Bathroom Renos

Let me take you on a little journey called bathroom renovations. We have been living in our house for 4 months now and while I'm not sure exactly when it started, I believe our powder room has been under renovations for more than half of that time. It all started when I was at home full time and decided the tiny little bathroom would be a good project to work on. It would spruce up the house without taking too much effort or money. Boy, was I wrong!!

It turns out that there were some bulging tape joints that we needed to fix up before repainting. This required us to break up and pull off the old tape and mud on two walls and two corners. While it may sound easy, this was not an easy task as much of the mud was stubborn and wanted to stick to the drywall as it was meant to do. Finally it was all off and cleared up and then came the job of retaping and remudding so that we had a smooth wall surface again. This is not a job to be taken lightly and after toiling at this for many nights and weeks, Reuben has finally perfected it. I am now in awe of all those drywallers out there. And in awe of my husband, who figured out how to do this stuff with advice from his father who is many miles away.

When we were almost done with this preparation we noticed a puddle on the bathroom floor one evening and realized that our toiled upstairs had slowly leaked so much water that it had seeped through the tile, floorboard and ceiling drywall and was dripping slowly out of the powder room ceiling. Reuben punctured a bigger hole in the ceiling and water came pouring out. We were amazed that this had happened without our notice. Thankfully, after much taking apart and putting back together of the upstairs toilet the problem has solved itself. The water was leaking out of the tank where it is attached by a huge screw to the base of the toilet. We try not to jostle the toilet so as to prevent this from happening again.

So now, we had the dillema of whether to replace the whole ceiling or just repairing that small patch. Although we realized how much mold there probably was in the ceiling, we decided to just patch the hole. So Reuben set about chipping away at more mud and tape and repairing with many layers of mud until it was perfectly flush.

Then the job was to sand all of the surfaces so that when we paint no bumps will show up. This was a big job not only because of all the new mud and previous nailholes but was compounded because of the ugly chair rail we ripped off and which left a sold line of paint dividing the wall in half. The bottom half of the wall was painted this thick navy blue color (quite hideous). So we had to sand the line where it met with the much less thickly painted top half of the wall.

It's now been sanded and is ready for it's first coat of primer. I'm quite excited. I want it to be modern, cozy and relaxing. Sort of spa-like.

I am thinking of this color for the wall, it's called Creek Bend by Behr.

Or maybe this darker grey with either the brown or red for the cabinet. Aren't paint color names so great!! It's hard to tell colors on the computer but you get the idea. Whatever I do it's going to be better than what is there, that's for sure.