I'm a little vain about the vanity

I'm finally able to help in this whole process, and I'm pawning my work off on someone else.  This bathroom has a five foot long vanity with a single sink bowl.  We've been asked many times by many people if we're going to add another sink.  The short answer - it would take a massive plumbing job to add a sink.  New pipes, new drain, the whole nine yards.  In the end, I would rather have extra counter space than another sink anyway.  The only time right now that we're in there at the same time is on Sunday mornings, and it hasn't been an issue having one sink.  The vanity looks like this:

except of course the drawers and cupboards are all attached and in the runners.  It's the basic golden oak color, and it's in decent shape.  The drawers all open smoothly and everything is straight.  We looked into putting something new in, but in the end we would be spending money for something when the one that's here is perfectly serviceable.  I still want to update it a little.  My mom has refinished a lot of furniture over the years - I think almost every desk and bed I had as a kid came from a junk store and was stripped, sanded, and refinished by my mom.  We couldn't decide what we wanted to do - stain it darker, or paint it.  Paint, stain, paint, stain, paint, stain...  You wouldn't think this would be such a big decision.  After a little research we've decided to paint it using chalk paint.  This is the "new" darling of the furniture painting world, and I've never used it so it could be a disaster.  This is what we're using:  http://www.anniesloan.com/acatalog/United_Kingdom.html and I picked it up at a paint store in Clovis.  The kids voted on blue, so that's what we're going with.  The vanity is sitting on my parents' patio. (You know how you can tell this picture wasn't taken at my house?  Look how clean the ground is.  Dirt is afraid of my mom.  It sees her coming and just decides it would be better to keep on moving.)  She vacuumed it all out and sanded the doors and sides a little, and we will attempt the painting process next week.  Wish us luck.

The old vanity top is a beige cultured marble.  I don't love the color, but I would keep it if it was in good shape.  However, all around the drain are hairline cracks, and since the sink is integrated as part of the vanity top, it's not like we can just replace the sink itself.

This has been tough - we have discovered that vanity tops are INSANELY expensive.  Really.  There is really only one option in stock in home improvement stores.  It's also a one-piece integrated sink design, and it's all white.  It looks like a hotel counter top.  Again, that's not necessarily a problem, but if the cracks around the drain are a common problem then we will be dealing with this again in several years.  I stayed in a hotel last week with that kind of sink, and there were cracks.  My father-in-law has been helping us sell some of the stuff we've pulled out of the bathroom, and a woman contacted him looking to replace her vanity top because hers had cracks.  Getting a solid slab counter and a drop in sink more than doubles the price, so that option is out.  I called a tile guy to get a quote, and that was even more because of the time to lay the tile.  Right now we're deciding between just going with the in-stock white counter top and hoping for the best, or figuring out how to install tile.  Our budget for this whole project is practically in the negative numbers, so we're trying to be really careful, but we also want to always think to the future.  I don't want to be replacing things in just a few years.

On another note - with all the comings and goings of this project, the door to the house is open a lot.  Matt will prop open the front door, then go around the back to carry in the next heavy object.  Kids will follow him outside, and leave the door wide open until I yell like a shrew at them to just SHUT IT ALREADY!  Then the other day, I saw this:

Um, what is that?

 
Well, hello there.  Perhaps it was gathering warmth from the sunset-colored carpet.  Maybe it was hoping for a bath, and it will now be sorely disappointed.

Is this bathroom finished yet?  I feel like we've been at a standstill for a week.  Hopefully the plumber comes in the next day or two and work can start again.

Where do we put all the toothbrushes?

Six people using one bathroom means we need lots of storage, and thankfully this bathroom already has some built in.  Just as you walk in the door there is a large cupboard and drawer unit built into the wall.

The inside is covered in great old beadboard that's been painted yellow.  If I'm feeling really ambitious at some point I would like to paint the inside white to freshen everything up.  Let's be honest - I'm barely getting to painting the parts of the house you can see.  It's not likely I'm going to get to the parts of the house you can't see for some time.  Yellow it stays.

The outside of the cabinet will definitely get painted once the bathroom has all the elements back in.  I'm planning on painting all the trim as well as the cabinet white, but the paint is pretty worn and chipped in places.  Not relishing the sanding and prepping I'm going to have to do.  Also, there are three different types of knobs spread over the two doors and three drawers.  I guess someone couldn't make up their mind.  (I can't decide between these three......I'll just use them ALL!!  Yes, good plan.)  

The medicine cabinet over the sink had a ton of storage, but that's not going back in the bathroom.  It looked like this:

with the straight Hollywood-dressing-room-style lights over it.  Sorry for the angle - it's now lying on its back in the garage, awaiting a new owner.  Know anyone who wants to buy it from us?  Let's make a deal!  That would be great.  Because of the ceiling slant in the bathroom, we can't use any other style of lights if we still want to use the medicine cabinet mirror that opens.  Since I want to change out the lights, we're going to have to use a flat mirror.  Losing all that storage doesn't seem so bad since there is already so much built-in storage in the wall.

The plumber who will be coming to move the pipes and drain to the corner of the room is on vacation this week and won't start until next week.  The kids bathed again in the wading pool in the backyard.  We went to the zoo today for a much-needed break, but we all smelled a little like the flamingo enclosure.  It will be nice when we once again have a usable bathroom with all of our hygiene tools in one place rather than spread all over the house, outside, or at grandparents' houses.  

Thanks for taking the time to read this absolutely fascinating post about bathroom storage options.  I know it was riveting. 

Walls!

The drywall is in!  We no longer have the cavern behind us when using the "necessary seat" and that is a comforting feeling.  I realize professionals can do this in less than a day, but it took us a couple, or maybe a dozen, days longer.

Once again, I'm impressed that all the little holes cut to allow for pipes, drains, and outlets line up just perfectly.  It's official - my husband is a math genius.  Or a math geek, depending on how you look at it.  The only spot left with no drywall is the corner where the shower/tub will go.  Matt is now beginning to tape and mud the joints.  This is where his lack of construction experience catches up with him.  While the pros make it look easy, it's more complicated than it looks to get that compound smoothed over the joints between drywall sheets.  To make it a little more tricky, nothing in old houses is perfectly square.  I would guess most new houses aren't perfectly square either, but in old houses things are often way off.  There are places where the joints meet nicely at one end of the drywall sheet, and by the time you get to the other end there is a half inch gap in between.  What should we do?  Tape and extra mud!  And more mud!  Aaaand still more mud!

There is not much insulation in this house, just as there wasn't originally in the house we moved out of to come here.  The previous homeowners had added blown-in insulation in the rafters.  Since we had the walls opened, we (OK, Matt) added roll-in insulation in the walls and on the slanted part of the ceiling.  That plywood you see on that slant is the under side of the roof.  We need some heat blockage there.

This house has great old windows - double hung with a diamond pattern on the top pane in most of the house, and a small diamond pattern single pane that swings in on hinges in the bathrooms and closets.  As much as I usually want to save and use old things, the windows need to be replaced for energy purposes.  Many are warped and don't close all the way, or have gaps around the edges that let in bugs and extreme temperatures.  Never fear, one of the old windows has already been used in the garage to replace a window that didn't open to give us some ventilation.  I'm sure everything we take out will get reused somewhere else.  It's the Mennonite in us.

It's great seeing some progress.  I know the demolition goes faster than the installation, so we've had some impatient days here.  We're going on day 15 with no tub or shower in the whole house, so we're grateful to grandparents who let us clean up at their houses.  I'm sure they do that for their benefit also - who wants to be near us after a hot California valley day?  Now we need to wait on the plumber, who is on vacation next week.  We'll keep doing what we can in the meantime, but the next major thing will be to move the plumbing for the new tub and shower.

While Matt is working he has been listening to the Lord of the Rings audiobook.  I can tell from outside the house when he's up there working, because I can hear it through the window.  The entire set is 46 discs long, and he's on disc 19.  Better get moving or he's going to run out of story before he finishes the bathroom.  I guess he can always start over, or go on to the Hobbit.  The bathroom saga is starting to feel a little like "there and back again" anyway.  Endless journey, indeed.

Ceilings are nice to have

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a ceiling!  It's the simple things in life, really.  Some like fancy cars, big vacations, nice restaurants.  I settle for a ceiling.

While a lot of construction like this seems to involve lifting heavy stuff and swinging a hammer, there are some truly amazing things I've observed.  See those two holes cut in the drywall?  The square one will be for a newly installed vent fan, and the round one is for the overhead light fixture.  My husband measures all over the place, then goes outside to the garage to cut those two holes.  When the drywall goes up, those openings miraculously match where they are supposed to.  He has pencil lines drawn all over the thing, using crazy math computations and a homemade compass to draw a perfect circle for the fixture.  This might not amaze many people, but I would truly botch this.  I would cut them backwards with the circle on the wrong side of the square, or they would be off by a couple of inches and I would have to figure out how to patch them awkwardly.  This is why the job is not left up to me.  Also, I get overwhelmed easily by complicated math.  But that's another story.

Once again, that 90 degree turn on the staircase proves a challenge for getting those large sheets of drywall upstairs.  My brother-in-law gave up a good part of his day to help.

Look at that!  Pastor Malcolm holds up an entire sheet of drywall with only his fingertips!  It's like his superpower. 

My almost-sixth-grade son went to summer camp last week.  When he left, there was a plaster ceiling in here.  When he returned, the new ceiling was up.  To him, there has been no progress while he was gone.  It was like all work stopped.  I think he is missing the nuance of ceiling material.

Next up - covering up the cavernous opening behind the toilet!  That toilet was my Mother's Day gift last year.  I'm easy to shop for.

It's starting to be aromatic around here

Every last bit of plaster is now gone.  The straight part of the ceiling is open all the way into the rafters.  In the middle of the night I'm convinced a possum is going to drop on my head.  I realize this is highly unlikely, but the paranoia is still there.  I refrain from looking up, just in case something is staring back at me.

So now we have no tub or shower in our entire house.  It's 105 degrees.  Those two things should never go together.  I really have given serious thought to the wading pool idea, at least for the kids. 

 Wait!  Aw, come on, I just filled that...

I guess it doesn't seem to bother this kid much.  What's a little dog hair in your bath water?

So back to the rafters.  The bathroom is now completely empty, except for whatever is living in that rafter space.

My husband says he can cover that rafter space with the first sheets of drywall, so hopefully that will happen in the next couple of days.  There is still a usable toilet in there, but the kids avoid it if at all possible right now.  With no lights it's awfully dark and creepy in there.  We have four and a half weeks left before school starts.  Think we'll be done by then?

To keep, or not to keep

I hate big decisions.  I want someone else to make them for me and I'll just learn to live with them.  Does this make me a chicken?  Quite possibly.  The tub -- I've always loved the look of those great rolled-side claw foot tubs.  They're so classic.  And then I used one, nearly every day for the last year.  I still love the tub, just not so much the shower attachment.  The curtain makes an oval around you as you shower, so you have curtains sticking to you from two sides.  There is a shampoo shelf that hangs from the shower attachment, just big enough for two bottles, a bar of soap, and a razor.  

Are we the only family who uses about 4 different varieties of shampoo and almost as many conditioners?  I'm not sure why we can't all use the same thing.  Hair hygiene must be really important to us.

We went through many debates about whether we should keep the tub.  Adding to the confusion was the fact that the tub was nearly in the middle of the room.  We finally ran out of time - the only remaining plaster to be removed was directly above the tub and it needed to come out for that plaster to be reached.  If the tub had been all the way in the corner, I think I would have left it.  To move it to the corner, we would have to cut into the floor and move the pipes and the drain.  If we were going to move the plumbing, then why not put in a new tub and shower with more space and shelving?

Once we decided to remove the tub, the work began.  Cast iron tubs are HEAVY, or so I'm told.  Once again, my job was to keep kids out of the way while the real work took place.  My father-in-law and brother-in-law came to help.

The staircase this tub needs to travel down makes a 90 degree turn halfway down, making the move a little complicated. 

(Kindly disregard the orange carpeting.  We'll deal with that in a later post.  Hopefully.)

Quick strategy meeting.

And the final approach.

 At this point I'm convinced I need to make copies of these photos, so the men can take them to the hospital with them.  It's hot, and the tub is incredibly heavy.  I refrained from saying, "Wait!  I changed my mind and want to keep the tub!  Take it back up, boys!"  I just don't think they would have appreciated that at this moment.  We decided to put the tub in the garage for now while we decide where to put it.  At the moment we're considering keeping it somewhere until we can add a full bathroom downstairs and use it there.  That is yet to be determined.  The garage is around the back of our house, so rather than carry it all the way there, they did this:

The tub is now upside down in the garage, and the men are making appointments with their hernia doctors.  Bless them.

The Walls Came Down

Now that the wallpaper is off, we had to decide what we were going to do with the walls.  This was one of those projects where we really didn't know our direction ahead of time.  We knew we had a certain amount of demolition to do, but we made decisions along the way about what it was going to look like in the end.  Keep the vanity?  Paint it?  Stain it darker?  Keep the vanity top?  Get a new one?  What about the faucet?  Take the plaster off?  Drywall over it?  Just chip off the crumbling parts and put drywall over everything else?  The top part of the wall under the lighter wallpaper and the border was traditional plaster and was in decent shape, but the bottom of the wall had been covered with some kind of slurry coat, also of plaster, and then was stamped with a brick pattern.  It's a little hard to explain, but it was probably very nice when it was first done.  It gave the room some texture on the bottom and dressed up the walls.  However, after 90 years that was the problem.  That slurry coat was chipping off in large sheets, and when we ripped the wallpaper off we could see where it had already been patched several times.  Patching it again was not an option, and once we started chipping plaster, we ended up removing all of it.  ALL of it, including the lath underneath.

 Maybe we'll just leave it like this.  On the other side of the wall to the right is a storage room and water heater closet.  It's a little disconcerting to sit on the can with a gaping cavern behind you.  

It took my husband about a week of solid work to get everything out of there.  In the middle of this job, our temperatures were hitting anywhere from 103-108 degrees.  We have no air conditioner, and because of the plaster dust he kept the bathroom door closed to try to keep the mess to a minimum outside of the bathroom.  I don't know how he did it.  While the vanity and sink had been taken out right as the work began, we left the tub as long as possible and worked around it.  Since this is the only full bathroom, we will have no shower or tub options once the tub comes out.  I guess we could use the wading pool in the backyard, but I don't think the neighbors would appreciate that.

My mom thinks it looks like a cabin.  What kind of cabins has she stayed in?

One of the fun things about older houses are the quirky architectural details.  The ceiling in this bathroom is partly under an eave, so there is a small section of straight ceiling, and a large sloped area over the vanity and toilet.  The attic crawl space is also in this bathroom ceiling.  There was a large amount of loose insulation directly over the bathroom, so before my husband could take the ceiling plaster off, he got into the attic with a rake and scooted as much of the insulation as possible off of the ceiling.  A fair amount still fell to the floor, but it was better than it might have been.  Also, crawl spaces were made for 100 pound men back in the day, and not the, um, more substantial size many men come in now.  I think he's planning on enlarging that crawl space hole.

One final note - when I say "we" are renovating the house, it is in much the same spirit that a man says "we" are having a baby when his wife is expecting.  They both plan, buy things for the baby, and can be excited and frustrated about the process, but in the end one person does most of the work.  So "we" are renovating the house - my husband chips plaster, rips off lath, cuts into the floor, takes out tubs, moves appliances, and scrapes insulation.  I paint and bring the Gatorade.  It is highly unlikely at any time during this process that I am going to look like this:

He smells as good as he looks too.  Now, where should he shower?