removal of the blinds, re-caulking, plumbing woes, and lots and lots of bleach.

Replacing a Toilet Arm

This isn’t the most exciting topic that Peter and I have ever talked about, but its good to know. A couple of weeks ago our downstairs toilet was having trouble. We (Peter) opened the top to figure out what was going on and figured out that our hard water had eaten through the arm on the toilet.

(Look at all that dust!)

With a few quick steps we had a brand new working toilet arm. All we did was attach the new chain to the rubber suction like this:

Then bring the new arm through the hole where the flusher goes.

Finally, attach the chain from the rubber suction to the end of the new toilet arm.

There you have it. Make sure that when you attach the chain that it isn’t too tight where the rubber suction never closes or that it isn’t too loose so it doesn’t flush it all.

Have you completed any useful but boring projects lately?

Installing a Dimmer

After reading this post by Sara at Russet Street Reno, Peter and I decided that we were qualified enough to install a dimmer switch on our own. Overall the process was pretty simple, but it did involve a fair amount of muscle and cursing.

We opted to buy the type of dimmer switch that wouldn’t require us to purchase a new wall plate. Ours looked like this:

The first thing that you need to do is turn off the the circuit breaker that corresponds to the room that you will be installing the dimmer in. Then unscrew the wall plate from the wall.

Then unscrew the metal plate that corresponds to the light switch. (Don’t do what I did and get part way through this and realize that you’re removing the switch that actually controls the fan.) I decided to take on this project at night while Peter was cooking dinner.  After only a few minutes of trying to balance the flashlight and unscrew the plates, I knew I was going to need more hands.

Remove the screws that hold the side wires in place. Be sure to remember which wire was on top and which wire was on bottom. This took a lot of muscle and tugging to straighten out the wires enough to pull the metal part out of the wall.

Reattach the wires to the dimmer in the same way that they were attached to the old metal box. For some reason I opted not to take a picture of this. I’m not sure why.

When both wires are attached, tighten the screws so that there is a solid connection between the metal of the box and the metal of the screws.

Screw the new metal box into the wall and wonder why its not exactly parallel with the fan switch. Watch your fiance as he curses at the switch and pulls and pushes on it until he is able to manipulate both switches into the wall plate.

Now admire your work and think about how much your life has improved now that you can read in bed without feeling blinded by the ceiling light! The one thing that I don’t like about the dimmer switch is that now when the light is on there is an almost imperceptible buzzing sounds. Has anyone else noticed this?

For better photos visit Russet Street Reno. Sara managed to do this project during the day, so her photos are infinitely better than ours.

*Note: Peter and I are not qualified electricians. We’re just too crazy kids who got tired of a really bright light.*

Staining is Hard.

This weekend I flew to Lubbock, TX to visit Clay. Clay has owned the same dresser–a hand me down from his older brother–since before I met him five year ago. I never knew the dresser to be without dents or scratches or even to posses all six of its handles.

So Friday I turned to Clay and said, “You know we could replace the hardware on your dresser this weekend.”

He shrugged, “We could…”

I started getting excited, “We could also paint it!”

More shrugging followed by, “We could–or we could stain it.”

Neither of us had ever stained anything before but we were confident in our ability to figure it out. We called around for advice, bought the necessary supplies, and got to work.

Everyone that we talked to seemed to disagree on how much you should sand a piece of furniture before staining it. Feeling lazy, Clay and I opted to go with the school of thought that preached lightly sanding rather than completely sanding down to the bare wood.

Unfortunately, for our project, I think we chose wrong.  The thing to remember about staining is that any imperfections that result in areas with more exposed wood will absorb the stain at a different rate that the rest of the surface area.

If we had spent the time sanding the wood to a more uniform state, then the stain would not have highlighted the imperfections in the way that this attempt did. In the end we opted to paint over our mistakes. Comeback tomorrow to see how it all turned out. Have you ever stained anything before? Tell me it turned out better than this!

Special thanks to Clay for understanding my weird definition of a vacation.