Guest Bathroom Tile: Success!

I am, to quote Charlie Sheen, "Winning!"

Hahaha, sorry, couldn't help it.

So, remember back, oh, a few months ago when I told you about my big, fat, tiling FAIL in the guest bathroom?

Yep, I totally tiled 80% of the bathroom before realizing that I was out of tiles, and that those tiles I needed had been discontinued months before.

Wop-wop-wop.

So, I commenced to ripping out all of that hard work, leaving a very sticky residue behind. In order to use the restroom, I set out a pair of bright pink cheapo sandals for us to wear, which sounded pretty hilarious when you heard someone go in there - all you'd hear was a really LOUD "stick, stick, stick" noise, and occasionally a loud thump (someone almost falling), and sometimes even yelling or cursing. It was pretty good entertainment, I tell ya.

But in the case of sandals vs. sticky floors, the sticky floors won.

Yep, this weekend BOTH sandals came to a sad, sad end. The floor was so sticky that when Tom was walking in them, first one thong popped through the sandal base and then the other one went!

And that's how I knew it was time to just DO THIS thing!

So I went and found a close match to our discontinued vinyl tiles and bought more than I thought I needed this time (just in case - I learned my lesson!), and spent 5 hours on Saturday tiling.

We used Armstrong vinyl tiles, which is also the same type of tiles we used near the bar area in the rest of the basement, and we've been very happy with those. We chose vinyl tiles for several reasons both times:

1) Vinyl tiles are affordable
2) They're easy to cut (just score and snap using a box cutter)
3) They're easy to install because they're self-sticking (no mastic involved)
4) So there's no drying time
5) They have a long life span
6) And the biggest reason - our basement is not level.

So there ya go! If we had more a choice in the matter, we both prefer real tiles to vinyl, but for us vinyl tiles are just the way to go in our very unlevel basement. Plus the fact that we could install vinyl tiles on top of the existing ones is a plus - ever since our asbestos adventure we'd like to avoid anymore demo of vinyl tiles in our basement, thankyouverymuch. So - it's vinyl tiles all the way!

And since we're doing this cheap-n-easy down here, we didn't bother with removing the toilet or sink like you normally would when you tile a bathroom (although a large part of that is also because we're pretty sure that the toilet and pedestal sink are rigged and we didn't want to bother them!). Nope, I just traced and scored the tiles to get all the wacky shapes and angles I needed to get the tiles cut to fit perfectly around the toilet base and sink base.

And 5 bruised-knees-and-backbreaking hours later, we officially have an updated and more sophisticated bathroom!

Well, if you just ignore the hole in one wall and the water pipes on the other.

Let me just say, it is sooo nice to have a new floor in there - it's not sticky at all (always a plus, right?) and looks a billion times better than the straight-from-the-70's-paint-splotched-and-scratched-and-faded-and-discolored white vinyl tiles that were already in there.

Next up I'll be slappin' some grout in those cracks and really finishing up the floor in here. Then we'll be almost finished with this bathroom! (notice I said "almost", haha! Is home improvement ever REALLY done?).

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Guest Bathroom Update - FAIL

Who doesn't love reading about a complete and utter failed project from time to time? And boy, was this one a serious fail.

To catch you up on our plan for the guest bathroom, we've been trying to update this room - and bring it out of the '70's that it was living it when we bought the house - by spending very little money on it.

Yup, budget updating is the name of the game for this room.

And so far we had been able to stick to our measly budget in here, too. We used leftover paint from other areas of the house, and scored the rest of the bathroom items either on clearance or just found them for a good price.

So our bathroom went from this:

To this:

Not bad, right? Yup, it's almost completely officially "updated" - it just needs a few more small updates.

Like the floor. Back when I was painting the bathroom, I knew that we'd install new flooring sooner or later, so I didn't bother with dropclothes or trying to protect the existing dated vinyl tiles. Hellooo paint splotches!

A few weeks ago I decided that it was time to up-the-ante in this room, since it had been awhile since it's gotten much diy attention lately.

So, I broke out the leftover vinyl tiles from when we tiled the basement bar-area, and started tiling away. I was about 100% positive that we had enough leftover tiles - we had a box and a half, and have you SEEN the guest bathroom? It's tiny! Like, seriously - tiny.

Things were going great, and the tiles were looking sweet, and as I reached in the box for another tile -

I came up EMPTY.

No biggie, I thought, I'll just stop by Lowe's and pick up some more tomorrow.

So I did. And guess what?

...

They no longer carry those tiles! The floor guy informed me that they went on clearance - 4 months ago!

....

Picture me slapping my forehead right there in front of that stranger, mkay? Because that's just what I did.

Afterwards a race to find just a measly 5 tiles that matched ensued. I googled, I ebayed, I contacted the manufacturing company and contacted customer service (who told me they couldn't help me), we jumped in the car and drove all around town to all the home improvement stores in the city.

And nothing.

Lesson learned: make sure you have enough material on hand to actually complete the project you're doing -- before you actually start doing it. Especially with tile.

So this past weekend I spent some quality time with our floor-tile-ripper-outter (like my professional-name for it?).

And now the bathroom looks like this:

Back to square 1. Sigh.

Anyone else have any fail-tastic projects done wrong lately? C'mon... make me feel a little better about our most recent big-fat-FAIL.

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Guest Bath Remodel: Lighten Up

Every time I hear the word "houseguest", I immediately make a mental list of everything that needs to be cleaned in the house in addition to all the home improvement we have yet to finish before the hypothetical guest arrives. And the spaces that are usually are the back of my mind because we don't use them all that often come popping right up to the top of the "sprucing up" list.

Like the Guest Bathroom, for instance.

Roughly 3 weeks before the ETA of our guests we began plotting our attack on the bathroom. We told you about how we installed a bi-fold door in the doorway to the furnace room - which immediately improved the bathroom about 10000%.

Then it was time for the fun part: painting!

So far our guest bathroom upgrades had only cost us $37 (which was for the bi-fold door and wood), plus some white paint we had on hand. For this room the name of the game was cheap & chic!

After taping the bathroom I pulled out our extra paint cans and surveyed the colors. Around about the time we bought our house I had discovered the Oops Paint section at Lowes - and became addicted.

We had quite a few paint colors to choose from, to say the least.

I opened up 4 of them and actually did a little testing! You should seriously be proud of me - normally I just pick one (I make sure that it matches the other colors in the house, first) and pray to the paint gods that it looks amazing on the walls (which so far it has! Hallelujah!).

Then I sat back and looked at them. They looked a little different on the wall than I thought they would, and the fact that the bathroom has no natural light from a window also makes a difference.

I also held up some of our leftover vinyl peel-and-stick tiles that will be going in here later, to see which one(s) would work with it...

In the end, the light and airy Desert Fortress (that we have upstairs in our Living Room, Dining Room, Hallway and Kitchen - oh, and the Master Bedroom Closet) won! Lucky for us, we had plenty - 1.5 gallons of it leftover, which was more than enough for the bathroom. It's such a great and versatile color - it's the exact color of a canvas dropcloth, so it goes with everything!

I painted and then we ended up hanging all the decorating items we had stored (until we got around to remodeling the bathroom)...

And this is how the bathroom looked for our houseguests (decked out for Halloween, too)!

We scored the mirror on sale at Lowe's last year marked down tremendously. It was $125, but we scored it on super-clearance for a measly $25! Gotta love a good deal like that.

We did splurge on the towel ring and a new toilet paper dispenser (goodbye nasty paint-splotched blue one!), but they only ran us about $30.

We bought white frames at Walmart for about $20, and filled them with original acrylic paintings I did in college - and a fun design I whipped up to match.

Bottom line: All-in-all, we only spent $112 on the bathroom remodel thus far (and we don't anticipate on spending much more since we have leftover flooring!).

And since everyone loves a good Before & After, here's the Before from way-back-when, & then the After:

Not too shabby, huh?

Yeah, we didn't think so. Of course we still have several projects left in here - a new light fixture (although I might miss the simple and rustic feel of a single lightbulb hanging on a wire from a hole in the ceiling... hah!), new flooring and then tackling that pesky and odd shower-in-a-closet!

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Guest Bath Redo: Duuh-duh-duh-duh-DOOR!

What? I had to make this door installation a little more exciting somehow!

So, if you recall we've been slowly making changes to the Guest Bath. It's pretty much a tiny closet/dungeon, or it was, and every time you went in there it felt like you were relieving yourself right next to the huge furnace unit (the doorframe on the left).

Oh, the ambiance.

After a few evenings slapping on white paint, it mightily improved.

But it still felt like you were relieving yourself to the lovely ambiance of a furnace, thanks to the open doorway.

Attractive? Not so much.

Thing was, ever since we first toured the house way back before we were even handed the keys to this baby, I envisioned (yes, I "remodeled" in my imagination every single room we toured in the 30+ houses we viewed... shhh, don't tell Tom that!) a door in that existing doorway. Really, it just made sense. Door + doorway = common sense.

And less "ambiance".

The view from the john.

Fast forward to a year later, and I began to remodel this room by painting the wood white to match the rest of the basement. Then it came time to install the door.

And we ran into a problem.

The door frame was crooked. Along the top.

Crap.

What do we do now?

We tried all sorts of things, spent days trying to figure it out, and finally... forgot about it. Or rather just moved on to other projects that we had the means and the know-how to handle.

But guess what? This past weekend we had another go at it.

And we WON.

After careful examination and figuring, Tom was able to pry off the existing trim and take apart the base of the frame.

He worked a little more magic by removing 1 piece of wood, and then just nailed everything back together.

And this time it was straight.
Hallelujah!

We seriously danced around hugging and laughing, because in the end the solution was just so easy. Why couldn't we see it before?

Happy-as-could-be, already victorious before we'd even tried installing the new door (we are pretty much pros at installing doors by now, though!), we hit up Lowe's and purchased the smallest bi-fold they had (it's a very small door frame), and returned home.

You can see how crooked the frame was before by comparing where the door trim used to be.

Holy slopes!

To realize it wouldn't fit. Doh!

Luckily, it was a pretty easy solution.

We had a scrap of wood laying around that fit perfectly once Tom cut it down, and we made another trip to Lowe's to buy some brackets to hold it in place.

Then it was time to caulk and patch (the wood wasn't exactly high-quality)...

Spray paint prime (What? I was feeling lazy!), and paint.

And we have a DOOR!

Goodbye nasty views of the ugly furnace and spooky ambiance, hello bright and clean beautiful door! Ah, it feels so much better, and actually seems to really open the space rather than close it in.

Total cost? $38 for the door and the brackets. We saved money by using the existing trim, and had everything else on hand. Not too bad for creating a much better bathroom experience! So what do you guys think? A hands-down improvement over the old bathroom/furnace room? We sure think so!

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Guest Bath $0 Update

Roundabouts a year ago (I feel like I've been saying that a lot lately, hmm...), the Guest Bathroom was near the top of my priority list. I had decorations, paint, flooring - everything all picked out and ready to go. Heck, I was ready to go, too - I was tired of the tiny, nasty bathroom, and was ready to give it a major makeover without a lot of moolah.

I painted the ceiling and all the trim, and it was looking 100x better already (it's amazing what a bit of white paint can do, isn't it?).

And then we hit a snag.

See, we both wanted to install a bi-fold door in the awkward doorway there on the left, which leads into the furnace/AC room. There's not enough room for a regular door to open/close in the small space, and so a bifold door was our solution after much consideration (we even considered a drape or curtain).

HOWEVER, because NOTHING in this house is square, level, or otherwise NORMAL, we couldn't figure out how to install a door in the HORRIBLY CROOKED frame we had to work with. We considered all sorts of options - some involving cutting down the door to fit, attaching extra wood to the sides of the frame to make it more level, and even some involved ripping apart the frame and redoing it - although we weren't sure if that would make the whole house collapse since it seems to be in a structurally important area.

So, we moved on - and completely forgot about the Guest Bath Reno.

Flash forward a year, and we've learned lots of new skills and done tons of new things - ranging from creating our own granite tile countertops to digging up a patio to our whole kitchen remodel - to installing about 30 new doors during our hallway makeover (okay, okay, so it was only like 6, but still...). We've also acquired new tools and know-how in that timeframe.

So what does that mean?

We're ready to DO THIS THING!

Starting like, yesterday.

Or a few days ago, really.

This past weekend we had some people over to celebrate my birthday (yippee!) and watch a good ole' fashioned Husker game on the tube (a big deal for us because not all the games are on public channels, and we don't have cable...). I was cleaning before the party and decided that the guest bathroom really needed SOMETHING. It was still a bit BLAH and UGH, if you know what I mean.

And I had an epiphany.

Or maybe it was more just a random inspiration.

I ran to our storage room where I found an old extra shower curtain rod that had been in there for awhile (it was either given to us or came with the house), and ran to the closet to dig out a red window curtain panel that used to hang in our living room (before we decided to go with white ones):

 Then I just put two-and-two together, and it worked perfectly!

I slipped the curtain panel onto the shower curtain rod and just propped the rod up in the back of the bathroom near the ceiling, and let the curtain panel fall over the linen closet/hidden shower opening (hahaha, read about THAT amusing story right here!).

The shower rod is white so it blends in pretty well with the walls and ceiling:

And the curtain panel fits over the opening perfectly, concealing the odd and ugly wacky area back there from view.

So while it's totally a temporary solution, it really helps the bathroom feel more, um, not craptastic. :)

And the fact that it works great for now and was 100% FREE - just makes it that much more fantastic.

So far the amount of money we've spent on this bathroom for updates: $0. Sweet.

Not too bad, eh? The plan for this weekend is to get some much-needed additional updates in this little area - so stay tuned!

What do you think of our update? Have you put two-and-two together to come up with a free update for your own casa lately? Any free finds you've snagged and remodeled - say, a dresser in the trash or a chair on Craigslist? Let's talk about free stuff!

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