Evolution of a Bathroom

I'd like to take a moment to rest on our laurels.

It's not that the bathroom's done, but it's so much doner than it has been. Compare, if you will, where we were and where we now are.

March 29 vs. Oct 10

Fresh paint, nice tile, new countertop, new light fixture, new cabinet knobs, painted shutters, new faucet, new mirror and frame...

It's so gratifying. Just so I can really glory in the transformation, I've recapped the evolution of the bathroom over the past 6 months in pictures.

Step 1: paint anything that stands still

Step 2: Replace hideous old tile counter and rotten grout.

Step 3: Replace depressing "Hollywood-style" light bar with shiny new brushed nickel fixture

Step 4: Add new framed mirror

Of course, we're not through. We still need to have the grey backsplash and tub surround re-finished to match the trim, we need to install a light/vent combo by the tub, I need to make the valance for the window, and we need to put in a modest crown molding.

Still, it's finally beginning to gesture towards what it will look like when it's complete, and it no longer has that makeshift, construction-project feel to it.

Coming soon: The Doors, live.

Ah, the Invigorating Fragrance of Latex

You may recall that our bedroom walls were two colors: a sort of deep moss and, to my despair, mint green. It was supposed to be fern green, but the lummoxes (lummoxi?) at Lowe's apparently mis-mixed it. At the time, there was carpet to install, furniture to shuffle, and no budget for repainting. So all this time, I've been waking up in the morning and rolling out of bad to get a faceful of winter-fresh circa-1986 mint green. Yech.

As part of my new push to get the house tamed (I like to think of it as a surge, the end result of which will be shock and awe. In a good way. I hope.), I decided to take back the wall. So we got a new shade of paint (I don't even trust them to attempt "Soft Reflections" anymore. We're now going with "Martinique Morn" instead), put down drop cloths, put up painters' tape, and moved the furniture. The new color is MUCH better (a sort of deep fern), and we plan to get the second coat down tomorrow night. Huzzah!

A rough approximation of Spring Eve (L) and Martinique Morn (R)

I also put a second coat on the three pieces of baseboards and on the bathroom door. That means that by tomorrow evening, if all goes well, the baseboards will be ready to install. I'm still feeling a bit inhibited and reluctant, but at least I've got a little momentum going.

Oh, and I installed our first batch of cabinet knobs in the master bath. They're from Restoration Hardware. They're so very chi-chi that I had to buy them in installations--half this week, half the next. But darn it, they're just so suitable. They match our one original door knob, and they look so adorably fin de siècle. See?

Stylin' but costly new cabinet knobs for the master bath

And finally, we're trying to kill off the burmudagrass (which is threatening to choke our shrubs) by covering it with clear plastic and letting the sun braise it. With astonishingly good timing, the weather has actually been sunny all week for the first time since May, so there is some hope of success.

Potter-related Hiatus

This was a slow weekend on the house as I went into total media lockdown in order to read the last Harry Potter without fear of spoilers. (True story: so I'm driving home from Wal-mart at 5 in the morning on Saturday, freshly minted Harry Potter novel sitting on the front seat next to me, and I think it's probably safe to chance the local classical music station--what are the odds they're going to let slip some key information about the wrap-up of the new book? About 5 minutes later the announcer comes on and says, "People are lining up around the world for the new Harry Potter novel! In Australia, a little girl got her copy, flipped right to the end of the book and--" Fortunately, I turned the radio off in time. I drove home in silence.)

However, we did buy a new toilet for the master bath (its predecessor was leaky. Matt had tried new valves, new wax rings, even a "superflange," to no avail. So we decided it was time to replace the whole darn thing) and Matt "The Beastmaster" installed it. Homeownership changes how you see things. I actually think our new toilet is kind of... pretty.

I also finally broke down and screwed a bunch of faceplates back in. I had left them off with the intention of replacing all of the mis-matched battered old beige outlets and switches someday. It's a dream I keep alive, but after 4 months in the house, it's becoming apparent that other concerns (viz., the new toilet, the baseboards, refinishing the tubs, new light fixtures, mulch and edging...) are going to continue to trump the gentrification of our outlets for the foreseeable future. Anyway, I realized, to my horror, that I was getting used to gaping holes in my wall. Not good. So the plates are back in their rightful, scruffy places.

We've got an action plan for next weekend, and I was awarded a little extra PTO at work for finishing a thorny project, so I think we'll be able to unleash some kickass on the baseboards soon.

No Pix Today

So it's been a while, not because we haven't been working hard (oh, we have!), but because I lost my camera's battery charger in Louisiana, and replacing it hasn't been as high a priority as procuring various doo-dads for the house. I kept thinking it would turn up and waiting to post till I could provide pix. I've finally recognized the inevitable and will be getting a new charger for my faithful and hard-working camera soon.

Meanwhile, here's a text update.

Most exciting (for me): I learned how to drive a riding lawn mower! The Vests very benevolently gave us one of their spare riding lawn mowers, which has been something of a salvation for us. After all, when you own a substantial spread like we do, a push mower just doesn't make the grade! (I speak jestingly, but it's actually the sober truth. Even on the riding mower, it takes well over an hour to mow our little almost-half-acre. With a push mower, it takes the better part of a day.) It was actually rather fun--the wind in my hair, the smell of cut grass, and when you're done, a real sense of accomplishment. Come next weekend, however, when the heat index is in the 100s, I'll probably be singing a different tune.

Also in the garden: We've begun a mulching and edging project that we will complete in installments over the next month or so, a few bags of mulch and pieces of edging at a time. We've had, due to time and budgetary constraints, to throw a lot of plants in the ground without prepping any beds for them, and the bermudagrass has been throwing a fiesta amongst our shrubberies. Now that most of the big projects are out of the way, we have begun to turn our attention to the Burmudagrass Problem. We've cleared and mulched and edged a little corner chunk so far. Modest but satisfying.

Our roses are mostly chipper and bloomy, especially The Fairy, Cramoisi Superieur, Wild Blue Yonder (warning: highly doctored photo--is nowhere near that blue), and Comtesse du Cayla. Our ginkgo, on the other hand, just sulks and mopes and looks chlorotic. And this even though we haven't had a summer this cool and wet since the Cretaceous, when Texas was covered by the Tethys Sea. Ingrate.

On the arboreal front: we've planted 2 lacey oaks (Quercus laceyi/glaucoides), 1 red oak (Q. texana or Q. shumardii?), 1 bur oak (Q. macrocarpa), and 1 white oak (Q. alba), as well as a pear and 5 desert willows. We still have a couple of palms to place (Matt got all of these super-cheap at the nursery), and we need to acquire a baldcypress and a 'Little Gem' Magnolia. And at that point, there will definitively be No More Room at the Inn.

Matt's big project: He's begun tearing down shed #2, the one that covers the hideous oubliette. I particularly regret our lack of a camera for this project because seeing the shed half-stripped is kind of impressive. Especially as he's only given it 6 or so hours of him time. Man vs. shed: one man, one crowbar, one victor.

On the inside: I caulked the bejeezus out of our clapboard hall closet (two tubes of caulking, and there were some spots that I never got to) and finally painted that sucker. This was two weekends ago; I still have specks of latex in my hair. Having a place to put our sheets, paper towels, and light bulbs really made a difference in terms of organizing the rest of the house.

In the bathroom: Matt wrestled with our leaky master bath toilet, not with complete success. He has now replaced a valve, the wax ring (twice), and added a "superflange" (sounds a bit like a blaxploitation movie, no? You'd think it would fix our leak and come with its own matching Cadillac). To no avail. We may have to call in a plumber and/or replace the dratted thing.

(Camera is back in order, so I'm adding in pix--MU 30 Aug 07)
Hall closet with copiously caulked gaps

The baseboards: We bought a couple of 10 x 1 planks to use as baseboards in the kitchen and living room, though we haven't yet worked ourselves up to installing them. One of the complicating factors is that we are trying to match the original baseboards in the kitchen and living room. The problem is that the original baseboards are 1-1/2" thick planks nailed directly to the studs with the wallboard resting on top of the baseboards. The thickness of the wallboards makes the baseboards appear to be only 1/2" thick. For a variety of reasons, we won't be able to replicate this unusual relationship between baseboards and wallboards in the dining room, nor will we be able to find planks that are 10" tall and only 1/2" thick. What this means is that we're going to have very weirdly thick planks as baseboards at the bottom of our walls. So you can see why we've been procrastinating.

Upcoming projects: Next week I plan to order faux (i.e., plastic) plantation blinds for the living room and master bed. No more tissue paper curtains! Maybe a few more of our neighbors will drop by once our home has adopted a more reassuringly middle class appearance. If we don't need a plumber, we may also spring for some new (brushed nickel!) drawer pulls in the master bath and a spray bottle that I can put our ceiling paint into to aerosol-ize it and spray our (disgustingly dingy) AC vents. If only I'd known about this product when I painstakingly hand painted the bathroom shutters with a weency plastic brush with split ends!

When the camera is back in operation, I'll work on the promised Manor/Elgin profile.

Onward and upward!

Memorial Day Weekend

Matt & I had a busy Memorial Day weekend. We finally tackled some of those tiresome, awkward sorts of tasks we've been putting off for a while. We rolled the master bath walls for the third (and final) time, primed the trim, and painted it. We painted the interior of that cabinet I had forgotten to paint. And we also opted to paint the miserable wall linoleum to match the trim. Not sure if it's a viable long-term solution, but it'll do for now.

Freshly painted master bath

In the living room, we (mostly Matt) finished off the edges of the bamboo floors and installed quarter round. On a purely cosmetic level, we brought in a palm and hung the Mexican star Matt gave me years ago when we were living in that weency little apartment in South Austin. Those small changes really make a difference in pulling the scale of the room together, I think.

The living room, embellished

Needless to say, much remains to be done. We ordered a countertop for the bathroom, which should arrive in 3 weeks' time--we'll have to uninstall the old and put in the new, along with its new sink and a faucet. Matt needs to reinstall the toilet, left off by the tile guys. We need to paint the tub and surround with that epoxy finish. We need to buy a new mirror and a new light fixture. And, of course, I need to make the valance, with Ladonna's help. In the long run, a new shower curtain may be in order, as well. However, the paint and the tile were a huge step, and we're able to go back to using the tub qua tub. ("Qua"?!? I must be feeling nostalgic for academia. "Qua" is one of those pointlessly jargony words I once promised myself never to use. Eh well. Perhaps if I apply a metric I could leverage my vocabulary using measurable benchmarks to maximize productivity. Yech. I'm in a whole new world of jargon in the private sector.)

In the living room, we need to do substantial touch-ups to the baseboards and quarter-round and finish hanging the chain for the Mexican star (we ran into difficulties with an insufficiently manly ceiling hook). And, of course, procure some window treatments not held on with tape. The remaining projects in there are long term: make some drapes, re-cover the ottoman with the drapes from the old house, frame some prints, and either buy a sofa cover or a new sofa altogether, budget allowing.

New baseboards for the kitchen and dining room are probably our next big weekend project. Since our walls aren't actually attached to the floor, the absence of baseboards means that any and all creepy crawlies can stroll into our house at will. Mr. Gorbachev, build up that wall! Doing so will almost certainly compel us to get the furniture into a stable configuration, a project with a whole list of sub-tasks unto itself (move Matt's computer, drill a hole through the wall to route the phone connection from the dining room into the study, clean out the wetbar cabinet, move the unhinged study door that's been sheltering inexplicably in the dining room for weeks, &c., &c...). Anyway, I'm looking forward to getting that room somewhat tamed.

Continued Gussying

Master bedroom

We haven't done anything really big lately, just shuffled our possessions around from one room to the next. Oh, and we've hung most of our pictures, which marks a definite commitment toward a permanent arrangement. Matt's been attacking the chinaberry corpse with a chainsaw. It's a shame it's nearly summer--we now have tons of firewood for our little metal fire pit.

It's interesting how our furniture fits in some rooms and not in others. Although the master bed and study are nowhere near finished, you can tell that in the long run, they'll make sense. I mean, none of the furniture matches any other pieces of furniture, but in a slapdash kind of way those rooms looks like they will hang together. Or that's what I think anyway.

Study--the bigger part. The study is shaped like an "L"--this bit is the long downstroke.

I'm not so sure about the living room. We have so much more wall now than we've ever had. Even after we've put up pictures, there are still these vast deserts of emptiness. I do have some boxes of small framed photographs--I'm hoping clusters of those will help somewhat. And then at a later date I'll be putting in long curtains, which may help to tie the top and bottom of the rooms together a little better. A potted tree here and there might make a differnce. But at the moment the room remains a bit of a question mark. The furniture looks sort of lost and forlorn. So much so, that I never sit in there any more. Now I do all my living in the master bed--it feels so much cozier.

Giant empty expanses

Sad little huddle of furniture in the living room

I don't know--what do you think? Do I need a rug? An armoire? A whole bunch more framed pictures? Whatever it is, it can wait a bit--we have everything we need for our day-to-day living, and when we entertain--which is rarely--we can probably just use the dining room.

The dining room is in an intermediate state--it had previously been colonized as a sort of makeshift study, but now that is being dismantled and the whole thing is getting a new personality--half sitting area, half dedicated dining area (something we've never had before). I'm not sure how it's all going to work out, but as there is a squishy chair in the mix, I think it will all be okay.

We've also been working on procuring the necessaries to re-work the obstreperous master bath. We were planning to tear out the beat-up old tub and replace it with a bigger, newer tub (extra deep for our bubble-bathing pleasure!). But when we started tapping on the tubs in our price range at Lowe's, they were all dinky and plasticky sounding. And when we told the tub guy that we were planning to replace it ourselves, he started talking about soldering pipes and setting the tub in sand, and other intimidating things. So now we've rather lost confidence. We're not sure whether to replace the tub with... something or just coat it in epoxy.

So we're shelving that problem for a while, and are focusing instead on replacing the countertop and sink. Naturally, our vanity is an abnormal length, so we're going to have to special order the rotten thing. Finding a person at either L's or HD who has the authority to help us with this problem has been surprisingly difficult--either they're busy, absent, or too snitty to give intelligent help. Aggravating.

So the poor bathroom is in hiatus. Which it's probably grown accustomed to, by now.

Update on the hideous Buick (or whatever it is) in our yard: Matt waited till the car was gone and piled little rock cairns in a row where the Buick used to park (leaving, I might add, huge permanent ruts). For a day or two, it looked like the message had been received. But then he just moved further up our yard (nearer to the intersection with Ave F), where he is no doubt wearing a brand new set of ruts. I ask you--who does this sort of thing? Would you take up permanent residence in someone else's yard without so much as a by your leave? If he stays there much longer, he's going to have squatter's rights to the outer 6 feet of our property, the brazen hussy. The Battle of the Buick continues...

Tile!

This part was easy (except writing the check at the end. And making 4 trips to Lowe's for tile, grout, and hardibacker. And loading and unloading the 70 tons of tile we'd bought. Yeah. Except for those things, it was easy.) It's nice paying someone else to do your work for you. I briefly toyed with taking on the tile myself, but the time, the need for expensive power tools, the wasted money if you screw up... just seemed like false economy, in the end. Also, it seemed like an insuperable pain in the fundament. We've served our DIY time with the paint and the bamboo, I think.

So we go these nice tiles--big ones in the kitchen and hall; little ones in the bathroom (they're porcelain, Mom & Dad, not ceramic. You convinced me.) The kitchen looks SO much more inhabitable now that that nasty old linoleum is no longer visible.
See how much prettier it looks? (Aunt Pauline, if you're reading this, you'll see I took your advice about newsprint in the windows. Only in this case it's tissue paper, as Ladonna had given us a stack for packing purposes. Might have looked a little more polished if I hadn't fastened them with painter's tape. Eh well.) Tomorrow we'll move the island back in, as well as the china cabinet and rocking chair. One step closer to being really, truly, properly moved in! With each step, the house looks better and more... I don't know... satisfying, pretty, pulled together, nice. Anyway, it's gratifying to see the thing I wanted emerge from the thing that was neglected and scuffed and unhappy looking.

Meanwhile, we're still sleeping on the sofabed in the living room.

And we're actually using that weird bathroom/laundry room/mudroom--we're waiting for the grout to set in the other bathrooms, and this is the only one that wasn't tiled. So I shouldn't have made fun of it for being a misbegotten freak of a room--it's actually coming in handy.

I'm sure you'll all feel sad for me when I tell you that this weekend I'll have to finally turn my attention back to... painting. We never finished the master bath, and I have to do the insides of the cabinets there and the insides of the hall closet before we can unpack the things that belong in them.

Ug.

Yeah, about those hardwoods...

Bad news.

We got a flooring guy out this morning to take a look, and he said that the most we could get out of the floors would be 5-10 years. They're antique longleaf pine subfloors, and because they're a softer wood, and old, and in pretty bad shape, he's worried that the top part of the grooves would begin to crack off if he sanded them, as is in fact already happening in the dining room.

So Matt & I conferred and considered and researched, and we've decided to go Pergo instead. Cheap carpet was also an option, but for the public areas we really, really, really want the warmth of something that looks like wood. And the nicer grade of Pergo is actually topped with real wood, so hopefully it will be a convincing facsimile.

So we're going to install it ourselves in the living room and dining room. (The adventure never ends--it just takes a different path. Did Confucius say that? Indiana Jones? Albus Dumbledore?)

The rest of the house, sadly, will get cheap carpet. If we stay there 5 or so years, we'll upgrade to something a little nicer, but for now we're going with uber-functional Berber. (This is the ugly side of Pergo--the shady compromises required to fund the stuff. Ah, well. Appearances must be maintained.)

Meanwhile, the painting continues!

The Ks came out today. Nice friends! I worked their tails off and they brought lunch, too (tasty antipasti sort of thing with meats and cheese and crackers and spreads and tomatoes and olives and salad mix).

Clever Keith installed our new GSDI-whatsits--the plugs that keep you from getting electrocuted in the kitchen or bath--as well as our schmancy new computerized thermostat. He also figured out which outlets/lights were wired to which breakers, with predictably unpredicatable results.

Keith, Being Electrical

We recycled the reject yellow paint from the dining room in the master bedroom closets, which I think was wonderfully frugal of us. And who doesn't want a bright yellow closet? Or two? Kate would like you to believe that she painted the entire built-in and closets with nothing but the weency little brush pictured below.

"I painted this whole thing with just this itty bitty brush!"

Meanwhile, progress was made in the master bath, which used to look like that (below left), but now looks like this (below right).

Our New Master Bath: Decadently Chic or Just Psychosis-inducing?

When Matt first saw it, he started muttering "REDRUM! REDRUM!" and wiggling his index finger at me. I think it will ultimately be tres elegante, but he thinks it looks like I slaughtered a cow in there. Which is silly. A cow wouldn't fit in that bathroom. A miniature horse, maybe, but not a cow.

I don't think I've posted any guest room pix, somehow, though I've been steadily working away at it. Here's the room itself--you may not be able to tell, but it's painted "Churchill Hotel Ecru" with a "Dune Breeze" ceiling.

Guest bedtroom with lovely (if currently obscured) view of great big cottonwood

The bath has "Shadow" walls to match the little desaturated aqua flowers on the valance Ladonna & I are going to make for the bedroom window (above).

Guest bath

And finally, Cathy came out (again--thanks Cathy!) Friday and helped me trim the living room and dining room. (Just a faintly lemony shade of white in lieu of the original dingy white, but what a difference it made. SO much more stylish and coordinated.)

Anyway, she vehemently hated my attempt to control the burnt orange walls with cherry red trim, which made me lose faith in the whole concept, too. So we're going with good old "Golden Beam," which is what's in the rest of the house. If the study wants to be burnt orange, I don't have the energy left to resist it. Will paint door to match tomorrow, though am concerned about paint's ability to stick to a metal surface.

Feral Burnt Orange Study