Bathroom Redo: Phase 1

Okay so yeah, this post is entirely unrelated to writing.  Fair warning.  But as I no longer keep up my “everyday” blog (as mostly my everyday life is either about writing, food, or is absolutely uninteresting), I had to post somewhere and now you’ll know what I’ve been doing besides writing.  I’ve been productive!  Really I have!  The house in which my DH and I currently reside was built in 1964.  We bought it 2 years ago, our starter home.  To say it has some quirks would be putting it mildly.  We did 2 months of renovations before moving in–painting every surface from ceiling to floor, replacing the flooring in the entire house (except the bathroom) with some gorgeous laminate, redoing doorways, removing crap kitchen cabinetry that made no sense and repainting what remained, patching walls where we took out 7, count ’em SEVEN, wall heaters, mudding the grooves in the substantial quantity of paneling such that no one actually KNOWS that our walls are really paneling, taking a belt sander after the walls in the bathroom, which were covered with ceiling popcorn–yeah I don’t know why–and remudding the entire thing…I’ve blocked out a lot of the rest.  Before and after pics of the original renovation can be found here.   In any event, DH was allowed to pick the color of the bathroom and his office.  I was not opposed to the idea of yellow for the bathroom, and in his defense, Lowe’s messed up EVERY SINGLE gallon of paint we bought there (I’m a firm Benjamin Moore customer now)–but, well, it sort of came out highlighter yellow.  Still, after 2 solid months of renovations (and I do mean 6-10 hours EVERY DAY on top of my regular job at the time), it took me 2 years to recover.  The bathroom is the last frontier.  Well I started Phase 1 of my Master Plan today.  I painted!  No more yellow!

This is what I started with this morning.

You may notice that the mirror is broken.   Yeah…that happened this morning.  With bad and bloody end results.  But I didn’t need stitches…well I probably could have used them, but I didn’t cut anything vital…it never gushed, and a big bandaid and gauze seems to be doing the trick…

Anyway, 3 coats of paint later:

Future phases and plans:

Phase 2: Beadboard on the lower half of the walls.  See that weird piece of trim in the middle of the wall?  Yeah it covers up a seam between two entirely different wall materials.  So we’ll put up beadboard, paint it a lovely bright white, and put up proper chair rail.

Phase 3: New flooring.  The existing linoleum will be
covered up with some nice travertine style vinyl tile. (see right)

Phase 4: I will sand the heck out of the existing vanity base, replace the doors, trim out new doors with some sort of trim, and get new knobs and drawer handles, as well as build a sort of cubby/shelf system in the kneehole.

Phase 5: Yank existing vanity top (ugly as sin) and replace with a nice tiled top in Venician  Stone tile.

Phase 6: Celebration completion with a bottle of bubbly in a bubble bath.

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