cue the 'Jaws' music....

This is our "scary bathroom." And boy, is it ever! At some point in the recent past, this house suffered some damage from a (rumored) busted pipe and it was fixed up by one of those restoration companies. Somehow, the fixer-uppers (who didn't really do that great of a job) forgot about the main hall bath! Many of the supplies were sitting in there, but nothing had been done to it. Anyway, today we started renovating it! We've hired some help since there's serious plumbing involved, and today they came and gutted everything. We are very excited b/c it's basically been unusable since we moved in and we've all been sharing our small master bathroom.

All of these pics are clickable if you dare to view them larger! Don't say I didn't warn you.

Here are the realtor's pics of what it looked like when we moved in. Yup, that toilet was that gross. I thought it was stained from hard water (the house had been vacant for quite a while) but turned out to just be scum! GROSS. Hey realtors...you will sell a house faster if you make sure the toilets aren't scummy! Can you imagine how many people just turned around and left after seeing that? It definitely wasn't a selling point for us! Somehow, the toilet wound up being the only thing we didn't have a major problem with. LOL


The biggest problem for me was that the sink faucet leaked like crazy when you turned it on. The inspector didn't quite convey the severity of the drippy-ness in his reports. You turn it on and water goes everywhere! An easy problem to fix IF we could have replaced the faucet. However, there were no shut-off valves under the sink! We kinda need those, so that's where it became a project beyond our abilities.


I talked Scott into just replacing the whole vanity after I had the chance to inspect it a little closer. The cabinet was in poor condition and some not-very-savvy person put some sort of gross texture, the color of oatmeal, all over the entire thing INCLUDING the hardware/pulls. Ummm. Don't ever do that!! I might have been able to save it if I could have replaced the pulls, but after looking it over, I decided it was worth it to just get a whole new vanity cabinet and counter.

Next up is the tub. It has no shower, which we didn't realize when we bought the place...but an easy fix for someone in the know. The grout/caulk was cracked along the top of the tub, but the biggest issue was that the hot/cold was backwards on the faucet. You turned on the water, thinking you were getting cold, but you got hot instead! Big problem for a kids' bathroom! And apparently, it has been that way since the house was built 30 some odd years ago. Crazy. Needless to say, I haven't been using it for fear of the kids burning themselves somehow, so it's been the cat carrier storage area.


Also, the flooring around the tub was pulling up and discolored.


Again, the flooring was pulling up in the linen closet that's at the end of the tub. VERY gross and creepy, so our linens have been living in my bedroom closet. I will be very happy for them to move out.


And now the bathroom looks like this:


Much better already!!! We've purchased all the new stuff and our contractors expect to be done by the middle of next week. I will, of course, share the after shots with you when it's done. Goodbye "scary bathroom," hello purple paradise!