Painting the Loo

Ok, so we overcame the car troubles after our unsuccessful attempt to get painting supplies for making our bathroom look pretty. We have our paint, paint brushes, rollers and the like. We even bought a new top for our vanity, because quite frankly, the old one is butt-ugly.

Yesterday we began by removing the medicine cabinet and scraping off the flaking paint. Oh and guess what? Under the paint is wallpaper! Two layers of it - an ugly layer from probably 1930 when the house was built, and then another ugly layer from the 80's. The ugly wallpaper you can see in the photo is the original layer.

The question is, are we ambitious enough to remove all the wallpaper and do it the right way, or are we going to be cheap and lazy about it like the folks to bought, fixed up, and flipped the house before us? Nah, we're probably not that ambitious. But we'll see. Hopefully the walls won't come out too lumpy looking. :P Can't be any worse than how it was before we started... there were many areas where the old wallpaper was just coming off the walls.

We weren't too sure how we were going to get the old top off the vanity. Kenji started by pulling off the sealant around the edges. I had the billiant idea of tapping the edges from below with a hammer and a pies of wood.

Well we didn't have a piece of wood handy, so Kenji took a couple whacks at it with the hammer anyway, and then we had a busted vanity top. But that was ok, because we decided the vanity top would be too heavy to lift off in one piece anyway. Plus it would be piles of fun to just smash it to bits! And it was! It was also really really loud, so we wore noise-dampening headphones. It's amazing how well those work.

Naturally, you have to be very careful when smashing a vanity top to bits. The bits can be very sharp, and need to be handled with care. I thought about wearing my gardening gloves, but my gardening gloves were in the garage, and it was too much of a hassle to go get them. So instead, I cut my thumb, only small-kine, and put on a Larry Boy cucumber band aid. I would have preferred to use a Bob tomato band aid, but I guess I used those up already.

So now we have a sink that is all smashed to bits in a big banana box, waiting for the next bulky-trash pickup day!


Well, the bathroom repainting job is turning out to be more complex than we'd hoped, but I think whenever you do any kind of home repairs, it's wishful thinking to have such hopes. Now our hope is that we just manage to get our one full bathroom back in complete working order in less than three months. :P