Renovation Nation: Or How I Spent My Summer Vacation, Part 1

Whew! I’m beat like a carpet, but I can’t sleep, which is why I’m writing a blog post at is-it-*that*-late-already o’clock.

The house still has the faint aroma of homemade chili con carne (watch for the recipe soon!), and I’m pretty tired after a day of working on our latest reno project; the guest bathroom. As I wrote in this post, we are ~~in battle with~~ working on a number of fronts here at the BirdHouse, with the guest bathroom being the area we decided was a) too heinous to leave as it was, and b) easy enough to fix quickly.

Ha. Quickly. Har dee har har, Oh my aching sides. I am such a riot.

To the point, we are idiots. As my sister, a homeowner in her own right, told me recently, there is No Such Thing as a quick and easy renovation job when you own a house! Everything just takes longer, since to get to the thing you wanted to fix/upgrade, there are usually 3-5 other things that have to be done first virtually every. damn. time. IT NEVER ENDS.

But regardless of that sobering fact, with our bathroom sink in the middle of our living room, the bathroom mirror in the hall, and shreds of wallpaper EVERYWHERE, it’s still worth it! We will be able to look at this little room in which we do our, ahem, business, and be proud of our accomplishment in not only making it look the way we want it to look but also repairing the (many) mistakes made by the last aspiring renovator who owned this house before us.

So for now, we will be pleased that we have finally removed all of the heinous wallpaper and border (cherubs no more!), washed the walls down with copious quantities of TSP to remove the massive slatherings and gobs of wallpaper paste EVERYWHERE, patched all the holes from various screws, anchors and nails left behind (THANKS GUYS), removed the sink, cabinet, towel rack, wall light, and mirror, and replaced the broken, leaky faucet with a shiny, fancy new one (it is quite lovely, even thought it;s my second choice; my first choice was $668.00, so that was nixed immediately by my better half…and who could blame him? That’s a CRAZY amount of money to spend on a faucet. Right?) We also have a new matching towel holder, floor register, and wall sconce to put in after I paint the room tomorrow.