the bathroom

Ever since we got our house I have wanted to do something about our bathroom. I was specifically irritated by the medicine cabinet, the light fixture, and the sink. The medicine cabinet did not really fit in the bathroom, and had not been mounted to the wall properly. Over the last couple of years, two of the three lights in fixture had failed. Finally, the faucet in the sink was next to impossible to keep clean. Golden probably has her own list of what she did not like.

So, Golden and I planned a bathroom renovation. Golden went for a brown and red theme (I think). We started the project on the twelfth of this month and it is still not officially complete, because the sink is not yet operational. For people who have multiple bathrooms in their house this may not be as big a deal, but this is in our only full bathroom in the house so we are still in a hurry. The appearance of the room is very close to what the end product will be, though, so I am ready to show some pictures.

Also, if you don't really care to get a play-by-play, just look at the pictures and skip the text.

First, here a few "before" shots.

On the first day, we removed the medicine cabinet and found wallpaper behind it. Based on what we pealed away from the wall behind the medicine cabinet, it looks like the room has been wallpapered twice and painted three times.

By the end of the first weekend I had painted the top half of the room, replaced the medicine cabinet with a mirror, and replaced the light fixture. This all sounds like simple stuff, but I was amazed at how much time they consumed.

The second weekend started with me tearing out the sink. Once the sink was removed, we learned that a lot of water that goes down the drain in the kitchen sink finds its way to the drain for the bathroom sink. Until the P trap is installed on the bathroom sink, we have to keep a bucket under the drainage pipe.

Another thing that we noticed is that there have been leaks in this bathroom before. I had to take some diluted bleach to the mildew that I found. Also, I had to be very careful not to do any more damage to the subfloor than was already done.

After the sink and toilet were removed, I spent a over a day removing three layers of vinyl floor and the top layer of the plywood subfloor. I did not get a picture of the completely cleared floor. I will say that this was my figurative, as well as physical, low point during the project. One day of doing almost nothing besides scraping a floor and making no significant progress is actually quite depressing. It felt good to have that part of the job behind me. The picture below is the backer board I put down over the sub floor.

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day I completed the painting job, applied a sealant to the backer board, and installed the tiles. It was nearly four in the morning before I finished.

I grouted two days later.

This weekend, I reinstalled the toilet, installed trim, and started work on the sink. Here is how the bathroom looks now.


In the end I lost track of how much we spent, but I do know that I was at Home Depot at least twelve times over the last two weeks. Home Depot is the real winner in this entire project.