House Made

“after” bathroom



“before” bathroom



view 2



beautiful new toilet



p.e.v.

It’s been KILLING us that we haven’t had photos to post until now. Sadly both of our camera batteries died at the same time. FIE ON YOU CANNON BATTERIES! I mean, for you all you know, this whole project was fictional. We just yammered on, claiming to be slaving away, while we were galavanting in the South of France. But now there’s photo documentation.

So we’ve all but completed the bathroom “refreshing” project. We have only to re-hang the medicine cabinet door and finish trimming out the mirror. That’s it! Beth will be crossing this off her list imminently. (You have no idea how exciting that is for her.)

We wanted high beadboard (It ended up at about 56 1/2 inches including the mouldings.) because we wanted it to look like it’s always been there. We used cheap sheet beadboard (had a budget, you know), 1×8 poplar for the baseboards, and 1×2 doug fir for the top rails. The materials all played well together and the set-up has had the unexpectedly nice bonus of making the ceilings in the room look higher.

We knew the walls wouldn’t be straight, plumb or square so we rabbeted the baseboard and top rail mouldings. (The poplar routed like a dream but the fir shredded something awful as you’d expect from the fibrous wood.) Since the beadboard edges would fall behind the rabbets, that gave us room to jigger the panels (cutting them more frequently in trapezoids than rectangles) and level them based on the beads rather than work-piece edges.

We busted out for expensive white paint for this project (We always get good paint for color but for white we just use home depot stuff to keep the budget down…i mean, white paint is white paint right? No, it is not.)and lord have mercy I don’t know if we could ever go back. The Ben Moore semi covered like a dream and finished as smooth as plastic.

Beth installed the new sink hardware on the old pedistal sink and added the hooks, switchplates, and tp holder. They all look great with the light fixure she put in a few weeks ago. All in all, we are THRILLED with the results.

Peter Gallagher eyebrows. With no mirror in which to look at myself closely, things got a little, as Beth says “grinchy.” Fortunately as of last night we have not only the new, improved, huger, over-the sink mirror installed, but a vintage-style pull-out shaving-mirror as well. Let me tell you, this thing is a must-have for those of us who can be a little…um…eyebrow-focused. (That was a lot of hyphens.)

As if to prove that my time spent with the new mirrors was well-spent, Beth later, while talking to me of other things, said “Wow, your eyebrows look great.” So take that Sandy Cohen!

Potty Eye View. In a bathroom, if anything looks wonky or wrong, you’ll have plenty of time to notice it, dwell on it, and have it drive you crazy when…well…sitting. It is, after all, where you’re likely to spend blocks of time…observing. So we evaluated all the work we did in the bathroom from potty eye view, also known as “potty perspective.”

Whenever we completed a step, one or both of us would take a seat and review the results. How does the caulk look when viewed from the from the main seat? Do you notice that trim joint from the potty? Will you see the crooked wall every time you sit down?

So everything we can see from P.E.V., as far as we are concerned, is perfect .

Tom and Angelina

Beth told me yesterday that if she were going to leave me, it would be for Angelina Jolie or Tom Silva.

Yep.

Oh and P.S. Angelina Jolie isn’t even on her “freebie list” because I called her first and no-overlaps.

The fact that we even had this conversation proves we are meant-to-be.

yarmouth blue at benjamin moore

Ooooh, we’re so mysteeeerious. We’re wily and enigmatic and you just never know how we might surprise! (Some sort of pulp/noir style pose right here would be great.)

I’m happy to say that the big bathroom ”voila” is approaching. We have putty, paint, caulk, and the mirror-frame left to do. Now we know that any one of those things could conceivably turn into a weekend-long project. See what 3 years has taught us? The whole thing has already taken longer than we hoped (Note I did NOT say “than we anticipated.”) thanks to everyone’s favorite old-house detail: complete lack of square and true walls and corners. While we generally manage out-of-square with shims, compound cuts, etc., those methods don’t always bring success when working with beadboard. Row after row of vertical lines will tell on you like a 5 year old.

So here’s a little teaser. We’ve selected Benjamin Moore’s “Yarmouth Blue” (50% opacity so as not to overwhelm our dark bathroom) for the walls above the beadboard. Hopefully it’ll look like a slightly more modern take on cottage-style. Super-hopefully the beadboard will look like it’s always been there. Stay tuned.

Beth here.

Work on the bathroom continues.  We finally (Finally!) got past the preparation stage and got some beadboard on the walls this weekend (no pictures of that yet), and it looks fabulous.

But that’s not what this post is about.  This post is about how the beadboard project has completely taken over the entire house.  I mean, one would expect the mess that happens in the Project Room, i.e. the bathroom.  This mess is totally explainable and expected.

(Click on any of the pictures to see my excessive Flickr notes about each room, or go directly to the “Beadboard Mess” series to see them in succession.)

It even makes sense that the hallway directly outside the bathroom is a tad bit more than messy.  One needs room to maneuver within the Project Room.  Again: Explainable.

Things start getting out of hand, though, when the project makes it to the Dining Room.

And then crawls into the Living Room.

The mess finally rests in the entry, awaiting potential guests with toilet boxes.  Who doesn’t want to be greeted by toilet boxes?

I fear where the project will turn up next. No room is safe.

We got a small mention at the end of a San Francisco Chronicle article by Anh-Minh Le about house blogging, which is kind of fun.

Here’s the link.

Beth here.

It’s time for more product advertising for companies that do not pay us. (I can never decide if this makes us more honest or just kind of dumb. Anyway.) We are currently four days in on the new toilet, and we are both giant fans of the Cadet 3 by American Standard.  It came highly recommended by the two Home Depot employees who were helping us (I know!  TWO guys helped us out!  It’s unheard of, but extremely welcome.), both of whom had been very impressed by the Cadet 3 commercial which featured a bowl full of golf balls that flushed on the first try.  Indeed, the packaging tells us we can throw away our plunger, but I think we’ll keep it for the other lesser drains in our household that cannot effectively rid our lives of those pesky golf balls.

Truth be told, my germ-fearing self was more impressed by the Cadet’s anti-microbial surface that purports to clean itself.  This will not stop me (or our housecleaner) from regularly cleaning our Cadet, but it’s nice to think we have a little help.

While I do not wish toilet troubles on my worst enemy, the Cadet 3 is a good choice if such a plague occurs.

Note: That’s not our bathroom. But how nice does that toilet look on wood floors?

what you get when you tear out the toilet

First of all, if you have more than one bathroom, there is never any reason to fear plumbing. I admit, toilet repair always makes me a little nervous, but that’s just because we’ve only ever had ONE. Nature pretty much limits the number of hours you can spend on a toilet project when there’s just the one toilet. That said, fixing anything plumbing-related is pretty straightforward. We’ve yet to find an un-doable plumbing project or to turn the house into the 8:15 at the Bellagio.

So anyway, in our last episode, I was getting ready to replace the toilet tank. That, as you may have guessed, turned into replacing the whole toilet. That’s fine as we hated the old toilet. It was kinda…foofy.

Now, when some P.O. installed the foofy toilet, he/she had to fill in the original tile at the base with basic white tile. Fine. But the real kickers are these: 1. See the closet bolts poking up there? There’s no flange holding them in place, just the wax ring. The toilet was in no way secured to the floor. 2. See that triscuit box? No that was not a commode-installation snack. That was folded up into a shim.

Oh, did I mention we live in earthquake country?

So today I’d planned to make major headway on the bathroom. As I was measuring the distance between the trim and the waterpipe, I noticed a drip on the bottom of the toilet. It looked like the tank bolt was leaking, so I replaced it to no effect. The INCREDIBLY knowledgeable and helpful plumbing department guy confirmed my worst fear: most likely a cracked tank. Tried a couple of various configurations of rubber washers and gently tightened nuts, and still: drip drip drip.

All progress stalled while we (tomorrow) install a new toilet tank.  So freakin not happy right now.