It’s Been Almost a Year!

By Joe at 27 April, 2010, 8:40 pm

As often happens, doing the work on our house has quickly taken precedence over writing about doing the work. This, among other things, I blame for our complete lack of updates over the past 8 or 9 months. Since our last update we have redone the bathroom, and moved to the upstairs to continue the never ending battle against wallpaper.

I know it’s a little late for this, but here are some photos from our bathroom remodel (we did take them, we just never posted them). We did this during a week of vacation starting just after Christmas of 2009, and wrapped it up the last day of our break before going back to work. Unfortunately (and slightly because of embarrassment) we got a little hasty with the wallpaper and didn’t take any before pictures with the old wallpaper in place. Suffice to say it was a mess and was peeling at all of the corners. The floor (also barely represented in these pictures) was a yellowing linoleum tile. Not very nice.

Our old vanity and an idea of what the floor was like.

The old inset medicine cabinet and vanity light.

The old tub surround and a part of the wall.

The walls were pretty beat up underneath all of the wallpaper, and it looked like there had been some tile halfway up the wall at one point which contributed to the rough plaster. This was nothing, however, once we removed the old tub surround.

Years of showers with bad caulking resulted in this mess of a wall underneath the tub surround. The plaster was rotted. Not good.

I wasn't prepared for the wall to need to be replaced under the tub surround, but that's what had to be done.

I cut about a foot and a half out of the plaster all around the tub with a RotoZip (which did a great job, by the way), and replaced it with some greenboard. After a few healthy coats of joint compound, the wall was good as new.

Our next task was to replace the subfloor under the toilet. The wooden plank subfloor must have had some water damage, and just continued to rot for however many years. Gretchen’s dad helped us cut out the old floor and put in a new one.

From here on out we were working non-stop. Not having “facilities” is no fun. We quickly removed the old linoleum tile, removed any tacks and nails, painted the wall behind where the new toilet would go, and got started putting in new floor. Check out what was under the plywood that was under the linoleum.

We picked up some Ikea Tundra flooring and liner.

New Years Eve 2009 was celebrated by installing a new toilet!

Then we primed, painted the ceiling, and then painted the walls. We went with Olympic Premium paint again, this time a semi-gloss for kitchens and bathrooms.

We don’t have any pictures in the time between installing the toilet and finishing up, so I’ll skip ahead some. After painting we put a new tub surround in, put together and installed the new vanity and sink, patched up the wall some and installed a new medicine cabinet and then a new light. When everything was done I put some base molding around the new floor. Here are the “after” pictures.