Projects

Still working on this page... Before 2020's crazies we bought a nice house built in 1970. It was generally in good condition, but definitely needed some work. Luckily, my wife and I know how to do a few things.

The Bathroom 🧻

Our master bathroom was never something to write home about. It had this weird, awkward waiting room thing with some horrible wallpaper border (that was applied over an older wallpaper border). The paint was off yellow and sponged on over, you guessed it, wallpaper. We didn't want to repaint over the yellow color, since the wallpaper below it was starting to bubble a bit. So, naturally we decided to just demo the whole thing. Just rip it all out.

Also, the bathroom portion (to the left of the vanity/mirror thing) was very cramped and had some nice 90s glass blocks. There were a lot of bad wall patches in there... The shower was dirty and smelled a little mildewy... definitely not cute. I'd say it was last remodeled about 20 or so years ago. It's time had come.

In a previous life, I was a handy man/contractor guy that remodeled and fixed just about everything. So I was quite excited to take on a project in our own house!

Like any project hungry, new homeowner, my wife and I started knocking out walls and ripping up carpet. We took out the door between the waiting room area and the bathroom and chiselled out the glass blocks from around the shower. It took us about 5 or so nights, but eventually we got everything out.

Oh, and behind that vanity was some pretty sweet, old wallpaper. We're pretty sure it was original to the house, which is always an exciting find. There's something about finding an original feature on an older home that is so thrilling; it's like a small time machine taking us back 50 years - showing us what someone else saw everyday. We peeled off a square of it and saved it - we might frame a small bit of it and hang it back up, but for now it's collecting dust somewhere in our closet 😉

Finally we emptied out the whole bathroom, which at this point resembled more of a closet than a bathroom.

Also, in this picture you can kind of see how our bathroom was laid out. We had a shower on the left, then a sink in the middle, and a toilet next to the window. It was all crammed in a 7 foot by 4 foot room.

Our plan was to expand the shower by just a bit, move the sink to where that vanity with the mirror was, and push the toilet into the room by just a bit. With this layout you would enter the bathroom from our bedroom and immediately see the sink/vanity and then to the left you'd see our shower and the toilet in the corner by the window. It doesn't make for a super glamorous bathroom, but it does create a more efficiant use of the space.

Also around this time my parents came to help us. I took a week off of work and both my parents magically had a week off at that time as well, so they drove 5 hours to our house. We tried to get as much done in that week as possible!

With the room emptied, we could finally see exactly what we were working with. The floor around the shower was rotting and weak so we removed that, and we took out the ceiling to 1) replace it with new drywall since we removed a wall and 2) put in an exhaust fan and reposition the HVAC for the room. This was one of the suckier parts because it was the middle of august and the attic was HOT. Also, we had to bag up and respread all of the blown-in insulation....not fun.

At this point, the bathroom had half a floor and no ceiling. But it didn't last long, we soon had everything patched up.

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