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Bathroom Procrastination

So there are some areas of the bathroom that we have procrastinated on. Painting the wall above the medicine cabinet by the sconce being one of them. When we painted the bathroom the sconce was already on the wall, and doing a proper painting job would involve switching off the electric circuit, removing the sconce from the wall and painting everything then. This weekend we finally got around to the semi-involved project.

Patrick removes the sconce from the wall.

Bathroom sconce

The “paintless” area.

Painting the bathroom

Patrick painting.

Painting the bathroom

Voila, we finally have paint above our medicine cabinet! In between the last photo and this photo there was once again a struggle. We appear to be having problems reinstalling items (see kitchen butler’s pantry doors). Putting the sconce back on the wall made me feel like I was on some endurance TV show…how long can you hold up the sconce while your significant other is attempting to align the holes before you want to drop the damn thing. I’m happy to announce I passed my 30-45 minute sconce endurance test. :)

Painted bathroom

Next procrastination bathroom project: painting the wall behind the toilet. Our current excuse can always be that due to Atlanta’s current drought we’d be wasting water if we were to drain the toilet tank to remove it and paint behind it. ;-)

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Bathroom Door

Hallelujah, the bathroom door latches! Since we moved into the house there has not been 100% privacy in the bathroom. We’ve had guests over for dinner, a housewarming party, a number of vacationing guests – and they’ve all had to use the bathroom with the door leaning shut, but not fully closed. The latch was not lined up with the hole for some reason (actually, that seems to be the case with about 80% of our doors) and therefore the door could never be fully closed. When my dad was staying with us he suggested chiseling a piece away so that the strike plate could be repositioned to line up with the latch. Patrick and I (or was it maybe just me?) cringed at the thought of having to chisel away wood from the door. So now a few months later we decided to give in and Patrick got out the chisel…

Chisel bathroom latch

…and voilà! We have a closing bathroom door. Our guests can now have some privacy! “Some” being the keyword as the closing door doesn’t mean a locking door. Right now we’re trying to decide whether or not to buy a new mortise lock set. None of our doors came with a key, so it would be kind of nice to at least be able to lock the bathroom. We’ve been eyeing some that have the thumbturn on the inside and a key for the outside. In the meanwhile I’ve been in the process of scrubbing away at the old glass door knob and mortise set to get the paint off with the help of some Goof Off 2. So at least while we decide we can have some nicer looking (unpainted) handles.

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Finally Some Bathroom Work

I feel like we finally made far enough progress with the bathroom to be able to show it. It’s been a slow process with all the prep work, but we’re very happy with how our results look.

Part of the prep work consisted of taking the paint off the detail work from the medicine cabinet mirror. (When we relocated the medicine cabinet the only original piece we kept was the actual mirror, hence why it needed the most prep work.) It took me a good 3 days to try and get in those grooves and everything. I was able to take the paint in the grooves off to a point that felt satisfying enough – it is a 90 year-old mirror after all, so if it shows a little sign of age it isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Medicine cabinet

The inside of the medicine cabinet all painted….

Medicine cabinet

…and the exterior of the medicine cabinet all painted. Don’t pay too close attention to the missing blue paint between the medicine cabinet and the lights, teehee. We need to take off the light to do that and have been avoiding the work. (Same goes for behind the toilet and behind the sink, oopsies.)

Medicine cabinet

The other painting job we had worked on was the base molding. And finally after 4.5 months of living in the house we have a toilet paper holder and the hand and body towel bars! The body towel bar was tricky because the only space it would actually fit was above the toilet. Not the best place in the world, but pretty much our only option. Every now and then I still catch myself reaching for the toilet paper on the windowsill…only to realize that it’s not located there anymore!

Medicine cabinet

Unfortunately the other view is not quite as finished. We haven’t painted the door molding or the base molding because we want to finish removing the paint from the built-in before we get to putting it back on.

Linen closet

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In and Around the House

So there’s been a few happenings in the last week…

Oh my, look how much our lavender has grown since we planted it! Juuuust kidding. When we planted the three little lavender plants they were quite pathetic looking already, but at least they were green and alive looking (See photo). Within a week all three plants shriveled up even more and turned into brown leafed and dead looking plants. Maybe we were a little fast with our decision, but we decided to tear them out and replaced them with some grown plants that we purchased at a local garden center. The one on the left is called “sweet” lavender, the one on the right is called “hidcote” lavender. Peeking in on the left is also some “red fountain grass” that we planted.

Lavendar

Atlanta has had a drought (already, and it’s not even summer yet!) with some 10 inch rainwater deficit. We haven’t had a good downpour since we started planting. We knew that there was some flooding in the area by the back steps because when the laundry extension was built they did not bother to calculate in the drain run that was going along the house. So now the water accumulates in a giant puddle (actually it looks close to a pond with the weeds in there!), including in our new flower bed. Everywhere I have read about lavender it says that the plants like very rough conditions, which includes dry soil and full on sun. With the standing water after a downpour I’m a little scared the lavender won’t be very happy in that place – I guess we’ll have to see how it grows or doesn’t.

Puddle

On the other side of the stairs we recently dug up the lost drain that is now blocked by the laundry addition. With the soil gone, or perhaps we just haven’t paid as much attention before when it poured, there seems to be quite a lake. The itty bitty green plant in the middle is a “weigela carnaval” that we planted there in hopes for it to grow large and hide our monster of an A/C unit.

Weigela

While we’re busy enough trying to keep up with our own house and garden we have also had to tackle the neighbor’s yard. A while ago it started off with one kudzu plant starting to creep up the side of their house. It was actually quite crazy to watch because I was able to literally count it going up one brick a day. Eventually the lawn mowing service came out and cut it down. But since then they haven’t come back and the lonely kudzu plant amidst the grass has turned into some grass plants amidst a kudzu field. And those little buggers just loooove to grow onto our driveway. And over our backyard fence for that matter. Since they say kudzu grows up to a foot a day (!) I have been going out there every few days to cut the plants that started coming onto our side. It’s really quite annoying.

Kudzu

So the other day we had some excitement…we kept hearing helicopters over our house. Finally we were curious enough and walked outside to see 2 news choppers hovering right above our house. In the evening news we found out there had been some car chase that ended in a street a block over from our house.

Helicopter

The gas company has come out and made a mess of our street. They’re upgrading the gas lines in our neighborhood from 5 lbs. to 57 lbs. of pressure or something crazy like that. This is where they dug up the gas line coming to our house…a couple hours later it was all covered up with dirt again.

Gas line replacement

When they changed the pipes at the street they also had to come to the gas meters at the house to upgrade the pipes and some converter there. That included a bright yellow pipe that we weren’t very happy about. After complaining to the workers they told us they would come and paint the yellow pipe. We were about to give up hope when they started working further down the street, but to our surprise we found the pipe painted two days later.

Gas line replacement

And last, but not least, we have also done some work inside the house! We finally got around to painting the window in the bathroom and a couple of days later the wainscoting. The prep work probably took longer than the actual painting itself. All that caulking and nail hole filling and sanding and refilling nail holes and re-sanding takes up a lot of time. Now we just have to finish painting the base board, which we waited on because we hadn’t caulked that part. It definitely makes a difference in how the bathroom feels.

Bathroom painting

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Shower Curtain

Unfortunately the window in our bathroom was placed in such a way that it has made it somewhat hard to place a shower into the bathtub because half the window would be in the shower. To prevent too much water from splashing onto the wooden window molding Patrick and I thought it would be a good idea to buy one of those curved shower rods in hopes of blocking some of the wood with the shower curtain. Even though the rod has been sitting in our closet for months we have now been able to hang it up because we wanted to paint the walls before putting up this permanent fixture. Up until now we have used our cheap plastic rod that is expandable. We’ve had it dangling on top of the tiles and the window crown molding so it wouldn’t damage the drywall and paint from fastening it onto the wall, and every time we hung our towels up (since we don’t have towel racks yet!) the rod was threatening to collapse on us. We finally put up our pretty curved (“for extra elbow room”) shower rod yesterday!

Ohhhhh, fancy! Look at that!

Shower curtain rod

Finally a shower rod that won’t fall on us. We also had to buy an extra long shower curtain liner because we’ve had to place the shower rod higher than the average shower curtain height due to the window being half-way in the shower. Not a problem with a 10-foot ceiling.

Shower curtain rod

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