Bathroom Renovation

The day you've all been patiently waiting for has arrived: this is the long promised bathroom renovation post! 

The bathroom has been finished since... awhile ago, but I just finished the shower curtain yesterday.

First, I'll remind you how ugly it was before, so that you realize that anything would have been an improvement. 

And now!

Here's the run down of the work we did:

• Regrouted the floor (I already posted about this awhile back)
• Replaced the toilet
• Replaced the vanity, sink, and faucet
• Replaced the medicine cabinet
• Replaced the vanity light
• Replaced the towel bars
• Replaced the shower curtain rod
• Added a shelf
• Added a curtain for the window
• Added a light and fan above the shower
• Patched drywall
• Replaced light switch and outlet covers
• Painted

I probably have photos of every single item above, but I'll attempt to stick to the highlights. 

The old toilet was enormous and used 3.5 gallons per flush. Who needs that kind of guilt every time they flush the toilet? We decided to replace it with an efficient and small toilet, so that we could sleep well at night and put in a larger vanity. Anecdotal evidence suggested that replacing a toilet was not that hard, so we jumped right in. 

Our only real mistake was that we tried to remove the old toilet tank, paint behind it, and put it back. Naturally the flex hose sprung a leak and we had one evening with no functioning toilet. Oops.

Gross paint. Missing from this photo is the sponge that was stuck behind the tank. 

Once we got started the next day, everything went surprisingly smoothly.  

 

We discovered that cleaning old wax rings is gross and that our toilet had a flange with hand-cut notches.

After cleaning the floor as much as possible and painting the wall, things were looking up. (The white stuff on the left is grout that I hadn't cleaned off of the tiles yet. I don't recommend waiting for weeks to clean it off completely...)

See? Devon LOVES replacing toilets! 

And what a toilet it is. It has the Power of Niagara!

Ta-da!

Next we tackled the medicine cabinet. 

The old one didn't even open all the way because of the weird wood trim around it. The wood trim was glued to the wall by some jerk. 

It's pretty satisfying to rip stuff like this apart. The old cabinet was sized to fit between the studs. We wanted to put in a bigger cabinet, so we had even more ripping stuff apart to do. 

This whole thing proved to be more than a one-weekend job for us, so we installed some temporary measures. 

Here's the extent of the drywall demo. At the top is the bracket and box for the light. We exposed a 2x6 old growth redwood double stud. Why on earth our bathroom is framed with such precious stuff, we don't know. I guess using lots of old growth redwood for framing wasn't a big deal back in the 1940s!

Here we have the stud removed and the drywall more or less patched. The white drywall mud patches are where we got a little overzealous with the sawzall and cut into the living room. Drywall dust in only one room just isn't enough, ya know? 

We installed the light before putting the cabinet in so that we could reach inside the wall. 

Unfortunately, we failed at math, and this happened. Yep, the cabinet was hitting the lights. Oops. It was actually not too painful to move the light up, but it did involve more drywall work. My FAVORITE. 

Finally we had the cabinet and light both installed with no critical conflicts. 

Hand drywall saws are not the most precise instruments, so the drywall edge looked pretty rough.

Using our awesome new mitre saw and most curse words available in the English language, we pieced together a border of quarter round trim. The cabinet we bought is an Ikea special and is not actually meant to be recessed. I assume that's why it has these super annoying little corners that we had to trim around, and why it doesn't have a handy self-finishing flange. 

After we failed at nailing the trim in place, we resorted to a tube of liquid nails. Let the next bathroom-renovators deal with it! We used drywall mud to fill in the nail holes and weird corners, then caulked the joints between the trim and the wall. 

All in all it looks pretty spiffy! Just don't let us catch you looking too close. 

The vanity was easily the worse part of the old bathroom. The marbled teal top clashed horribly with the blue floor, and the cabinet itself was made of disintegrating fiber board with metallic gold trim. 

The view behind the vanity was, if possible, even worse than the view of the vanity. Why did anyone with a conscience even produce this color of paint?

In another one of those super fun experiences with old plumbing, we found that the shut-off valves didn't work. We had to turn the water to the house off to accomplish what you see above. We got new valves and took this photo just to gross you out:

The old one is one the left. Obviously.

Somewhere in the middle of the vanity work, we painted the whole room. 

You can also see our snazzy new curved double shower curtain rod here. 

Voila! Our new vanity cabinet is an Ikea special, with a few modifications required to fit it next to the tile wall base. 

Ikea has really nice butcherblock countertops, so we bought the smallest piece we could and cut it to size. Here we're trying out the sink and faucet placement before drilling holes. Devon put a really nice oil finish on the butcherblock. 

Hole saws are cool! 

I don't even want to think about/admit how many trips to the hardware store it took to assemble the sink plumbing. The finished product looks a little like Frankenstein's monster, but it works! We did have some leaks early on (thus the mixing bowl at the bottom), but they turned out to be because the gasket that came with our cheap sink drain couldn't be trusted. Since we reset it with a big gob of plumber's putty, it's been leak-free. 

Here we are saying goodbye to most of the junk from the bathroom. The toilet and sink sat in the backyard for awhile before we got around to arranging pick-up with the city, but at least they weren't on the front porch, hillbilly style. 

For good measure, here are even more "after" photos. 

New towel bar

The shower curtain that took me months to finally finish.
I bought a shower curtain, then replaced the bottom portion with solid brown fabric.

The curved shower curtain rod is awesome.
You can hang towels on the outer bar, plus it makes the shower feel bigger.
When my parents visited, Dad helped us install the fan and light.
Thanks, Dad!

The shower and tub are basically the same as before.
We added a curtain (made from a shower curtain) to protect
the window and wood trim.
We bent the hook on a shower caddy to account for the thickness of the tile
and hung it from a knob secured to a stud. 

The pretty light - and the cabinet even opens!

I love this shelf even if it doesn't hold much useful stuff.
I found the liquor bottle and the silver dish at my
friendly local thrift store.

We changed out the switch and outlet covers.
Also, the blue canary in the outlet by the light switch
is watching over us. 

Deck the Halls

Oh hi, blog readers! Fancy meetin' you here. And now, so that you don't notice that I haven't posted since ever, I shall distract you with shiny lights!

Christmas! Yay!

So, Christmas lights are hard. I feel just the slightest bit of empathy for the people whose Christmas lights I make fun of. And I make fun of EVERYONE'S Christmas lights, so a little empathy for each person is really a lot, all together.

Right?

It is, I admit, really hard to get them straight. Gutter clips are not the magic that the box claims, and you have to move the ladder a bajillion times. We didn't try too hard, really. This was only our first try at Christmas lights, and we didn't want to set the bar too high.

Christmas happened inside, too! This is our little tree, a dwarf Alberta Spruce. We're planning to keep it outside in a container and bring it in each year to decorate. The guy at the nursery said we could definitely get 5 or so years out of it this way. After that we'll plant it and pick a new Christmas tree strategy. For now, though, it's doofy and I like it. And it even has presents under it!

Here's a closer look.

Those are some sea turtles from our trip to Barbados, just there to keep things from getting too Christmasy.

I also hung up all of the beautiful Christmas cards we've gotten.

It's a little hard to tell, but they're hanging in the entryway. Many thanks to internet and real life friends for the cards!

Happy Holidays everyone!

Pop Quiz!

Oh, hi there, loyal readers! We have not fallen off of the planet, but we did fall off of the home improvement bandwagon for a little while. Mostly because we were busy showing off our house to our families and a house full of awesome housewarming party guests!

We're back with a vengeance, and we have another installment of Quiz time!

What's wrong with THIS picture?

Hint: It has nothing at all to do with my off brand duster. 

Old Furniture, Clean House

I thinking cleaning might be the one area where we're not really interested in overdoing it. When it comes to tidying and cleaning, we're more in the "do a little as possible" camp. That said, we did finally give in and clean the house up after weeks of chaos and bathroom renovations and half-unpacked rooms. Now we've isolated the chaos to the garage and the still-packed-ness to half of one room. 

Pictures or it didn't happen:

I'm loving our loud rug and red living room accents. The walls are sadly bare, but that's a project for another weekend. I do have a whole pile of pictures and art next to the tv stand waiting for said weekend. 

Oops, Devon's jacket is annoyingly reflective in these photos. Anyway, the dining room has a dining room table in it now! How novel! This is the table we made when we were living in Mountain View. We need to make or acquire chairs at some point. 

The kitchen is still on the chopping block when we have the time and money to redo it, but for now it's in a pretty usable state. 

This would be that still-packed bit I mentioned. We set up Devon's desk, but my desk still needs some sanding and another coat of finish. All of my sewing stuff and yarn is still boxed up, for the most part. The closet in this room is still a mess. We'll get there, though!

The bedroom. I love the headboard and rug and I love the quilt my sister made me, but they don't quite go together, huh? A new quilt made from the wedding table runners is on the list of things to make someday. 

And, chaos. We ran out of time to clean the garage. We need shelving and a bigger work bench. We need to do something about the cavernous crack in the floor. We need a garage door that works. We need a better way to access the loft. Really, we need several months to work on the garage alone! 

This brings me to the photos I didn't include above. What? You're sick of looking at boring photos of our house? Too bad!

New (old) dressers! While we fully admit to being big Ikea fans, we are not fans of their dressers. We decided that since we didn't like the Ikea fare and didn't feel like spending a lot of money on boring furniture store stuff, we'd look for antique or second-hand dressers.

I went to Oakland to visit the Habitat for Humanity ReStore back when we still needed lots of things for the bathroom. I didn't find a single thing in the ReStore, but I did find the dresser on the right in the St. Vincent de Paul attached to the ReStore. Jackpot! After sending pictures to Devon, measuring the dresser and the car several times, and making sure the mirror would come off for travel, I bought it. I found a nice guy from the salvage store next door to help me load it. A rent-a-cop also helped. He took one look and bet me $20 that the dresser wouldn't fit. I agreed and was very pleased with myself when it slid right into the car. It was an oversight on my part to not have a counter bet in place! I did have to take the mirror apart to get it in the car, and I couldn't see a single thing out the back of the car all the way home from Oakland. Still, I love the dresser!

We had a less dramatic journey to pick up the dresser on the left, which we found on Craigslist. We got it from a very talkative guy who was moving to a smaller place. He regaled us with the virtues of the dresser, but really most of the handles are a little bit broken. It's still very cool overall, so we're keeping an eye out for new handles. 

Here's one more photo of the living room (looking towards the dining room) which shows our very favorite furniture purchase - a mid century hutch. At least, I guess it's a hutch. I'm not really sure what to call it. This was a lucky or stupid Craigslist find, depending on how you look at it. I saw it listed for $100. If you've ever tried to buy a mid century anything, you know that's a steal! These sorts of things go for at least $800 around here. The catch was that it was in San Rafael, which is at least an hour drive north. And it's all one piece, so there is obviously no way it would fit in our little hatchback. 

We hatched our genius (stupid) plan and set out the next day. On a Saturday morning, we rented a U-Haul van at something like 7am and drove up to San Rafael. The woman we bought it from was moving, so she had  couple of movers there. Luckily, they carried it downstairs for us. It's quite heavy! We loaded it in the van and strapped it in with tie-downs. We got a late breakfast and headed home, and the whole ordeal was over before noon. The U-Haul rental was more than the price of the hutch itself, but we still think we got a deal. 

That's it for today! I'm off to do anything that isn't cleaning or driving too far to buy furniture.