Powder Room: After

Two weeks after I posted about my excitement for a working toilet, and a narrative of our bathroom redo, I am ready to post the after pictures.  Of course, things aren't completely "finished."  There are touch-ups that need to be done, and a few items that still need to be put up.  I need to buy some baskets to place on the shelf of the farmhouse vanity we built (you can find the plans at ana-white) I know myself, and it may be another year or so before that actually gets done, however, so I thought I'd post the reveal now.

Here was the before picture:

And here are some photos after many, many hours of hard work.  I am particularly proud of how my husband and I worked together, with very little yelling or swearing.  Towards the end there were a few times he told me, "I know you think you are being helpful, but I would really appreciate if you would just stop talking."  I only told him I was going to cry once, at 3:45 on Saturday, when we still didn't have a working sink drain, and had 25 people coming at 4:00.  He got it working at the last minute however.  We both shine under pressure.

First Floor Bathroom, Before

I am writing this post in anticipation of having a working toilet on the first floor by this evening.  It's been since Memorial Day weekend, and I've definitely felt the loss.  We decided to do the powder room because it was small, and we figured it would be a quick, relatively inexpensive redo.  What fools we were.

This is how our bathroom looked before.  Rather uninspiring.  You can't tell from the picture, but the sink is in the shape of a shell, and the vanity had been painted with some sort of textured paint. Unfortunately, all types of dirt and lint and who knows what else would cling to the stippling, and it was impossible to make it look clean.  The walls of our entire house are painted in a color I have now named Fannie Mae Beige, and in a flat finish, which is horrible for a bathroom, and most any room where you will have young children that may brush against the walls.  (I am slowly ridding the entire house of that color.)  The floor tile was white, with veins of pink running through it.

So the demolition began, and we discovered many things.  One, that although the vanity looked horrible, it was amazingly well constructed. The only way to tear it out was to cut it out in sections, and after we removed the entire cabinet, the vanity top still remained stuck to the wall.  That was some pretty strong adhesive the builders uses.

Two, while the shell-shaped sink and vanity top looked like it was made out of that lightweight, occasionally cheap looking marbled acrylic, it in fact was not.  I'm not sure what material was used, but it seemed to be some sort of cast composite.  My husband basically chiseled around the edges until it finally came apart from the wall.  I think we have the same sink in the boys' bathroom, so that's making me a little nervous.

Three, and this was the worst, the floor had sustained significant water damage, going all the way into the subfloor, and through to the ceiling below.  I am sure that at some point, someone had to have seen a water spot forming on the basement ceiling and wondered, "Hmmm, that's right below the toilet, I wonder if everything is okay."  If that did happen, no one did anything.  Once my husband removed all the damaged plywood, insulation, and drywall, he saw traces of  a slow leak dripping down the drain from the old toilet.  He cut out the old PVC pipe, and coupled and cemented a new section to the drain.  Assuming he installs the toilet correctly, which I have no doubt that he will, we shouldn't have any more water problems.  I love having a handy man.

But tonight, we will have a finished floor and a toilet in the room.  It's the small things we take for granted.  I've been very impressed with my four-year-old, who has managed to make it upstairs in time to use the bathroom these past three weeks (only once did he have an emergency situation and need me to assist him up the stairs).  In all honesty, as my pregnancy is progressing, I'm more and more worried that I will find myself in an emergency situation, and there will be no one to help me up the stairs.  Hopefully, by the end of the week I can post some after pictures, and our bathroom will finally be done.

The Woes, I mean, Joys of Home-Ownership

I am forcing myself to write today.  For one thing, it's been a week and I feel I need to, and for another, if I don't, I will simply stress out about my house.  I'm at that point right now, where there is so much to do that my mind all but shuts down trying to figure out where to start.  I feel like one of those Looney Tunes characters put in charge of a baby.  A baby that crawls across the telephone wires, over the crocodile pit in the zoo, bounces off an awning onto a car in rush hour traffic, only to be miraculously saved by a window washer who picks the baby up by the diaper with his squeegee and plops him into his room.  Right now, I'm Sylvester, frantically running in all directions trying to take care of things.  I'm getting electrocuted by the wires, snapped at by the crocs, falling onto the pavement and getting mowed down by oncoming traffic. I should take solace in the fact that the baby will ultimately be saved, but I know the window washer is going to dump his dirty water on my head as I am about to enter the building and head upstairs to check on him.

What has started this not so slow descent into madness is the "quick" powder room remodel my husband and I planned to do over the weekend.  We're no strangers to DIY projects.  We had the vanity built and stained, my husband has had experience installing a toilet and sink, so most of our trepidation was related to installing a tile floor.  That was new to us, but we figured, we did our research, it was a small room, we'd get through it.  All of that changed as we started to demo the existing bathroom.  (I should clarify, that while I am using we, it was really my husband that did most of the work).

Without taking you step-by-step into the project (I will save that for a later post, hopefully after we have the room finished and are laughing about this whole thing); I will say that we found extensive water damage in the sub floor.  We now have the floor removed to the joists, and need to throw out the existing insulation and remove a section of the ceiling below.  I don't see how the water damage wasn't showing on the basement ceiling.  My only guess was that it must have been painted over by the previous homeowners or by Fannie Mae.  I'm just glad we started this project six months after we moved in, and didn't wait a year or two from now.

I know there is an end to this project in sight, but in the meantime, I have tools scattered all around my first floor and everything that was in that bathroom is in a corner in my kitchen.  When I come downstairs in the morning, I literally pull my hair when I see the chaos.  I need to have some semblance of order (and safety) before I babysit for a friend on Saturday.  She's never been to my house, and I'm afraid she's going to cancel her plans and march out with her son as soon as she puts her foot inside the door.  So right now, deep breaths, patience, and hard work.  That will see us through.

Irons in the Fire

I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend, and a Happy Mother's Day to all moms out there.  I had a wonderful day on Sunday.  My husband went to a bachelor party for my soon to be brother-in-law on Saturday, so I knew that I wasn't going to wake up to smiling, well-dressed children bringing me breakfast in bed.  In fact, Sunday was a lot like most other days of the week.  I comforted my oldest child when he woke up in hysterics at 5:00 am, I got them dressed, went grocery shopping with the two of them.  At first I thought I was going to want a break from my normal Mom routine, but when is a better time to embrace it? After all, that's what we're celebrating on Mother's Day.

In some ways, Sunday was even busier since I had to make potato salad and a strawberry-rhubarb tart to take to a farewell party for a neighbor.  I'm a little jealous that I was not able to drink any of the 12 gallons of sangria one of our friends made, but I had a wonderful time at the party and ended the evening on a high note watching Sherlock on PBS: Masterpiece Theater.  Not going to lie, I looked forward to that most of the day.

My husband also started working on one of our many projects on that day.  We're building a farmhouse vanity for the powder room on the main floor.  I found the plans on  http://ana-white.com/ .  Right now it looks like this:

but hopefully it will just take a few more hours of work to make it spectacular.  I went ahead and made a spreadsheet of everything I want to do/make/buy for each room.  It's a little overwhelming right now, so my next step is a schedule.  I know the nesting drive is kicking into high gear when I'm willing to commit to a timetable.

Everything is on hold until Saturday, though.  Tomorrow, it's time to get organized.  My sister's wedding is on Friday, and I need to start preparing to bake the cupcakes for the reception.  I've never baked this much at one time.  I'm fine with the baking part, but I'm not looking forward to all the washing of dishes that will be happening on Thursday.