Well guess who is at it again...

Me!  I finished the downstairs bathroom today.  I'm not going to ramble on and on about it.  I'm just going to give you some before and after pictures instead.

This first picture is how the bathroom looked in 2004 when we moved in.  Notice the hideous wallpaper, yellow sink, and peel-and-stick tiles on the floor.

2004

The next picture was taken in 2006.  I removed the wallpaper and painted the bathroom a pale, pale yellow.

2006

 

 

 

The last pictures were taken today.  You can see the real tile work my husband did not too long after I painted the bathroom in 2006.  The most recent update included new color  on the walls (a blue-gray) and a new light fixture.

A Most Brilliant Wallpaper Removal Technique!

As you know, we are working on some home improvement (and probably will be until they day we die...or move).  After removing the wallpaper and border in the guest bedroom, there is only one room left with any wallpaper!  We have ripped wallpaper and/or border out of 5 rooms in the house so far.  The room that is left is the computer room.  I haven't been in a rush to tear it down because although it is not my favorite, it wasn't bad enough to motivate me to paint.  I really hate painting.  But this room has moved up on the project list thanks to the Great Catsby.  That's right.  Catsby.  Michael's little terror of a cat.  This cat has invented a fun new game.  She gets on her hind legs and jumps straight up and rips chunks of the wallpaper border down.  A piece came floating down the stairs this morning and the cat came bounding down the stairs after it, attacked it, then let it be.  She has played this game enough to clear a whole side of a wall from the majority of the wallpaper border.  Whoever picked out this border stuck it on top of an uglier border, and the latter is still stuck to the wall.  Maybe I should try to wet the wall for the cat...

Anyway, here are a before and after pic of the walls:

He's in the paper!

New fire hydrant

I hope this works. Michael's picture is in the paper.  Click the link above. :)

In Other Renovation News...

A couple months ago we gave the laundry room a facelift with some new paint! I got to paint it a bright pink, since I am the one who spends actual time in there.  :)  Here are some before and after pictures for your viewing pleasure:

Show Me What's Behind Wall #1...

We bought our house in May of 2004.  I know I felt pretty grown up, becoming a homeowner the day after my 24th birthday.  The house we bought was built in stages...it used to be a garage with an apartment on top.  This was built in 1935.  Then remodeling was done, the most recent in '71 and somewhere in there the downstairs was converted from a garage to a living room, kitchen, and bathroom.  In the early 80s, the dining room, laundry room, master bedroom, and the garage were added on.  Despite all these changes, they did a pretty good job of keeping the brick uniform on the outside of the house.

All of the upstairs, save the master bedroom, is still old, old, old 1935 old.  The rooms still sport the huge baseboards, the doors have the old-timey knobs, and underneath the carpeting in the original narrow hardwood flooring from 1935.  I *love* the old stuff!  My husband gave up trying to get me to modernize the upstairs and instead bought me a skeleton key so I could play with the doors.  :)

As you could imagine, a house that is 76 years old has some problems.  The people we bought the house from did a pretty stinking good job covering up a lot of these problems.  Due to lack of funding and motivation, we have just now (7 years after moving in) uncovered one of the nastier looking problems.  I am not at all surprised.  I knew something was strange when we moved in, but I went with the whole "ignorance is bliss" thing and the room was ok enough until we had some cash to fix it up some.

This is the guest room as photographed on June 6, 2004.  The rooms have cement walls, and in this particular room one wall was half wallpaper/half paneling. Hmmmmm, why would they put paneling up in a room of cement walls???  That was something I thought was weird, but never wanted to think too hard about it.  If you can see the larger view of the picture, you can see the have patched cracks in the bottom board on the window and the baseboard with putty.  Stay classy, East Texas.

Moving on to June 12, 2011...I have paint, cement wall repair junk, and lots of time on my hands this summer.  So yesterday I ripped the paneling off the wall to see what it was hiding.  There was an obvious problem before removing an inch of paneling, because the panels under the window had peeled up and fallen off in layers.  There was just a thin layer of wood remaining.  This is what I found when I yanked the clever cover-up job off the wall:

Scary, no?  It might be hard to tell, but that would be a chunk of moldy sheetrock they tacked up on the wall.  Why is it moldy?  Because that window is leaking!  Which should have been obvious by the patch job on the window trim.  Why is the window leaking?  Because of the obvious termite damage the previous owners dealt with covered up.  Isn't it funny how that passed the termite inspection?  Must be because the putty wasn't cracking yet and they had a treadmill in front of that window.

The good news?  The termite damage is obviously old.  My husband fixed the window and it hopefully will not leak any further.  The wall will be restored to its original cement glory (once we figure out the best way to do that).  No more grandma wallpaper and border. Hooray!