The Martin Luther King Memorial Guest Bathroom Part 1

My wife Lu deserves all the blame for this project, and by blame I mean the credit, except for the parts that turned out funny. And the name, which is certainly not meant to offend but is probably offensive anyway, was her idea too. It arose from the fact that we spent the Martin Luther King holiday weekend working together in a 5 x 4 bathroom, listening to some of MLK’s speeches during the process.

This was the first time I’d attempted a renovation quite this extensive. It’s painfully difficult for me to start a project when I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing, because I have an amazing – almost superhuman – ability to see in vivid detail the worst possible outcome of any situation. My job might have something to do with this. When you spend your days coming to the aid of people who have set their houses on fire, fallen from unpleasant heights, decelerated much too quickly and into hard objects while behind the wheel of their cars, or suffered an unexpected and terrible betrayal of their own body, you begin to perceive how close we all stand to genuine peril. When I looked at our old bathroom, I could see the possibilities for improvement, but I just as keenly perceived the many ways in which we could screw it up, and in the process damage our house, and possibly our relationship. Matched against this project, I saw only my own lack of experience and the inevitable frustrations that would result.

Lu does not see the worst case scenario when it comes to home improvement. She figures anything is probably better than what we have now, and then starts tearing out things with appropriate gusto. This sounds like a grave mismatch, but in fact makes for a good team. I’ve learned many new skills after embarking haplessly on complex projects at her insistence, or simply coming home from a 24-hour shift to discover that she got bored and started something in my absence. By “started something” I mean “knocked huge holes through the drywall,” to cite one memorable homecoming.

The bathroom as it was

We decided to start with the guest bathroom because we spend little time there, and wouldn’t have to look at our mistakes very long once the project was complete. Here’s our bathroom before the rehab. It’s fine. There are no holes in the wall, thanks to admirable restraint on the part of my wife. But it has all the charm of cheap construction from an era known as “The Year of Beverly Hills Cop II.”

To keep things simple, we planned to leave the sink, vanity, and toilet in place. The floor was tiled around the base of the base of the vanity, so replacing it would make this a much more complex project, involving my wife knocking holes in the floor, which I wanted to prevent. So our plan was:

1. Replace the ugly, 1980s-strip-club-dressing-room light fixture
2. Install “bead and board” paneling around the walls up to about 36 inches
3. Top this with a molding chair rail
4. Repaint the whole thing “something that isn’t white”

We figured we could do it all in a couple days, which means three, and when took five I was proud of how close we guessed.

To be continued