My hair is long again and it seems I may have gotten a few up against recession in the last few rounds. The latest battle was me (and Leah and Dad) versus an ugly bathroom!
But it’s a recession Rhett, you can’t go around spending money, doing renovations on a bathroom. It’s true, but there are ways—young padawan learner. You must learn from your MASTER! In a perfect world, we would have tore up that bathroom and started fresh. But you were right—we don’t have that kind of money. So you have to improvise. And that’s just what we did.
In a perfect world we would have replaced the… counter top, vanity, toilet, flooring, tub, faucets, lighting, sink, etc.
In a recession world, when your wife is a student, we replaced the… toilet (LOW FLOW, 6L FLUSH, AND WHAT?!), counter top, faucets and the lighting and bathroom fan we had already replaced. Plus, Leah and I had recently repainted the bathroom (and vanity (worst job ever)) in effort to spruce it up.
So we made a mess. Tore it all apart.
And then moved towards putting things back together.
Dad and I went to Rona and bought a countertop. Apparently there is a difference in width between a kitchen and bathroom countertop, so we got the wrong size the first time. Luckily, they had the same style for both sizes. So it was a quick return (and by quick return I mean we spent half of our time going back and forth from Rona and other hardware stores).
We cut the countertop down to size with a circular saw and cut the sink hole with the jigsaw. The circular saw worked well and Dad cut a pretty true line. However, the wall didn’t agree. As it’s 50 years old it retains the right to be a bit out of shape. So we had to put an angle in it. We attached the countertop and put the old sink in. Leah and I really liked our old sink, it’s very unique (or so it seems to us), and so we just bought a new, pretty faucet for it. We re-caulked everything. Done. Presto chango. For less than two hundred bucks (with toilet rebate from the city) we have a whole new bathroom… sort of. And it looks great.
See the whole photo set on Flickr.
Yay! Now new flooring for the bathroom and baseboards throughout the house…and curtains, and new kitchen countertops, sink, and flooring, new furnace, waterheater….
Soon enough baby. Once you are done your masters I should be able to quit working and you can take care of me forever, right?
Looks great, Rhett and Leah (and Doug)!
We’re totally re-doing our main bathroom this year. We need a new tub and everything else is in pretty poor condition, so we decided to bite the bullet and just do it all. But spending that much money in one room is a bit scary…..
Well, it’s a very important room Jen. If the kitchen is the most important room in the house than logic would seem to indicate that the bathroom is the second most important room.
Let me break it down:
1. Kitchen—food goes in.
2. Bathroom—food goes out.