This isn’t my tackle — my husband and oldest and youngest sons have done all the work. I’ve just been a consultant and encourager. 🙂

We’ve been needing to redo our shower for a long time. The tiles kept coming a little loose, though my husband had reapplied grout several times, and water had gotten behind the tiles enough to warp the shower walls. This close-up shows it a little bit.

I really don’t like tile anyway. We constantly have to battle mildew in this bathroom, and it tended to settle in the grout easily. Plus I didn’t like the color of the tile here. We wouldn’t have redone it just for those reasons, but I was glad to have the opportunity to change it.

So here’s the “before” picture:

Removing the old tiles:

I didn’t take a picture of the most disheartening part. After getting the tile off, Jim saw the sheetrock behind it was water-damaged and needing to be removed, but he was expecting that. But the insulation behind that was wet and a couple of joists were rotted. It looked really awful at that point. Thankfully Jim know how to take care of those things. This is the end of Day 1:

This was the debris taken from the bathroom: old tile, wet insulation, etc. They took all of this to the dump.

The next day they began putting the shower surround in.

This is the end of stage 1, the shower ready to use:

I like it!!

As you can tell, the wall above it isn’t finished. The shower surround is shorter and not as deep as the tiled shower was. We talked about trying to patch up the wallpaper but decided to remove it instead. That room gets so humid, even with a fan, and some corners and seams were peeling anyway. That’s what the boys are working on this week while Jim is at work.

I need to go look at paint colors and maybe a border or stencil this week. We’re hoping to have it all done before out of town company comes a week from today. 🙂

This is in the category of “You don’t get everything you want while renovating” — unless you have a lot of time and money — or the Extreme Makeover: Home Improvement people are doing your renovations.

We had wanted to replace the old faucet. It was still functional, but it was chipped and pockmarked. But when Jim took it off and took it to Home Depot to compare, there were no other faucets with the configuration in the back that was the same. Jim felt he didn’t know enough about plumbing to cut and redo the piping, and to call a plumber in would have added a lot more cost and time. He had already taken off a couple of days to work on this, so he’d lose that window of time if we had to bring a plumber in, and we had to get the faucet figured out before we could do anything else. So we decided to keep this one. He filled in the holes and tried to paint the chipped panel with chrome paint, but he said it looked worse, so he took it off. He was able to take the knob apart and clean it thoroughly — some mildew had gotten in where it couldn’t be reached — so it looks much better now. We might get a little soap dish to cover up the chipped part, even though we don’t really use that shelf for soap.

We were without use of the shower for two days. The first day, the boys just went without, Jim washed his hair in the kitchen sink, and I washed my hair there, too, and had a little “sponge bath” in the bathroom. The next day was Sunday, and of course, we were wanting to shower before going to church. Jim had “points” for a certain hotel (kind of like frequent flyer miles, accumulated during business trips), so we rented a room for the night, and Jim and I took showers then. The boys went swimming in the hotel pool for a bit. Jim and I like our own bed, so we came home to sleep, but let the boys have the adventure of staying in the hotel overnight. They had showers the next morning and we joined them for the hotel breakfast, so it was a nice little treat. I was so glad for a real shower after just one day of missing one. I remembered one of our missionary friends to a primitive jungle area talking about the only place for bathing being the river, and, since the people were so curious about everything they did, they came out to the river with them (along with watching them eat and almost every other aspect of their lives). So they kept their clothes on and soaped up underneath. 🙂 I’m sure after a while they probably rigged up something, and the people got more used to them and didn’t watch every move. But remembering that did make me appreciate how easily we can get clean in this country.

By next week I hope to have pictures of the finished room!