Before I got started planning out the bathroom closet, Peter had a much less pleasant job to face. While I was at work he created various pastes of bleach that we left sitting on the tiles for long periods of time. Is this the safest thing for you to do? Probably not, but we were desperate and as I mentioned before we didn’t have much money to throw at our bathroom makeover. He managed to gently chip away some of the freestanding grout that was dried to some of the individual tiles. Unfortunately, for fear of chipping the tiles themselves, he did leave some of the more stubborn grout. After just the bleach the bathroom was looking a million times better.
As you can tell from the photo above, the caulk and grout was way too disgusting to leave in tact. Even after bleaching it repeatedly, it still looked like a gross gray color.
Peter went in and removed the strange caulk/grout combination that lined each of the walls and connected the walls to the shower. After vacuuming up the debris, we were ready for a fresh new start.
The best thing about painting is that when you rip off huge sections of paint because you decide you hate taping and think that maybe your tape will stay put through two separate coats of paint, you can always re-paint.
After spending what seemed like hours with some tweezers trying to pull off bits of tape that were left behind, I’m beginning to think that I should become one of those people who has a really steady hand and doesn’t need to tape things off. Thoughts? For those of you who missed it, check out this great post about painting by Making It Lovely.
Happy weekend!
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.)
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.
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?
