The Martin Luther King Memorial Guest Bathroom Part 2

The new light, fresh from the bargain bin at the fixture store

I’ll try to hold back on the details of how we managed to immerse ourselves, on and off, into a 4 x 5 bathroom for five days, except to say that all did not go according to plan. On the other hand, certain things did go according to plan, like everyone finishing the project with the same number of fingers they started out with, so I call it a success. The mismatched angles, bowed walls, and odd preexisting electrical wiring we discovered were good learning experiences for us. “Good learning experiences” is what you say when the project is over. What I said about those things as I discovered them involved many repetitions of words that are often written with asterisks where the vowels go.

Take a quick look at the transformation. There are still some things that needed fixing when this photo was taken, most notably replacing the fake drawer cover on the vanity (removed due to a failure of things going to plan that isn’t worth delving into now, except to say: Hey people who built our house, WTF?). Overall, we were very happy with the results. It’s an improvement over the original, and although it captures dozens of tiny amateurish mistakes, freezing them in time for us to wince at forevermore, the nice part is it’s a guest bathroom and we don’t have to go in there much.

We learned some important things rehabbing the MLK bathroom, which I’ll list here in the vague hope that someone, someday, will use them to shorten his or her own bathroom remodeling project, so s/he can go snowboarding instead for the last couple days, like I had planned to do.

Get help

The biggest problem facing us at the start of the project was our complete, yawing ignorance. We’d never done a project like this. We’d built shelves and done some other slightly handy stuff around the house, but I had never cut a mitered diagonal to fit molding together at a corner, or wired in a new light fixture, or walked into Home Despot with a tape measure on my belt without feeling like a total poser. We didn’t want someone to do all the work for us; we just wanted a little hand-holding – someone a little more experienced than we were, who could occasionally tell us we weren’t going to screw up the whole thing. My mother and stepfather were our advising team. They’ve done some projects like this, and they had some tools I don’t own that were immensely useful to us. Their help was invaluable in kicking things off and spotting some possible problems we hadn’t noticed. You don’t necessarily need someone to help throughout the whole project, maybe just at the beginning and during some dicey spots.

Cut costs

We were disheartened to find that most of the sheets of wall-board at Home Despot that were dinged or damaged along the edges. On reflection, they were still usable, but would require extra cuts and a bit more planning. We brought this up with a guy in the lumber aisle, and he knocked 50% off the price. From now on, I’m going to look for marred (but usable) goods and see if I can get a discount.

We got an antique mirror off craigslist for $20. We found the light in the “bargain bin” of a lighting warehouse and paid $85 for a $150 fixture.  We decided not to replace the faucet unless it looked lousy after the rest of the stuff was done.

Overall, not including the cost of tools (some of which were borrowed), all the supplies for the rehab cost under $300.

Plan

You can save a lot of time and headache by doing things in the correct order. For example, if you learn one thing from this entire entry, it should be this: paint your molding before you install it. We didn’t. Why not? We love the togetherness that comes from packing two people into a half bath, trying to paint quarter-round along the floor and kicking each other in the face.

Here’s the order in which I would suggest doing a project like this. This list is remarkable in that we did almost everything on it in the reverse order.

1. Pick out light fixtures and faucets. Remove the existing ones to make sure they’re compatible, aren’t grossly misaligned. We did this almost as an afterthought.
2. Pick your colors so you can paint molding before mounting it. We did this second to last. Wrong.
3. Paint the walls. Mount lights. We did this last.
4. Cut all your wallboard and molding, verify that it fits well, and paint it.
5. Mount molding and the like.
6. Spackle and touch-up paint.

Surrender

We made mistakes, and found some pre-existing mistakes we were powerless to fix. The wall mount for the light fixture was three inches off the centerline of the vanity, making it difficult to line things up vertically. The bead-and-board pattern of the wainscoting accentuated the complete lack of parallel (or perpendicular) lines in the room, something we didn’t know about until we started cutting and wondering why nothing fit together right.

We joked that we would fix the problems with spackle. The joke quickly morphed into a mantra. The fact is that a rehab project undertaken by a couple novices just isn’t going to turn out right under the best of circumstances. Trust in the powers of 1) spackle, and 2) the fact that most people aren’t observant enough to notice all your dumb screw-ups anyway. Perhaps, given enough time, you might not even see them yourself.

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