Oh, wait a minute.. yes, yes it is.
I’m sure all of you reading this blog know what it was like to be without a toilet at some point in your life. I in particular have a few instances I could name, such as when my husband talked me into going rustic camping this past summer, and I had to do my business behind our tent, or like the 2 months it took to renovate our bathroom. I’m not sure which was worse!
A little over two years ago, my husband and I bought our first house. It was built in the 1940’s and needed a lot of upgrades and we decided we would do them ourselves. Let me let you in on a little secret, neither of us have renovated a house before and we were in for some rude awakenings!
October 4th, 2015. (Insert law and order theme music) My wonderful husband left for his yearly golf outing with his best friend, Kevin. Bored and feeling like tackling a big project, I walked into the bathroom and started ripping out our shower doors. These were NOT ordinary shower doors! No sir, they were Russian Roulette shower doors. You see, anytime you would get in the shower could have easily been the last time you got out with all ten toes. At any minute these doors would slip off their track and fall into the tub. Do you know how hard it is to remember that your shower doors are dangerous when you’re trying to sing like Adele in the shower?!
So here I am ripping out these shower doors all by my lonesome. I’m not exactly sure how long these shower doors had been on the shower but what I found underneath was the accumulation of dead skin, some awkward smelling black stuff, and a whole lot of strange gunk (yeah we will call it gunk). You think after all the hours you spend cleaning your bathroom that it’s really clean, and then you take things a part and find stuff like this.. *see picture below.. mm yum!*
After I was able to get both doors off, I built up the courage and text my husband this picture, like “Hey something happened in the bathroom, and I hope you’re golfing well, I love you”. Then thought maybe I should block his number because I didn’t want to see his response, haha!
In all honesty though, this is how all of our projects get started. I rip things a part to get them “started” and that gives him the motivation to finish them. Mainly because he has to, or we would be living with holes in our walls if he didn’t.
Once we were able to get everything out; the shower doors, vanity, medicine cabinet, light fixtures, fan, and the wall paper off the walls ( we rented a steamer from the Home Depot, praise baby jesus this thing was divine! We stripped all the wall paper in 45 minutes!!!) things were running pretty smooth and I thought I saw the light at the end of the tunnel.Then, like always, we changed our minds. At first we were going to keep the white tile floor, clean the grout and call it a day, but things are never that easy. We both decided it needed to go!
So, that’s what happened. We started ripping out the old tile ( mainly because Matt says we’re not paying people to do what we can do. ) Have you ever ripped out tile? No? Oh, its tons of fun! Loud hammering, tiny pieces breaking off, and you never know what you’re going to find under it! And, what’s a little home improvement without BLOOD, sweat, and tears….
Once the tile was finally out, we brought in the professionals. The professionals who told us that our sub-floor had a 1-2″ slant in it. Have I mentioned I love remodeling? It took a lot of self leveling compound, but we were on our way to having some new, pretty, completely level floors!
Okay! The flooring is in, now what?.. The tile on the walls! It was blue. You really can’t tell in the pictures, but it was definitely blue. It had to be, to match that floral wall paper we were rockin’. Instead of ripping it out like Matt wanted to do, I painted it. I used the Rustoleum tub and tile paint kit. At first I was nervous. I’d never used a kit like this before and I didn’t want to mess up half of our bathroom walls.
It took me most of a day and 1 1/2 kits to complete the project ( I put two coats on each wall). The paint went on easy ( I used a tiny roller) and it also had self leveling in it, to make sure the tiles ended up smooth! The only downfall of this product was the odor. Holy Cow…. I recommend making sure every single window in your house is open, with a couple of fans blowing. The smell of this stuff was so strong it somehow seeped into our food. I was literally eating sandwiches that tasted like the smell of this paint for weeks!
Next up! The walls were painted. We used Behr premium paint in Castle Path. It was darker than I expected, but its grown on me now. I think if we didn’t have a window in our bathroom it would have been too dark, so thank goodness we did because I don’t know how good Matt is at cutting holes in walls to add new windows, haha!
My wonderful dad (Bobby) came over to help with the rest. Installing the new toilet, ( Because Matt had to have one, even though our old one worked just fine), putting in the new vanity lights, hanging the mirror, installing the sink, and hanging the new shower rod. All which went extremely smooth, btw. Haha, yeah right! I hope none of you believed that…
Matt cut the holes in the wrong spot under the vanity, the pipes kept leaking terribly, one instance Bobby turned the water on while Matt was trying to plug a hole and water went EVERYWHERE, and to get the vanity light in we had to hammer a hole in the wall all the way to the light switch to run new wiring!
AFTER all that was done though, all it took was a few minor touch ups, some decor and voila! We finally had an updated bathroom and I could shower again after two months! 😉 haha, no no.. we have an extra bathroom in the dark corner of our basement, which oddly enough reminds me of showering in a cave.
Reclaimed Revival 