We Miss Our Toilet

Since demolishing the guest bathroom, we realized how much we miss having an extra bathroom.  Considering our other bathroom is off of our master bedroom and the guest one is off of the living room, we tend to use the guest one more.  So this weekend we were in power mode to get the this bathroom renovation on its way and better yet get our second toilet back! Hurrah!

Last weekend we ended our project with the bathroom looking like this…

Yikes! that is one scary looking bathroom. We had quite the work to get done before we had a working toilet in here. We had a few things we wanted to incorporate in the bathroom.

Here’s another handy list of our to do’s for this bath:

1. Patch and sand all walls.
2. Paint walls.
3. Add wainscoting and chair rail to walls.
4. Paint wainscoting, chair rail and trim.
5. Tile and grout floor.
6. REINSTALL TOILET.
7. Install new faucets and shower head in bathtub.
8. Install new light fixture.
9. Install vanity.
10. Install mirror.
11. Install towel bar.
12. Decorate! 🙂

We had a lot to accomplish before we had a working bathroom again, so we got right to work.  Justin started with installing the wainscoting.  He purchased full sheets of it from Lowe’s(of course).

It is pretty affordable at about $10 a sheet which are 4 feet wide.  We didn’t need very much since this bathroom is pretty small.  The sheets come in a preprimed white coating, which was nice for me considering I’m the painter in this family.  Less coats of paint! suh-weet!

Justin had the wainscoting installed in no time! He did have to make a few holes for the plumbing as you can see.

We figured this would be the best time to do all of the painting considering the flooring was unfinished and I didn’t have to edge in to close to the wainscoting because the chair rail would be covering the seem. I also didn’t have to use any drop cloths, considering we weren’t too worried about maintaining the look of our concrete floor we currently had going on.

I got everything taped off and I was ready to paint! Oh ya I forgot to mention my paint color choice.  I am going with blue, shocker right?  The color is sweet slumber by Valspar.  It is a super duper light blue color, which you can see below…

I went my usual painting route by doing all of my edging in first then rolling.  This room is crazy quick to paint, piece of cake!

I love the color, it’s really light so I hope it will brighten up this room quite a bit and make it feel a bit bigger.  My plan to go really light with the laundry room worked out well, so I am hoping the same will work in here!

Once we had the mirror down, we were able to see the original purplish-blue color that the bathroom was when we moved in.  The color we went with this time was more blue, than the more purple color they had chosen and our color is also lighter…

The new color is on the right and the old color that was under the mirror is on the left. Either color I think is better than the greenish yellow I painted the room, that you can slightly see on the top of this photo.

I also think the wainscoting is going to help to make this bathroom feel a lot lighter.

Here is all of the chair railing and trim that Justin purchased.  All of these pieces were also pre-primed in white, more great news for me!

Ah, beautiful untouched trim!

Justin used this guy to cut all of the trim and chair railing on 45 degree angles.  He had a blast doing this, seemed like a very time consuming job.

Here is the first wall with the chair rail installed.  I was so excited to see it go up, looks great already!

Next up was tiling.

We used the same Roman Stone tile that we used on the patio, but in a lighter shade.

Justin had to lay the tile before installing the trim, since the trim would lay on top of the tile.  He used the same method as he did when tiling the patio.

Here is the finished product.

I swear he did this so quick and it looks great.  I think he has tiling down, put that one on your resume Justin!

Once the tile was dry Justin started changing out the faucets in the tub.  We didn’t want the polished nickel look that we currently had, we wanted to change everything out to brushed nickel.

I know what you are thinking… why would we get rid of such a modern faucet?  Here is the new faucet…

It is Moen brand from Lowe’s.  We also replaced the shower head.  Unfortunately I didn’t get a before photo of the old shower head, Justin is just to quick for me.  Sorry folks.  Here is the new one though…

It’s huge! I might be showering in the guest bathroom from now on!  From there we called it a night and the next morning I woke up to this…

BOOM a grouted floor and half installed toilet.  I swear Justin doesn’t sleep, he thinks 5am is a good time to wake up on weekends! Crazy man!  He was even already started on installing the trim as you can see!

Looking pretty good!  From there he caulked all of the chair rail and trim.

Caulking trim just finishes it off so nicely!

From there Justin finished installing the toilet and even brought in the vanity.

So this is where two days of hard work got us.  I would say it was a job well done because we have a working toilet again!! Yahoo! Would you like a list update? Okay fine!

1. Patch and sand all walls.
2. Paint walls.
3. Add wainscoting and chair rail to walls.
4. Paint wainscoting, chair rail and trim.
5. Tile and grout floor. 
6. REINSTALL TOILET.
7. Install new faucets and shower head in bathtub.
8. Install new light fixture.
9. Install vanity.
10. Install mirror.
11. Install towel bar.
12. Decorate! 🙂

Change In Plans

I decided this weekend would be a good time to re-paint the guest bath.  So I headed to homegoods and target to find a new shower curtain to start.  I wanted to get a new shower curtain first, so I could pull a color from pattern for the paint.  I ended up having success and headed to Lowes to get a color that would match.  I made it home and showed Justin all of my finds.  Next thing I knew he was talking about removing the medicine cabinet before I painted because we really hate it.  I agreed and let him pull it out of the wall.

Here she is, so we can all say our last goodbyes.

Justin immediately started removing the cabinet when I said yes.  I figure I would start painting the other half of the bathroom while he patches the whole in the wall where the cabinet was.

I also requested that we take down the exisitng towel bar and move it to the other wall.  I wanted to move the bar because where it currently was located I wasn’t able to hang a full towel.  I figured if we moved it to the opposite wall I could hang some kind of art above the toilet.  So the towel bar came down too.

I thought we were done from there and I could begin painting. Well, I was wrong and Justin had another idea, he wanted to remove the mirror.  I did hate the mirror and I thought that would also be an easy fix so we took that down too.

Once the mirror was down we could see all the gross grime that was left in the crevices where it was.

Grrrross. Justin then said, while were at it we might as well remove the vanity since its old and we don’t love it either.  You can probably guess that I agreed and we started removing that as well.

We started by removing the doors first.

Justin then shut off the water and we started removing the plumbing below the vanity.

I was lucky enough to get the job of removing the pipes and letting the old water and hair fall on me, not to mention the fabulous smell that comes with it.

From there we removed the vanity top and the sink, turns out the sink was plastic, who woulda thought! Once the vanity top was off we saw this…

A big hole in the drywall, not a good thing the discover.  We were now worried that there was no dry wall behind the vanity at all.  There was no turning back at this point so we trucked on.

It took some prying and shimmying, but we got the whole vanity out and we were happy to find drywall!  Turns out it was just a small hole on the left side. Phew!

At this point we decided we had no choice but to remove the tile as well since there was no tile under the vanity and the new vanity we were imagining was a free standing one.

So we started prying tiles out to find that the previous owners of this home tiled right over the original linoleum. Woo hoo one more thing to remove!

We removed the tile by using a mason chisel and hammer.  We tapped the chisel under the tile, more like slammed the chisel under the tile and then pried them up.

This job was not quick, we pried them up in pieces until every tile was gone.

Also this job is kinda dangerous.  Justin and I were bleeding on our hands and arms and I even was bleeding from my forehead.  Little shards of ceramic tile pop up when you chisel them out. Fun stuff! From here we called it a night considering it was 8pm.

Bright and early I went to town removing the rest of the tile while Justin was prepping the wall to repair the hole from the medicine cabinet.  This time I was prepared though!

Yes, Justin got me a safety mask and yes I am wearing the same shirt.

Justin also removed the toilet so I could get the tiles that were under the edges of it.  So once I finished removing the tile and ripping up the remaining linoleum it looked like this…

Do you notice anything on the floor in this photo? Possibly a crack in the foundation?

Oh hi crack! At this point we were thinking this project just got really expensive, so we called Justin’s dad.  Turns out it is perfectly normal for the foundation to settle and to get cracks in some areas. Man were we relieved!

While I finished up Justin had already installed the drywall to fill the hole in the wall.

Finally making some progress!

From there Justin’s dad told us we should probably pour down some cement underlayment, so we are sure the floor is level when we lay the new tile.  So off I went to Lowes and picked up a bag of this…

Once I got home Justin mixed up a batch of the cement and started pouring it in.

At this point we need to wait for the underlayment to settle and dry for 24 hours and then we can start laying tile and working on other projects in the room! Man this project got big fast!