The Bathroom, Part Deux

A girl can only live with nasty, moldy linoleum for so long. Remember what the bathroom looked like before? Abnormally tall sink, gross linoleum, and yellow and purple sponge painted walls. Painting the walls and sink helped, but that floor...

Before we moved in.

After the bandaid. 

One evening at some very inconvenient time, I decided to figure out what was under the linoleum. I stuck a flat head screwdriver under a peeling-up part behind the toilet and look what I found!

It's not a moldy subfloor! It's not more linoleum! It's not a gaping hole into the basement! It's lovely white hex tile! It felt like that moment from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory where Charlie peels back the wrapper on the candy bar to find the golden ticket. There may or may not have been some jumping up and down. But then the real work began. The entire floor was still covered in linoleum with cardboard backing and lots of glue. And of couse there was the fact that people don't cover up lovely white hex tile with linoleum. We prepared ourselves for a distinctly un-lovely surprise at some point during the excavation process. 

First, we uncovered the area near the toilet. It was a messy process. We scored the vinyl layer of the linoleum and peeled it up, then wet the cardboard backing/glue residue with hot, soapy water and let it sit.  Then we took our trusty 5-in-1 tool and started scraping. Luckily, the tile is made of something impervious to scratches. We found a few uneven and cracked spots in the tile around the toilet, but it was such an improvement on the linoleum that it seemed okay. We kept going and pretty soon (lie: it took several hours) we had uncovered the whole floor except under the toilet and under the sink. 

There was still quite a bit of yellow glue stuck to the floor. I took the photo on the left with me to Home Depot and asked for an adhesive remover. Some jerk employee said, "Sweetheart, you don't want to kill yourself on that old tile. Let me show you our linoleum options." I gave him a solid glare, thanked him for his thoughts, and asked again where the adhesive remover was. I'll bet if Drew had been with me, the man wouldn't have suggested more linoleum, but I digress. One giant bottle of haz mat and two masks later, I was on my way home determined to restore the floor if it killed me.

So we spread the adhesive remover, which looked like egg yolks, all over the floor and scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed. Sure enough, all the yellow residue came off. Girl power/hazardous chemicals for the win.

The next step was finding a perfect new vanity to replace the old ridiculous one. We wanted something 24 inches wide in a dark color with a white top for $250 or less. Guess how hard that is to find? Pretty dang hard. After lots of online searching and lots of head scratching about the people who buy the ugly vanities that seem to make up 90% of the market, we landed at Lowes.

Hello new friend! You are decent looking, you have a nice shelf on the bottom, you are 24" wide, and you are a normal height. You are also $229. After valiant efforts by Drew and some nice stranger, it became abundantly clear that the box was simply not going to fit in our Hyundai. We unwrapped it at the curb and put the parts into the backseat, along with the packaging.

Spoiler alert: It's a good thing we saved the packaging.

Next, we had to get the linoleum out from under the toilet and old vanity, which meant we were getting into the serious part of the project. We set aside an entire weekend and said a little prayer for marital bliss and successful plumbing adventures. Before removing the vanity, Drew recorded this video for posterity:

We removed the old vanity and the toilet and got to work. That was not as easy as I just made it sound, but it wasn't terribly interesting either so I'll spare you the gory details. Sidenote: When we were watching our ten minutes of preparatory videos on youtube, at least one warned us of the sewer gasses that would leak out of the toilet pipe once the bowl was gone. My very handy father, whose telephone assistance made this project possible, said to "just stick a rag down there." Excuse me dad, we are talking about TOXIC POO FUMES here. A "rag" does not sound sufficient. I put an entire bath towel in the pipe and we both really really hoped that the bath towel was up to the job and also that no one had to use the bathroom for the rest of the day.

 

GROSSEST THING EVER. There was even a cheerio under there.

Toilet in the bathtub! (Do not use)

That's your towel for when you come visit us!
(J/K. We threw it out immediately.)

There were lots of grout lines that were old and crumbly so we decided that we needed to regrout the entire bathroom. It sounded like a good idea but it turned out to be a very, very stressful idea. The old grout was black, so we thought we should regrout with black grout too. Right?

MAYDAY. Is it supposed to look like this?

Our lovely white tile, which we'd spent so much time/girl power/chemicals on, was getting covered in what looked like tar. It felt like a very bad choice. Once we started though, there was nothing to do but keep going.

You'll notice we put the toilet back in before re-grouting. Rookie mistake.

After waiting the recommended two hours, we scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed and there was a horrible black haze left on the tile. The grout was also smearing out of the seams and getting all over the tiles we were desperately trying to clean. We were both on the verge of losing it, so we decided to go put the vanity together. 

After screwing the legs and shelf together and putting it up against the wall in the bathroom, we realized that we were in BIG trouble. The back of the vanity was open except for a brace along the bottom edge of the closed part of the cabinet. That brace was at the exact height of our plumbing coming out of the wall, and the u-bend dipped below the bottom of the cabinet. We may have been able to cut out the bottom of the cabinet for the u-bend and then move the brace up the back of the cabinet to accomodate the plumbing, but we are simply not that handy. The veneer was peeling off in a few places as well so the cabinet simply wasn't worth the hassle. 

We put the vanity and its packaging in the car again and drove back to Lowes in a state of near-panic. The two things we'd tried valiantly to do - restore the tile and replace the vanity - were not going well. Not well at all. The nice woman at the returns counter refunded our money on the vanity with a smile, which is why we love Lowes. We found another vanity in the bathroom aisle that had an entirely open back and didn't involve any veneer and was $10 less expensive than the other one. SOLD to the panicked, un-showered couple covered in black grout! 

We went into the tile aisle and asked another nice Lowes employee what we should do to remedy our grout disaster. He said the haze would come off in time and that the grout in the seams just needed a few more days. Fine. But we both had a sinking feeling that the bathroom looked less "vintage" and more "shitty" than we were hoping. We did some soul searching in the vinyl flooring aisle (and my pride took a major hit when I realized the Home Depot jerk may have been right about my tile restoration abilities) but ultimately decided to head home with our new vanity and wait to see how we felt about the floor after continued scrubbing in a few days. 

It turned out that the vanity fit beautifully. The open back accommodated our apparently-not-standard plumbing and we thought all was well. Then we tried to put the sink on. 

I don't know if you can tell, but the pipe basically comes all the way up to the top of the vanity, leaving no room for the sink bowl. It made sense because the old sink was much further off the ground than this new sink, but it meant that the plumbing needed altering. 

We went back to Home Depot for a hacksaw, a new white screwy thing for the top, and some glue to hold everything together. We measured everything about fifty times and cut the pipe. We got everything put back together and...

Action shot.

TA DA!!!!! The haze is getting fainter and fainter and I no longer need a stool to wash my face. We didn't touch the bathtub or the tile in the shower area, so they still look crummy, but that's what they make shower curtains for, right?

Total cost: $400. Total years aged: At least 5 each.

The Dining Room: Help from Kate & Hurricane Irene

This is what it looked like before we moved in.

The dining room is smack dab in the middle of our house and has openings to the living room, kitchen, and entryway, which makes it a key space. The heart of the home, if you will. This made choosing a wall color sort of difficult. The photo on the right shows what the dining room looked like in the previous occupants' hands. The wall color was a nice cream and the trim was actually white, making this the ONE room in the house that didn't make me want to barf. The downside though, is that the room has lots of nice features that the monochromatic color scheme wasn't highlighting. Time for more paint!


Originally, I wanted blue in the dining room. Navy seemed too dark for our already-kind-of-dark little house, and light blue or teal next to the living room wall color made it look a bit circus-like. Drew's aunt suggested sage-green, which seemed to work well for the space. We found the perfect shade of green (again, why do they have to make so many paint colors? Why can't they just make the ones I like?) and...

We were so darn tired of painting that we just couldn't bring ourselves to paint any more. Just looking at that roll of blue tape and the piles of drop cloths made me shudder. We needed a miracle to get our motivation up again.

That motivation miracle came in the form of... Hurricane Irene. And the fabulous Kate. And wine.

This is Kate. I went to law school with her and she was in town briefly the weekend of Irene, attending a wedding and moving out of her apartment (and giving us her futon!). She was staying with us and so got roped into our Hurricane Irene plans. Did we huddle up and read books? Did we play board games by candlelight? Did we catch up on all the fabulous stuff bar exam preparation that we had each spend the summer doing? Of course not. Drew and I conscripted Kate to paint the dining room with us. She is clearly a good sport - in the photo to the left, she is sitting on a very strange bench/art installation by Jamaica Pond a few days before the hurricane. Only a good sport sees a weird bench and hops in gleefully. She agreed to dive into our painting project with almost as much glee.

This is Hurricane Irene - remember Irene?  The wind was blowing, the rain was pouring, but we mercifully did not lose power - not even once! There were a few tense moments with a giant tree outside our window, but it held together and we painted on.

The Academy Experiential Ed department
would not approve of these provisions. 

Armed with plenty of provisions, we went for it. Note the choices of provisions here - cereal, almonds, raisins, and wine. I also got some bottled water and some cans of tuna. Once I found out Kate would be hurricaning with us, I went out and bought more wine. Disaster prep is not one of my fortes, clearly. It's a really good thing we didn't actually experience any hurricane-related disasters or we all would have been covered in paint, with only chianti and trail mix and tuna to tide us over. Oh well. I'll work on my disaster prep for next time.





Anyhow, the dining room has several architectural features that make painting a true pain in the neck. First, it has a built-in china cabinet that is original to the house and has been left unpainted. This is a plus in general, but very worrisome when you're slinging paint all over the place. Second, it has a chair rail and extra-thick crown molding. Again, very nice features, but lots of work. Third, it has three doorways and a giant bay of windows. More trim. If you've ever painted trim, you know how rough it is. As Brendan said, "I don't think anything could be more annoying or fussy than this trim." Amen.

Boom. Time for wine. 

Kate, Drew, Irene, and I painted like we've never painted before. We held our collective breath around the china cabinet and got the room finished in record time.

We found an antique gate leg table in a shop on Cape Cod for an amazingly low price and, with the help of Drew's mom, got it back to Boston and into our dining room.

It has two leaves in the middle and two leaves that pop up on the sides, making this a truly gigantic, Thanksgiving dinner-worthy table. We only have four chairs, which complicates things somewhat, but we'll get there.

We also got a sewing machine from Drew's Nana, which is cleverly disguised in the table beneath the clock. More on my sewing pursuits in the next post.

Ta da!

We successfully kept all the paint off the china cabinet!

View from the living room into the kitchen.
(I made that table runner!)

 

This is the table with the center leaves in and the side leaves down. It's HUGE.

The sewing machine is reminiscent of "Inspector Gadget" or the Batmobile,
but in a Suzy Homemaker kind of way. 

So that's the dining room. I hope everyone enjoys a beautiful Saturday - I'm off to Home Depot!

Updates: Living Room, Bedroom, Entryway

Hello! I've been scolded a few times lately for not posting any updates on our house. It's been a busy two months, with both of us starting new jobs and adjusting to new schedules. In Drew's case, this has also involved getting used to hanging out with fourteen year olds every day (better him than me). But we're back on the blogging wagon (fingers crossed) and we have lots of progress to report!



First, the living room. We did a lot in the living room right away, so there's not too much here that's different. We moved one of our antique chests into the place of the sad little table (which has been relegated to the basement), which makes the awkward chair look less awkward. What do you think? We still need to add something above the chair and on the wall to the left of it, above the TV.

We also acquired this great rocking armchair from Drew's parents. I sewed some arm covers (more on my sewing prowess later) and we put it in the corner where the sticks used to be. We found that painting (it's of Paris, if you can't tell from this angle) on the street in our neighborhood and took it. It's a little garish, but so are the walls.

Next up for this corner is to fix the lighting situation. That lamp from ikea was $6.99 or something and it lived in our old apartment, but it looks super goofy right there. I'm thinking a hanging lamp?

Also, note the backgammon set on the floor next to the chair. It looks cool, but we don't know how to play. Anyone who wants to come play backgammon totally should feel free.....

Next up - the entryway. The last time you saw the entryway, it had stuff everywhere. We've cleaned it up (except under the rolltop, obviously...) and painted the walls and trim, but we still aren't really feeling good about the space. I think replacing the shoe shelf with something more substantial, moving the painting over the desk, and putting some hooks on the wall will help, but I'm not convinced that the layout is right. If you have design sense, please tell me what to do.

View from the spare room. The living room is on the left.

We will hang the Boston poster eventually...

The painting is hanging on a pre-existing nail but will get put over the desk soon.    

So. Much. Blank. Wall. HELP. 

And the bedroom. We got a real live bed - no box spring on the floor for us anymore! No siree, we're grown-ups now. The bed has a headboard, which is awesome because it keeps our pillows from falling on the floor.

I've done some research on the whole bed-in-a-corner thing, and apparently it's pretty controversial. Some like it and some hate it. Some people say it's bad feng shui and that you'll wake up with a neck ache or your blood gets infected or something. At the end of the day though, we feel like it makes our bedroom more open and we're sleeping great. We think our blood is healthy. We're keeping the bed like this.

Then came the question of what to do in that big, gray corner. We decided on some hanging lights. Drew braved his worst fears (Ikea on a weekend) to come help me pick them out. I can't decide if I care enough about them functioning as lights to keep the cords there, or whether I'd like to hang them with wire/string and use the electrical components somewhere else in the house. If we keep them as lights, we'll corral the cords along the edge of the windows. What do you think?



Next up, I'll show you all the cool stuff we did in the dining room, our new-and-improved kitchen, and the newest and best surprise in the house, which involves the bathroom floor.

Happy Veteran's Day!

Our very own multi-purpose room

Our old apartment was 550 square feet and our new place is 1050 square feet. Nearly doubled! With all that extra space comes rooms we didn't have before, notably a dining room and a second bedroom. Dining rooms are for dining, which we do a fair bit of (although it would be more honest to call it "eating" or perhaps "shoveling" around here). Spare bedrooms are for house guests, which we have once in a blue moon, and children, of which we don't have any. So the question presented itself: What should we do with our second bedroom?

This is what the previous owners did: 

Things we dislike: Purple walls, off-white trim.
Things we don't have: Baby

The obvious first solution was to use the space as an office. As it turns out though, our entryway is awkwardly large and absolutely needs a piece of substantial furniture in it so it doesn't feel wasted. Enter our giant rolltop desk, printer, and other office-y things (I'll post photos of this space once it's not covered in office paraphernalia, paint chips, and other assorted detritus). 

At first, we put our bed in the second bedroom while we set up our real bedroom. I loved sleeping in that room, mostly due to the ceiling fan and the woods out the window. The closet is cedar-lined as well, which seems very fancy to me. Who does that? (Answer: The same people who painted the entire house in different colors of off-white. I guess they weren't all bad.) The room isn't well suited to be our bedroom, though, because it's kind of a hallway - it has one door that leads to the entryway and one that leads to the hallway/bathroom/kitchen. The bedroom at the back of the house seemed better to me, so sleeping there full-time was not our solution. 

He's also a law student.
Photo credit to someone on facebook

We cleared everything out and Brendan (on the right) helped me paint it one day while Drew was at work. Brendan is very tall (helpful for the high parts), very funny (helpful for the part where we spend hours together), and very kind for offering to help his dinky sister in law paint things. He also came to Ikea with me one day, which turned into quite an adventure and ended with him getting stuck in the trunk. Story for another day.

From santorini.com

Drew requested a blue room, so I searched for a blue that wasn't too dark and wasn't too "baby blue" either. The woman who helped me pick the living room color wasn't working the day I went to the hardware store to choose the blue. In response to my request for help, the hardware store guy said "Don't worry about it. People put too much stock in color choices. Just pick a blue and paint the wall with it." Thanks, dude. Really. Very helpful. I'm not very good at controlling my facial expressions, so I think he knows I don't appreciate him very much. Whoops. All by myself, I chose "Santorini Blue," which looks nothing like the blue commonly associated with Santorini.

The blue is much more New England-y than Mediterranean, which is probably good because we're in New England. Here's the room with fresh, white trim and Santorini Blue on the walls: 

Once the room was painted, we had to resume figuring out what to put in it. Too many books leads to a bookshelf on one wall:

Hitler and WWI books, banished from the living room

One of my favorite girlfriends from law school, Kate, kindly offered us her futon. Her mother told her in no uncertain terms not to bring it home after law school, so I'd like to think that we all won. Really though, Drew and I won because Kate stayed with us this weekend (upcoming post: Painting the dining room during a hurricane), we put her to work, and we got to hang out before she left Beantown (sad). 

Once the futon was installed, I decided that we had enough walls painted and enough furniture in its proper place around the house to start hanging stuff on the walls. Exciting because now we won't have blank walls! Stressful because now I'm going to put holes in the walls that will probably be off kilter and cause me headaches! I decided to start big with a photo collage above the futon. We had one of these in our bedroom at our old apartment and it was less than perfect. We nailed a bunch of photo hangers up and hung things on the wall, which resulted in lots of uneven spacing. This time, I decided to be a wee bit more precise. 

There were lots of ideas using butcher paper (which some people just have laying around, apparently), but I went old school and used notebook paper, which I cut to the size of each frame and stuck to the wall. I marked where the nails needed to go, hammered them in (sorry neighbors!) and tore off the paper. 

It worked like a charm! 

If you ever come visit us, this is where you'll stay. Until then, it's a nice place to sit and look out the window and/or read books about Nazis. Hooray!

The Bathroom, a.k.a. A Bandaid Until We Can Renovate

This is the realtor's photo, so it makes the space look nicer than it is.

Of all the rooms in the beige palace, the one that offended me most was (hilariously) not painted off-white. Nope. The bathroom was painted yellow with a purple sponge paint overlay. I couldn't get a good photo of the purple sponge paint part of the bathroom, so you'll have to take my word for it. On the left is what the room looked like in the previous occupants' hands.

This is how it looked when we moved in.

Note the abnormally tall sink - 39 inches tall! I actually have to stand on my toes to wash my face. Embarrassing to admit on the internet, but true. Also note the abnormally short toilet. Next to that sink, it's pretty ridiculous. It's also low-flow, which is good for the environment but means we need to purchase a plunger (our old apartment had a toilet that flushed with the strength of a black hole. It was amazing and didn't clog one time in the three years we lived there). The floors are old linoleum and the bathtub may have actually been painted at some point. It's finish is chipping and bubbling in places in a very non-bathtub kind of way. Curiouser and curiouser... The lighting is also terrible. Thus, the award for room in most need of renovation goes to: THE BATHROOM. There is not one thing about this room I wouldn't change if I had a million dollars (or a couple thousand and a contractor, or several hundred and some DIY skills).

Close up on the gross moldy linoleum.

Even though I'd love nothing more than to rip out that linoleum, kick the sink to the curb, and buy a new bathtub, now is not the time. We can't structurally fix this room right now, but that doesn't have to mean we live with it the way it is, right? Right.

Bandaid time!

We painted the walls with "Rodeo" (a light, warm gray), bought a new shower curtain at Target, painted the trim and sink "Simply White," and hung blue towels (not because they match terribly well, but because that's the color we have).

Ta-da!

Much better! 

Until we have the money and/or skills to deal with this permanently, I'm pretty happy with the transformation!

The Bedroom, Part 1

There are lies and untruths and half truths all over the internet, and I aim to fact-check this blog so I'm not contributing to the mess. As it turns out, the color of the living room is Spiced Apple Cider, not Spiced Pumpkin. Yes, they are both delicious, New Englandy, autumnal things. Yes, they are nearly identical to one another. No, neither food item is actually the color that Benjamin Moore says they are (see swatches, below). Whatever. Spiced Apple Cider provides the backdrop for the nonfiction-but-not-Hitler-or-WWI book collection and the vase of tilted sticks.

Actual Spiced Apple Cider (from www.myrecipes.com)  

BM Spiced Apple Cider

Actual Spiced Pumpkin (HOW GROSS DOES THIS LOOK??) 

BM Spiced Pumpkin

Glad we got that sorted out. 

Now for an update on our latest house-related progress. I've been waiting to post until rooms are "done," which I realize is a huge mistake because none of the rooms will ever be "done." After we painted and arranged the living room, we tackled the "master" bedroom. I put that in quotes for two reasons. First, because of the weird gender implications of calling it the "master" bedroom and second, because it's no bigger than the other bedroom, has a smaller closet, and is the only room in the house where the windows haven't been replaced. The other bedroom even has a ceiling fan. Really, it's just the bedroom we've decided to sleep in. I forgot to take a "before" photograph of the room, but you can see the paint color here: 

Look! More off-white! With yellow undertones!

You can also see the old water damage beneath the window that we had to repair before painting. With Drew out of town, the first fix-it job in the new house fell to me. The guy at the hardware store told me to scrape off the old paint, prime the surface, smear compound all over the place, prime it again, and then paint it. He said it would look like nothing ever happened. Okay, Mr. Hardware Store Man. I can do all that. 

One evening, after staring the wall into submission, I stuck a 5-in-1 tool in a paint bubble and started prying. The scraping was sort of cathartic, in a way. There were paint chips everywhere (yes, I put down a drop cloth first). Then there was plaster dust. I was rather enjoying myself, but then I remembered that all the houses in New England are covered in lead paint and I was probably breathing lead paint dust. Gaahhhh!!! No, I wasn't wearing a mask. No, I didn't have the windows open (it was pouring rain). Yes, I do have many years of higher education and a pretty healthy dose of common sense (that I forgot to use). I did the only sensible thing and immediately googled "lead paint poisoning." I came across several very scary articles about what can happen if you inhale lead paint dust including the fact that it only takes 1/10,000th of a packet of sweetener worth of dust to poison an adult, that you will give birth to babies with tentacles, and that you will have intestinal distress forever. Worst. Thing. EVER. I immediately took a shower (to wash off the dust that was seeping through my skin into my bloodstream). Then I decided to just keep going. Most of the scraping was finished, the bedroom was covered in paint chips, and the hardware stores were closed. If I was going to poison myself, I had already done so, and I couldn't very well leave the bedroom a mess. Then I remembered the entire building had been gutted in the late eighties, when lead paint was illegal. Phew (ish). Here's a photo of the scraped and partially primed wall. 

I forgot to take a photo of the scraped wall because I was busy panicking.

Then I put compound everywhere:

Then I primed it again and, voila! Ready to paint. Drew came home and said "nice job on the wall." As though this even comes close to recognizing the painstaking scraping, priming, compound-smearing, obsessive googling, and worrying about how our future children will have tentacles. But whatever. 

Drew had to do the high parts because I'm a midget, and now the room is a pleasing shade of gray:

Speaking of "a pleasing shade of gray," if you've never tried to find the perfect gray to paint a room, quit while you're ahead. Just as there is such a thing as "warm whites" and "cool whites," there is such a thing as "warm grays" and "cool grays." Because the house doesn't get much light, I thought it was important to find a "warm gray" to paint the bedroom so that... I don't really know. I forgot that we mostly sleep in the bedroom and that the precise shade of gray was probably not that important. It seemed crucial at the time. Finally, I was too confused about everything and, without buying a paint sample, bought a gallon of Benjamin Moore "Willow Creek," which is a brownish-gray. This could have been a disaster, but we put it on the walls and it looks like a regular gray, but is much more cozy. WIN! 

Then came the matter of furniture arranging. As previously mentioned, neither of us have any skills in this department. The room has a closet on one wall, windows on two walls, and a door on the fourth wall. Accounting for needing to open the closet door and the door into the room, we had two walls that could accomodate the bed. One also has the door into the room on it, which would have made for an awkward entry and also deprived one person of a nightstand. Not ideal. The other wall has a window on it that is 26" from the floor, which is exactly the same height as our box spring and bed, sitting on the floor. I didn't really like the idea of sleeping with my head against a window, so we were at a loss. Then Drew made a bold suggestion: What if we put the bed on the diagonal between the two windows? Everyone can have a nightstand, no one will get stepped on by a burglar when he climbs through the window in the middle of the night, and it looks kind of cool. 

BOOM. Conundrum solved. Except for the part where your pillow falls on the floor while you're sleeping (more on that later). Also, that rug is from Ikea and was $20. And I don't think I have lead poisoning. All good things.

Next up - the bathroom!