Bob: This lone initial shot of the downstairs bathroom doesn't really capture the amount of work needed to renovate it. I took far too few pictures of it before I started working on it, so these will just have to suffice. Obviously the shower curtain rod needs to be reattached to the ceiling, but some of the problems in here only revealed themselves to us later. However, all the fixtures besides the shower and tub are almost brand new. Later, after we move in and settle down a little, we'd like to redo this shower surround; it has fake marble tile grouted with SILICONE (ugh!)
Nan: My initial reaction to this bathroom was GUT it! Then common sense and the wallet
took over, and I realized we'd have to make-do in order to remake this into something usable.
Bob: Yet another hole in something, this time in the back of the shower stall. Someone stitched this over with a chunk of beadboard and gun staples, and when we got here, it was already back off. Probably those plumbers... Note the a-peeling vinyl wallpaper.
Nan: This hole wasn't there when we first looked at the house in contemplation of buying.
The plumbers did a number on several walls in the house when doing the repairs ordered by
the mortgage company who owned the house. I can't object to the hole, because the mortgage
company paid all repairs to the water system. We figured in the couple of thousands, at least.
Bob: This is why there was no easy solution for renovating this room: all the wallpaper is loose, and further exploration revealed that many preceeding layers of wallpaper were also loose. This shot above the vanity and medicine chest shows where the vanity light was removed. I don't know about you, but I'd like a better result than just sorta patching this back together...
Nan: When Bob got through with this wall, the paint went on as smoothly as if the wall was
freshly built. Nice!
Bob: This is the floor of the bathroom closet, fairly indicative of the challenges in store for us. Baseboard is just a one-by-four held in with a single nail! Hatch in foreground is main access to the crawl space. A pair of louvred wooden doors (already removed) need to be refinished, repaired and remounted.
Nan: I keep forgetting how cruddy-looking this closet was the first time I saw it.
How on earth would you even sweep this mess, let alone keep it clean?
Bob: This shot illustrates two deficiencies: this room has a chair rail, and it was placed four inches too high. As you can see here, it buries the light switch. Also (using your imagination) the door opens INWARD into the bathroom directly in front of the vanity, making the space MUCH too cramped. I really didn't like the door anyway, and this was as good of an excuse as any to remove it.
Nan: I will admit it: Bob was right. The only way to fix this was move the chair rail downward.
Bob: Wait'll you see what we did! However, we started with the
closet...