A couple weeks back I wrote about some fancy renovations we wanted to do in the first floor bathroom. After thinking it over some more, though, it seemed like we might want to focus our efforts and budget on a part of the house where we spend more time. For now, we did some minor renovations on the bathroom that at least get rid of the derelict look of primer and peeling finish. The scaled back project involved painting, replacing the wall sconce, the peeling faucet, the towel racks, and the mirror. We also put in a little wooden table and a rug. The big changes – swapping out the toilet and sink, replacing the floor, and taking out the plastic stall shower to replace with a tile version of some kind – are going to wait for another time. We’ve still got some touch-ups to do and need to hang some stuff on the walls, but all in all it worked out pretty well.
The new look.
We got a huge assist on this work from the Habitat for Humanity ReStore in Newburgh. If you have one in your area, I highly recommend checking in there as a first pass option for all your home improvement materials (not to mention furniture). We ended up with a new faucet, a wall sconce, and a pie safe (which we’re using as a table/storage unit in the bathroom) for a grand total of $20.
Installing the faucet in the sink wasn’t complicated, though it did suffer from the same “nothing’s easy” syndrome as most seemingly-simply renovation projects. First of all, as we tried to turn off the water supply using the valves underneath the sink, it quickly became clear that you could turn the valves all you wanted and water was just going to keep coming. So we ended up having to shut off all the water in the house (using the valves on the hot water tank and the water main in the basement) to change one faucet. The thorough DIY-er would have replaced these valves, but this seemed like it was going to involve taking out the section of pipe the valves were soldered to, which would in turn probably mean taking out the cabinet that the sink rests on. We decided to put this off until the larger bathroom renovations down the road. Then it turned out that reaching the corroded nuts that secured the faucet to the underside of the sink wasn’t easy – even with the basin wrench I bought for just that purpose, but that was eventually resolved by jamming a pair of pliers back there and flailing around until the nuts came loose. Then it was time to put the new faucet in. Luckily, it came with flex supply hoses already attached that looked like they would be long enough to connect to the supply pipes. Looked. In fact, they came up a good 6 inches short, so after I got the old faucet out, I realized that we needed to go buy longer hoses, but in the meantime we had to connect something to the supply so we could turn the main back on. At first I tried to remove the copper supply lines from the old faucet, but those were so badly corroded that I couldn’t get them off. So I reconnected the old faucet and tightened it up enough to keep dripping to a minimum (taking the old hardware off had roughed it up enough that I couldn’t get it to totally seal up again) and then packed the bottom of the cabinet with towels until we could go back to the hardware store the next day. In the end, I guess it was worth it.
The light fixture offered similar challenges, largely because it seemed based on the packaging like it was originally intended for some kind of commercial installation (a hotel maybe) and so it came with no instructions or even a brand name we could use to look it up online. It also seemed like it required some kind of handleless screwdriver to attach the screws to the mounting bracket behind this decorative cone piece. After taking the fixture apart (3 minutes) and removing the cone thing, I put it back together (90 minutes) and was able to install it. I think it look pretty good even without the cone.
We had been wondering what to do with the back of the door, which looked pretty rough after removing the most recent layer of wallpaper. After the half-measure of patching over wallpaper seams on the walls yielded less than stellar results, I decided to just bite the bullet and strip the paint/paper. Here I was expecting a huge pain in the ass, but some alchemy of multiple paint and paper layers somehow created the ideal medium for heat gunning and I managed to strip the whole thing in less than three hours. I did some initial sanding as well to get the remaining paint remnants off, but we had guests arriving for the weekend and I knew we wouldn’t have time to do a good job sanding, staining, and applying poly. We’ll need to go back and finish this part of the job soon, but even in its rustic state it sure looks better than before.
We also had a series of minor fiascoes with the paint (ripped off the wall by the painters tape) and the towel rod (defective hardware and brackets that preventing it from being flush with the wall), but this post is already getting long. Placing the pie safe ended up being the only straightforward part of this project.
I can only imagine what our bathroom would look like now if we had decided to take on the bigger project…
