A Note on Home Renovations

So we've been in our house for six months.  Bathrooms are still not finished!  Never in our wildest dreams would it have taken this long for these small rooms.  No, seriously...they are small!  It's really the only thing we don't like about our house.  Okay, so nothing has been easy in the master bathroom.  At every turn in this process we've had unexpected "issues" arise mostly because of the age of our house.  Let's see...we bought all the supplies and new fixtures back in May, starting with the new shower pan.  Well, shower pans come in standard sizes, such as 32 inches x 32 inches.  That was the closest size to the size of our shower stall, anyway.  Let's just say it took weeks for poor Joe to break up the inch and a half thickness of the old tile and plaster walls (which inadvertently created a fine white dust to rest on every surface of the house no matter how much I vacuumed and dusted).  Once the studs and everything were exposed it turned out the the stall was more irregular in size than we thought.  The rebuilding process of the walls (layers of green board, paper, waterproof stinky stuff that smelled like roofing tar, cement board, grout, tile, etc. etc.) took a lot of precision to make the shower pan fit.  Oh, oh, oh, that reminds me...once the walls and floor was opened up, a strange toxic smell was seeping up into the house and gave me a non-stop headache and made we start wondering if we'd bought a house that was built on top of a toxic waste dump.  The closest thing I can use to describe the smell is sulfur.  The walls and floor were open for about 3 months all together so the smell was there for about two months before we finally asked dad about it.  That's when we found out the drain and all the pipes needed to be completely replaced under the house.  Thank goodness dad is a plumber and he lives two doors down!  We've saved thousands so far in plumbing bills.  What a blessing.  What a good thing that we found out how bad the pipes were before we closed up the wall!  Had we not had everything exposed we would have been making the problem worse for years before finding out.  

So the tiling could finally begin...in August, that is!  As you can see, Joe did a beautiful job in the shower stall.  In these pictures you can't see the floor because of the tarp taped to it to protect it from the paint stripper.  Yes, you heard right, paint stripper...we'll talk about that next.  The floor is the same color as the shower but are 12x12 tiles instead of 6x6.  It looks beautiful.  Let me remind you that before this, Joe had never had any experience in tiling.  What a wonderful craftsman he's turned out to be!  

So the moment I was finally waiting for had arrived --the tiling was done and all we had to do now was slap some paint on the walls and put the new vanity, mirror, lights, and maybe some shelves, get some new towels (which I've been holding off on because I want it to be my fun reward to accessorize after it's all done), a floor mat.  Oh, and the new baseboards, too.  A week tops before my wonderful new bathroom would be finished!  Not!!!!!!

I went into the bathroom all ready to finish taking off all the towel bars, patch, sand, tsp and put the primer on when I realized some of the paint was already peeling off the wall.  Oh, no!  Some moron had painted latex paint over oil-based paint.  That meant we had to scrape all the layers of paint off down to the plaster and start over.  So we started scraping...and scraping...and scraping.  We finally realized the easiest way was going to be using a paint stripper (started that only about two weeks ago!).  It works great but has a terrible smell and hurts my chest to breathe (even the "green" one we are using).  All we have left to strip are the corners in between the door jams and the corners of the walls (spaces about an inch and 1/4 wide..very hard to get in there with a scraper).  

Anyway, that's where we're at.  Hopefully we'll get the rest scraped today while Debbie is watching the kids.  That's the plan, anyway.  Joe is also going to have to cut the tile for the floor in the other bathroom today because Kevin needs his tile saw back (thanks, Kevin!!!) tomorrow.  :)  I'll keep you all updated!