And here it is now:
(By the way, I used to look at home decor and improvement blogs and wonder, "How do they keep their houses so clean?" The answer? They don't. Right before I took this picture, I wiped the dried toothpaste out of the sink, rehung the towel that the kids can't seem to maneuver onto the simple hook, and replaced the gummy bar of dollar store soap with the pristine "company soap." Just keeping it real.)
We learned a lot along the way, and finished just in time to completely tear up the full bathroom upstairs. Both were in desperate need of renovation, but this was beyond anything we had done before. When we moved in, the bathroom looked like this:
It was a nice, big bathroom, especially for an old house. The bottom 2/3 of the wall was covered in forest green and white striped wallpaper with large rose bouquets, and the upper 1/3 was covered in white wallpaper with tiny rose bouquets. At the very top of the wall ran the coordinating border, with large sprays of forest green and burgundy rose bouquets. It was pretty for its day - I had a bedspread in 1987 that was almost identical to the wallpaper pattern. Loved that bedspread. On the walls? A little busy for my tastes now. Almost in the dead center of the floor stood a cast iron claw foot tub with a shower attachment. The previous homeowner had pieced green carpeting around the base of the tub and toilet. It hadn't been installed and stapled down, but was cut in pieces and taped down with double-sided carpeting tape. Since we have multiple boys, carpeting in a bathroom is not a good idea. I won't bother to spell out why. Just trust me. I ripped the carpet up before we moved in, revealing a painted red floor underneath. That red floor now had strips of missing paint where the tape had been. The plaster on the longest uninterrupted wall had begun to crumble rapidly, bowing out the wallpaper and ripping it in spots. This ripped wallpaper was a magnet to my toddler, who could be heard gleefully ripping strips of wallpaper off the walls at random times. We finally were able to stop that, and I patched the rips with clear packing tape where I could for a temporary fix, but the damage had begun. Our nightly routine went like this: bathe a child, hang up their towel, then sweep up the plaster chunks knocked off the wall by the towel, and start over again with the next child. Because that plaster was in such awful shape, it had to come off the walls. Once school was out for my teacher husband and our kids, the work began.
Wallpaper is (mostly) gone! We're obviously not opposed to child labor. Hey, they'll be using it as much as we will.
Pretty, isn't it?
