OT: Renovations, part 3--upstairs bathroom (Warning! Pic heavy!)

[MorningGlow]

Hola, ASAHers! Been a while, but as promised, here are more renovation updates. In this chapter...the upstairs bathroom. When last we left our hot mess of a house, the upstairs bathroom was one of the rooms most in need of help. In a big, big way.

On Christmas Eve four years ago, Mr. MG and I left MG Jr. with grandma and went to the house. I had informed him that I was not going to move into the place (which we did shortly after Christmas) unless we replaced the toilet. I refused to clean it. It was that bad. (Anybody see Trainspotting? Like the domestic version of the famous toilet in that movie.) So Mr. MG pulled out the old one and put it in the front yard as a statement of what he thought of the house, and put in a new one. We also pulled off the square rose-colored wall tiles on the sink wall and found out that they were metal! Apparently they were a Montgomery Ward product specific to the mid-'50s. Unfortunately they were beyond saving, and into the giant dumpster they went, along with the rose-colored sink with corroded metal legs.
I scrubbed the tan tub and found out it was actually white. :scared: Can we say FIL-THY? We yanked out the soap-scum-caked tan tub surround (no, I wasn't about to try to clean that either), but then we ended up with the bare plywood that had been underneath. I spent four years with $3 shower curtain liners stapled to the plywood; every few months or so I'd yank them down and put up new ones. So I was reeeaaalllyyy ready for actual, you know, tiles. ;)

Anyway, I don't have photos of the original sad state of things, but I can start mid-renovation. And you know? Maybe it's better for your stomach that way.


Above: Mid-renovation. The ceiling light (and the sconces next to the mirror) are ours. Yep, they replaced nasty corroded light fixtures. I really like the ceiling light; it's retro, and fancier than your average bathroom ceiling light, but not as over the top as a chandelier, which is all the rage right now. That's a bit too much for a bathroom (just my own preference).


Above: New wall tile, old squares of floor linoleum. The black rectangle under the toilet is an old slate plate that used to be required in upstairs bathrooms; it has a groove all the way around it, to catch any water from a leaky toilet. I wanted to keep it, because I thought it was cool, but unfortunately the floor was so uneven that they had to tile over it. :(

And now piccies of the finished product (yay!):







Below: Two shots of the cabinet in the bathroom. Storage goooood. The only bad thing was that one of the workers put the utility hinges on the outside of the cabinet doors. Wrong! (He did that because the carpenter made them so exact to the size of the openings that you couldn't slide a piece of paper between the doors and the frames.) So I spent a couple of days sanding down the doors and putting the hinges in between the doors and the frame, where they belong. Girl power! :D

[SeattleGirl]

1. Very nice, MG!

Girl power, indeed!

[MorningGlow]

3. Thanks, SG!

:hi:

[Delphinus]

2. This looks sooooo nice!

It's wonderful when you have the abilities to make such beautiful transformations. You two are a good team!

[MorningGlow]

4. Thanks, Delphinus!

But although we did a lot of "ripping out", I hired contractors to do the "putting back together". Mr. MG ran out of steam (and time), and after 3 1/2 years, I ran out of patience.

[Mist]

5. Great job! How happy you must be to get that shower surround tiled. And I agree

100% about not having a chandelier in the john--considering the propensity of dust to stick to a damp surface, how much cleaninig time would be given to polishing every little bauble on a chandelier to keep it looking good?

[MorningGlow]

9. Thanks, Mist!

:hi:

I like to look at pictures of bathrooms with chandeliers in them, and watch home improvement shows on HGTV where they do that kind of thing, but I am in no way capable of keeping something like that clean in my own bathroom. I have enough of a challenge keeping things tidy at eye level and below! Plus there's no vent fan (we just do the old-fashioned thing and open the window a crack), so the dust and stuff billows around on the waves of steam every time someone takes a shower. Not a good setup for a chandelier!

Hee--serendipity--that reminds me--I remembered to put the complete Upstairs, Downstairs DVD set on my Amazon wish list for Christmas. Phew. I recall in one of the first episodes a bit where Rose, the head housekeeper, showed some underlings how to keep the crystal chandeliers clean and sparkly by taking them down (I think they lowered on pulleys) and wiping EVERY bauble with bluing wash. Weird, the stuff that sticks with you, eh? :crazy:

[Kind of Blue]

6. So fresh and clean. That sink is to die for!

Curtins, simple but elegant. Lovely, MorningGlow :)

[MorningGlow]

10. Aw, thanks, KoB

:hi:

Curtains are Shabby Chic at Target--LOVES me some Target! That sink (just a normal one from Lowe's or Home Depot--I forget) was our second one in there. First I picked the white square vanity, but every time anyone wanted to use the toilet, they'd bang their knee on the corner. Too big. So we yanked it out and kept it--pretty much designed the downstairs bathroom around it so we didn't have to sell it.
:rofl:

This one:

[northernlights]

7. your house is lookin' so much happier

now that she's had her face lift! It's nice, isn't it, to soak in a new, improved tub with shiny clean all around :hug:

congrats on a beautiful job all around!

[MorningGlow]

11. Well, I can't soak in the tub just yet

Apparently there's a leak in the pipe attached to the overflow plate (and as a female I love to overfill the tub) and because there's no ceiling in Mr. MG's office, which is the room below the bathroom, he gets blopped on the head if any water goes through the overflow plate. Must remedy that--and THEN I get my bath!

Thanks for the :hug: !

[kentauros]

8. Very nice!

You've done well! :thumbsup:

I don't understand the "problem" with the hinges, though. To me, if they work, it doesn't matter where they are or what they look like :P

The slate with the groove makes me think that perhaps the purpose was no so much that the toilets leaked, but that before air conditioning, they would sweat with condensation ;)

The one major thing I've never understood about house design, though, is why a utility room is the only room that gets a floor drain. If I was designing a house from scratch, there would be drains in every room that had plumbing, i.e., the bathrooms, the kitchen and the utility room. So much damage could be saved by such a simple thing :)

[MorningGlow]

12. Thank you kindly once again!

But--tchuch--men! Of COURSE it matters where the hinges are put, ya silly! :P Wimmins know these things. (J/K ;) ) Actually I had bought utility hinges, which are, as the name implies, simple and ugly and meant to be hidden with only the hinge part sticking out. When they ended up on the outside of the cabinet and then the contractors went their merry way for a while, I tried to replace them with decorative hinges, but because of the cabinet configuration they just wouldn't fit. So I went back to the utility hinges and MADE them fit.

Good point about the condensation--I had forgotten that--and our toilet does sweat in the early summer for a couple of weeks.

Also good point about floor drains. I agree completely--and how hard would it be to include them? There's a small bedroom next to the bathroom--no closet, barely room for a bed, so it might have been a maid's quarters or a trunk room--that I'd like to turn into an upstairs laundry. We have a HE washer that uses very little water, so there's no worry about flooding if it breaks, but even so I know the idea of an upstairs laundry room strikes fear in people's hearts--all because we don't have an ongoing tradition about having a drain in any room where there's plumbing.