Sunday, March 21, 2010

Back to the bathroom remodel

When we last left our intrepid house owner, she had unwisely decided to tackle an outdoor project and an indoor bathroom model in the same spring. The bathroom project got set aside for a while, but now it's BACK!! So after a few elbow grease sessions scraping off ugly wallpaper (pictured in a previous entry), here's where the project stood:

Hurray! No more ugly wallpaper! Next, paint. In this case, Coral Gable Biltmore Mediterranean Caramel. I guess for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, you have to have a fancy name. I just tell people, "It looks like cinnamon":
My original plan for the floor/ugly linoleum was to simply put new linoleum on top. Then I had a conversation with a friend, who asked, "How hard is it really going to be to get that linoleum up? What's underneath it?" I decided to find out. Here's what I found:
Score! More red oak, just like in the rest of the house. I started having dreams of beautifully refinished wood bathroom floors. Then I pulled up the rest of the linoleum by the toilet and found this:
Hmm. Not so pretty. A friend said I could sand the black sticky stuff off, but as I continued to pull up linoleum, I decided that no matter how much I tried to sand, it just wasn't going to look as good as the hallway wood just on the other side of the bathroom door frame. Here's how everything looked post-linoleum removal:

I'm going to tile. Anyone feel like helping? It's my spring break project-- along with removing a half-way torn-off gutter, rehanging a gate, and carpenter bee-proofing one last part of the balcony off my bedroom. Woo . . .