Half-bath renovation

This has been done for a few weeks, but I keep forgetting to share! The half-bath in our home is tiny and sits behind the stairs in our hallway leading to the laundry room and garage. This was the plan for this tiny space:

1. Re-grout the existing tile (even though the tile is a tiny bit crooked)
2. Smooth the ugly over-caulked walls (the previous owners had slathered the stuff on the wall for some unknown reason)
3. Paint
4. Replace all door trim, baseboards and add in crown moulding
5. Replace sink fixture, toilet paper fixture, add in a new towel bar and replace lighting
6. Remove the existing mirror and replace with an oval one

I'm going to go through this step-by-step. This is going to be a bit long, so grab a snack and take a potty break before continuing! Here's a picture before:

1. Re-grout existing tile.
This seemed like a fairly easy task. Jason & I took a trip to the hardware store and bought new grout in a darker color. The existing color matched the tile and it always looked dirty. The store employee showed us a little metal tool that we could use to scrape out the grout. After it was scraped, we then just had to mix the grout correctly, and apply it with a float. (I think that's what it was called.) Sounds easy, huh? Yeah, not so much. After removing the toilet and the sink, it took Jason 2 hours to scrape around one tile with that tool before the tool was deemed useless. We went back to Home Depot and bought this Dremel plus this grout removing attachment. Nope, we didn't pay that much. There was a promotion that day, plus we had some leftover gift cards. I think we paid $40 out of pocket. So the Dremel was a little better. The only problem was that it kicked up dust like a bunch of wild horses stampeding through the desert and made your hand shake for 30 minutes after using it. It drove Jason crazy. Literally. (And why wasn't I doing it? Because the half-bath wouldn't fit both of us!) It still took Jason several hours to get this done. Finally, he was able to put in the grout and we later sealed it with three coats of sealant. Here's the grout before:

 

And after:

2. Smooth the ugly over-caulked walls (the previous owners had slathered the stuff on the wall for some unknown reason)
Apparently, I forgot to take pictures of the ugly mess of a wall. There were two stripes (yes stripes!) of rough-looking caulk or plaster that ran down the sides of the wall next to the toilet. Jason sanded them down and after painting, you could hardly tell where they were. 

 3. Paint

We used Behr paint from Home Depot for the project. "Harbor" went on the walls to coordinate with some towels I had found at Marshall's a long time ago. We used "White Fur" for the trim. Painting trim was a PITA even though we used pre-primed wood. The white we used didn't saturate the wood as well as we would have liked, so it took more coats than expected. Oh, we also painted the ceiling since it was small. We figured the blue ceiling would make white crown moulding really pop!
Here's the towels with the painted wall:

 4. Replace all door trim, baseboards and add in crown moulding
 Neither Jason nor I was happy with our door trim or baseboards. We had talked about putting in taller, more decorative baseboards in the entire house since we have high ceilings. We selected the baseboards, door mouldings and crown moulding that we liked and painted them. Then the nightmare began. We bought these little corner pieces that we thought looked cute. They fit in the corner of each wall eliminating the need to make 45-degree angle cuts on the baseboards. I took out all the existing door moulding and baseboards myself (see...I did something!). Jason then began nailing in baseboards. This is where we figured out that the walls of our half-bath are not straight. At all. The wall behind the sink actually makes an S-curve. That was was bad enough. Then, we found out that rather than nice 2X4's behind the wall, there were some type of metal plates behind the plaster instead. It became a b*tch to nail the boards to the wall. I could hear Jason cursing down the road! Worse yet, the wall next to the toilet has no supporting beam in the corner. The walls are supporting walls, so it's not required, but it meant that one side of our sheetrock was kind of floating. Jason had to very carefully nail it in the wall. Because of this missing beam, we had to leave our dreams of crown moulding in the garage. There's nothing to nail it in that corner and I really didn't want anything crashing down on our guests' heads when they use our bathroom. We thought about Liquid Nails, but we would still need something to hold those pieces up there. It just wasn't happening. The baseboards and wall trim do look nice, though. However, after finding this out about our baseboards, we may abandon the idea of replacing all of them if it's going to be this rough. Here's the before with everything taken out:

 

Here's a picture of the corner pieces and new baseboards:

 5. Replace sink fixture, toilet paper fixture, add in a new towel bar and replace lighting

 This was one of the "easier" tasks. Jason made it a bit harder by replacing the water shut-off valves. He wanted better ones installed, so that was a small project added on. I couldn't find the exact fixture we used, but this is the closest to the lighting: Here. We also bought this sink fixture at Home Depot which I think was on sale at the time. The towel bar and toilet paper fixture we got from this collection at Bed, Bath and Beyond using 20% off coupons!
Here's Jason painting around the newly-replaced water shut-off valves:

 

And here's a couple pictures of the new fixtures and hardware:

 

6. Remove the existing mirror and replace with an oval one
This was way harder than it looked. The original rectangular mirror had been stuck to the wall with a gallon of Liquid Nails. Jason tried to pry it off the wall, but he ended up having to break it before he could take it off. This left three holes in the sheetrock, but the replacement mirror (that I found for $40 at Ross!) was large enough to cover them all up! Here's the finished (for now) view. Lights on!

Lights off!

 

  

I haven't put anything on the wall yet, but I'll get to that eventually. It took Jason so many hours to do this because of all the unexpected obstacles, but I am so proud of him! We are happy with how things turned out and aren't embarrassed to send people to the bathroom anymore! :)

 

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I want this!

Some of you may know that I own a ridiculous amount of jewelry. And even owning this much, my husband still buys me more. And it makes me happy. The problem is that it is all stuffed in bags and drawers where it is difficult to get to. I never remember to check what might go with my choice of clothing for the day. So for some time now, I've been looking for something to put my jewelry in that would:

A. Make it easy to access
B. Be lockable in case I get to one day hire a cleaning lady!

I have found both! I found an awesome jewelry armoire at Pottery Barn (of course!) that just came out. It's the Hudson Jewelry Armoire and it's perfect! Now to convince J to get it........

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The tree is finally gone!

Today marked the continuation of the dead tree saga. Obviously, this went down before I started blogging. I'll do a little catching up here. When Jason & I bought our house last June, we knew we would have to take down a huge dead mesquite tree. After a couple months, Jason's dad came over to help trim it down. They were able to get rid of most of the bulk (without ladders, making it a bit scary). What was left was a solid tree trunk about 7 feet tall and almost 2 feet in diameter that we wanted to give to my uncle. His hobby is woodworking and we wanted it to go to someone who'll make something really cool out of it rather than use it as firewood. So today, my uncle came over with a couple of woodworkers and a tractor. The problem was that the tree was in our backyard and was way too big to fit through our fence door. Plus, the tractor was also too big to fit through the door. The tree guy cut down the huge trunk and then chained it to the tractor sitting in the front yard. Then, after some rolling of the trunk, they were able to drag the trunk to the front yard. Luckily, the yard wasn't even damaged! They estimated the trunk to weigh over 1000 pounds! That's a lot of wood!! Anyway, we thought we'd be working (or, watching in my case) for 2 or 3 house. Instead, they were done in 30 minutes! What a wonder! To refresh everyone's memory, here's what the tree stub looked like. I forgot to take out my camera, but I'm sure you can guess what our backyard looks like without a tree. This is the tree after only one limb was cut off.

Here's my hubby acting as the tree monkey. He was able to climb the tree without ladders. Plus, sometimes he & his dad were passing around the chainsaw while it was running and suspended on a rope! Talk about scary!

Finally, here's what was left of the tree that is now going off to the mill. This is an
"action" picture capturing the fall of the last limb. The tree trunk underneath is what is going. Fun times!

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Dinner at last!

After putting our table together on Saturday afternoon, Jason I went to a Halloween party. This meant that we didn't even get to eat dinner at our new table! Strike one for Saturday. On Sunday, we slowly woke up (after Jason practically slept until noon) and ate some breakfast in the living room. Jason moved on to go work on his truck at his parent's house while I stayed home and did some laundry and cleaning. You know, the FUN stuff. When Jason goes to work on his truck, I know to never expect him home until around 10 or 10:30pm. He just gets so into his work that he doesn't think about anything else. So, strike two for Sunday. On Monday, I did my usual grocery shopping and decided what to make for dinner.....yummy pecan crusted chicken. I even bought some fall-ish flowers for our pretty table to set the mood! Jason came home after work, helped me make dinner and then we promptly walked right up the stairs to watch TV. As soon as we sat down, we both realized that we had a dining table that we could actually eat at. Well, we were already upstairs so we just said we'd do it the next day. Strike three. At this point, you'd think we bought a useless piece of furniture. Finally, last night, Jason & I had our dinner at the table. Jason even got out placemats so our plates wouldn't scratch the table. How sweet is that? The funny thing is what I made for our first dinner at the table: turkey loaf. Talk about the most boring possible thing to make! But, it turned out alright and we enjoyed dinner TOGETHER.

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Hooray for the little things!

Last week, Jason & I bought a dining room table. Unfortunately, we had to wait a week and a half to get it. The furniture store called me late Tuesday night to tell me that the table was in so I told them we would pick it up on Wednesday after Jason got off work. So I met Jason and we loaded up our table (unassembled) and our 6 chairs (assembled, thankfully) between our two vehicles. Assembling the table had to wait that night since we had a meeting with our insurance agent at our house. That took half the night so we thought we'd do it on Thursday. Long story short, Jason & I couldn't put it together until Saturday. So without further ado (and certainly not much fanfare), I present our dining area before, complete with ugly light fixture from the previous owners, kitty feeding station and Pottery Barn boxes that I keep saying I will use for storage.

And here's the dining room table sans Pottery Barn boxes which are now in the living room. You can't tell from the picture, but the ugly light fixture isn't centered over the table. It really doesn't matter because it will get replaced anyway. It's just nice to finally have a table to eat dinner at. Hooray!

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