A "Quick" Renovation

You know what?

I hate renovations.

I know, in just THIS house, we've chronicled repainting, retiling, and/or replacing basically everything in every room, so you would think I like this work.

Nope.

I like the final product, but the mess, the multiple Home Depot trips, the disruption, the whole "rest" of it... yea, I could do without that. This crap is routinely stressful, and nothing ever goes to plan.

Case in point. Last weekend, there were sales on bathroom vanities online. We've been talking about painting the upstairs bathroom and replacing the vanity, which is too small for the space and left an odd-size gap between the vanity and the toilet. We had already replaced the toilet, and liked the flooring well enough. I wasn't excited about another project, but this was supposed to be a "quick" renovation, just some paint, vanity, mirror and light. One weekend, and done.


Well, maybe a little more, since the current setup had one sink, and we decided that two would be better, so Eric would need to get plumbing adapters.

So, while I was climbing the Incline last Saturday, Eric took out the vanity...only to discover that Bruno never bothered to tile the entire bathroom, but had installed the vanity and tiled around it. Also, the vanity was stupid heavy. When I got home from climbing the side of the mountain, I could not lift this thing and get it down the stairs very easily, even with Eric on the lower end. There was a lot of panting and grunting and stopping and general grumbling from me.

With gaps in tiling, that meant that we would have to retile. Eric started to remove the river rock shaped tiles... to discover they came out exactly one stone at a time, with enough grout and mortar dust to look like we had a volcanic eruption. It also took an exceedingly long period of time, and with the small size of the bathroom, it was a only-one-person-will-fit job.

I tried to be helpful, and load up the rubble to take out. I got the first five gallon bucket filled, went to go downstairs, where I promptly got my shoe caught in my pants leg, almost fell down the stairs and dropped the bucket.

I sat on the landing and self-pity cried for a while before collecting the stones and getting out the shop vac and regular vac to get the rest of the dirt, dust and rubble up. Cognitively, I know I need to wash those walls now, but I do not have the emotional energy to do it.

We got the rest of the tile out without incident. I painted the ceiling, the skylight shaft, the walls and the closet.

We looked for tile and I couldn't find anything I liked that wasn't a million dollars, so we ended up ordering some online, with the promise of two-day shipping.

The vanity arrived mid-week, and Eric got our friend Garret to help him bring it up the stairs. It weighs about 300 pounds so I'm not really sure how I'm going to manage it into the bathroom. I'm also not sure about how its going to fit through the door...

The ceiling needs another coat of paint.

The tile hasn't arrived. Wayfair told us because we bought more than one box of tile (imagine!), it changed the shipping. It won't be here for two weeks.

Quick renovation...