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.