Reno-cation Week

Get it? Renovation/Vacation week? Sorry - that was my lame attempt to create a new word. It's Monday, I'm going to leave it at that.

Last week was a busy week in renovation-land (aka our house.) It was filled with ups and downs, and since I'm going to cover about a week's worth of details in one blog post, bear with me as it might get a bit lengthy. I'll try not to get too carried away.

The week started to get interesting Tuesday night when I started demolition of the half bath. J came home from work not feeling so great. He went downhill fast as the evening wore on and by the time I was getting B ready for bed, poor hubby was completely overtaken by a nasty stomach bug. I don't know which was worse, emptying the puke bucket or being bugged by B to see what was inside said bucket. The last thing I needed was to be cleaning up B's puke on top of hubby's so I steered him away as best I could. With J being sick and confined to the bed, I ended up with plenty of alone time for some demolition fun. There's just something so satisfying about ripping away trim with my little 6" crowbar. The towel bar was a pain and one side didn't want to come off until I nearly ripped it out of the wall. The toilet paper holder was a true joy to remove though. I have hated that toilet paper holder since the major bathroom tissue manufacturers decided to reduce the width of their rolls. It was originally designed for rolls of a certain width and once that width was reduced, getting toilet paper to stay on the holder was nearly impossible. I threw that stupid thing into the trash with a huge smile on my face! By about 10pm, I was cleaning up and getting ready for bed. By 11pm, I get a call from J's aunt who was at J's mom's house finishing her taxes. Remember, this was April 14th and taxes were due the next day. Well for some reason she was unable to print her return. Great. After cleaning up after J and taking apart the bathroom, I was beat, so I made a plan to stop by early the next morning to try to fix the printer. Then the phone rang again at 1am. This time it was for J - he was on call for work. Lovely.

The next morning it took almost an hour to get the printer running. I have no idea what the problem was (yes I am in IT, however hardware is not my speciality), but it finally started working again after I pulled out the printer cartridges and put them back in. Whatever - it's working now and that's the important thing. The rest of the day was spent removing wallpaper and sanding and staining the new trim around three of our new doors. So I went from being covered in sawdust to being covered in wet gooey wallpaper bits. Let's just say I was very grateful for a shower at the end of the day!

The next three days were spent on what I call the dreaded 3 P's - Patching, Priming, & Painting. One day of patching. One day of priming - 2 coats. And one day of painting - 2 coats.

The end result is a much nicer bathroom, but it's still missing a few things. I need to get new trim, refinish it with stain and poly and install it. Then I need to put up the new hardware I purchased (towel rod, towel ring and toilet paper holder.) Oh and after all that we discovered that the previous owners of our house decided not to screw the existing lighting fixture into any studs or anchor it into the sheetrock. So now there is no way I can safely re-attach it to the wall. Which means we are now in the market for a new lighting fixture! Grrr...

Stay tuned for pictures!