Bathroom renovation, stage 2

Posted on August 21, 2007 by Barbara Harper

We’ve been tackling right and left this week.

Last week I showed “stage 1” of our bathroom renovation — taking out the old tile and replacing it with a shower surround. We decided, instead of patching up the wallpaper, to pull it off and paint. Jeremy and Jesse pulled off the old wallpaper, then Jim patched up several little imperfections and replaced some pieces of molding and primed everything. He and I went shopping for paint and towel racks. We found a really pretty light tan called “Pecan Sandie” — looks like coffee with cream to me. But he painted and put up the towel racks, then today I put the wall decorations back up. Here is the finished product:

Here are most of the decorations in there.

This print was a very inexpensive one at K-Mart years ago. The old sailor reminds me of Mr. Peggoty from Dickens’ David Copperfield.

We had gone with a lighthouse theme with the old wallpaper because the pattern looked to me like sand dunes and sea grass and seagulls and blue, beige, and tan as the color scheme, and early on I found the above Thomas Kinkade lighthouse prints for a very good price in a catalog. We decided to stay with that theme and color scheme. I looked around just a little for a lighthouse border or stencil but didn’t really have much time to put into it this week. I may look some more — I don’t know — I don’t want to overdo the lighthouses. I may expand into a general nautical theme. Or I may just leave it. Right now everything related to a theme is in the decorations and shower curtain, which can be easily and inexpensively changed if I want to do something else.

We’re also having out of town company come in tomorrow, so I had the boys tackle vacuuming, dusting, sweeping, taking out all the trash cans, and a few other odds and ends. I changed the burner pans and rings on the stove, cleaned the range hood, cleaned the microwave inside and out, moved everything on the counters out and wiped them off and cleaned the counters, dusted the little ridges on the cabinet doors that collect dust as well as the back edges of the dining room chairs, which do the same thing, did several loads of laundry, and did “my” dusting (my room, picture frames in the hall, and some of my decorative shelves). I also took Jason for an appointment at the oral surgeon’s: at his dental cleaning last May, before he left for the summer, they said his wisdom teeth would be needing to come out. He has none on the top, but one of the bottom ones is coming in exactly sideways, and the other one is at a 45 degree angle. There is some concern that one is close to a nerve, and if it develops more roots may cause problems, but they felt he could safely wait til Thanksgiving or Christmas break. He decided he wanted to do it over Thanksgiving break. I tried to talk him into waiting til after Christmas — there’s more time for recovery and a little more flexibility in his schedule then. But I think either he wants to get it over with or they scared him about the possibility of damage to the nerve. He said he didn’t mind missing Thanksgiving dinner — I wonder if he’ll still feel the same way when the time comes. 🙂

Anyway, Tuesday the one thing I have to do is clean bathrooms. I also hope to get the laundry finished, clean out the toaster oven, declutter the sunroom, vacuum the lamp shades in the living room (one of those odd little jobs that is often overlooked, but once I notice it I can’t stand it), and a few other little odd jobs. Once you get started, especially when company is coming, it seems like the more you clean the more you notice tings that need attention. But I have learned from experience not to spend so much time cleaning that I’m exhausted when company finally does come, so I’ll stop and rest in the afternoon.

Happy tackling!

Bathroom renovation

Posted on August 14, 2007 by Barbara Harper

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!

Tackle It Tuesday: Updated Recipe Book

Posted on January 30, 2007 by Barbara Harper

I am also linking this post to Organizing Junkie‘s Recipe Round-Up. Check here for more ideas about organizing your recipes.

I mentioned in an earlier tackle that I made up a scrapbook-style recipe book for recipes that I clip from magazines or print off from the computer, etc. It was getting to be too much for the notebook I had it in:

For a long time I’ve been wanting to divide it into two notebooks: one for main dishes and side dishes, the other for “extras” — appetizers, desserts, breads, etc. I also wanted to subdivide the broader categories, from “Main Dishes” into “Ground Meat,” “Chicken,” “Ham,” etc. Since I don’t have an index, it will be easier to find what I am looking for that way, plus it will keep the little divider pockets from getting too stuffed (I put new recipes in the divider pockets, then after trying them put them into the scrapbook. That’s the plan, anyway. 🙂 ) I pulled all of that out this evening to work on while watching TV with the family.

So here’s a little glimpse of the new notebook of “extras.”