Uncharted Territory

There is a door in mine and Blake's room.

For the entire time that we have lived in this house we have pretended like the door isn't there. Most of the time it is blocked off. Until recently, when we moved around the furniture in our room.

Behind the door is the master bathroom.

If you asked our kids they wouldn't know what was behind the door...well...at least the younger ones. They are probably under the assumption that OZ is hiding behind that door.

I promise that this bathroom is anything but magical. It has been a great storage for our "construction" supplies. It was also great for holding Christmas presents. That is about all it is good for.

If you could go back in time 6 months to before we bought our house, and smell what our house kind of smelt like, this bathroom is a good representation.

When we were working on everything else, we had the notion that we would clean the bathroom maybe paint the walls, and bottom of the vanity, and call it good.

Well....

Randomly one day, while I was painting everything else in sight, I decided to take off the front of the vanity so that I could paint the doors. When I was sitting there unscrewing the hinges I randomly looked down and saw a loose peel and stick tile so I took my screwdriver and pried it up. No biggie. I noticed that it was the same laminate that was in the kitchen. Perfect! I thought. I will just peel up the peel and stick tiles and paint the linoleum underneath, like I did in the kitchen. So I popped up a couple around the front of the vanity. Then I pried up one that was in between the vanity and the shower wall. There it was. Black fuzzy mold.

I stopped prying up tiles, stopped trying to fix the vanity, walked out of the bathroom and closed the door.

That bathroom has "not existed" for the last 6 months. I didn't want to deal with mold.

But...this weekend Blake put on his hazmat mask and got to work. Here is a little before glimpse:

See the soap and shampoo? Left from the previous owners. Just goes to show you, how much we haven't touched this room.

The whole in the wall by the toilet is from an inserted toilet paper dispenser. Why oh why did they love to cut holes in the sheet rock back in the day?

Blake removed the toilet and put it in the shower. (That way, if any water leaks out of it, it wont leak onto our wood floors.) He also removed the vanity.

It became clear pretty quick that there had been a leak. Luckily the sub flooring came up with out a hitch and the wood planks underneath seem to be in good shape. Blake sprayed the floor down pretty heavily with bleach to kill any remaining mold. Twice.

Surprisingly the whole thing took Blake about 3 hours.

Now we are ready to start putting this bathroom back together.

Some of our really good friends came over to check out the progress on our bathroom. When our friend noticed that the toilet was in the shower, he didn't hesitate to step inside and relax....

and that, is exactly why we are friends.

Stairs Take Two

Today my oldest is 9. He is so sweet and so kind.

I am so glad everyday that he belongs to me, and I am mortified that he has grown up with no ability for me to stop it.

I am most likely coloring my hair red on Saturday. In other words, I may be experiencing a mid life crisis.

When one experiences a crisis, change is needed.

Evidently, in my case, a lot of changes in paint.

May I present our entry. Or...a source of angst for me.

It is tiny. Teeny tiny. We removed the original banister long ago and that helped to open it up, but I have always felt like I needed to do something fun with this little space. Something that says "Hey! This is our house. We are fun."

I painted the stairs grey and white after we moved in but have never been very happy with them. They were just OK in my book. 

The stairs going downstairs. Ugh! So gross.

Old dirty white carpet + moving in + having a furnace replaced + painting and construction = Well...our carpet.

So I did what any perfectly sane person would do...I looked for things to decorate the entry. "Cute it up" if you will. No luck.

The space is too small to allow anything on the floor, and the walls are just weird enough to make it hard to put something on them.

The next logical step? Redoing the stairs.

I started by using a paint stripper to strip the paint. I used Citristrip that is not caustic and smells nice. Worked like a charm. Granted I could only do every other step at a time. Not that that stopped my kids from asking every 2 seconds if they could walk on the orange stairs.

You apply the stripper to the paint in a thick coat. Then after about 30 minutes or so the paint starts to bubble.

The longer you leave it on the better it works. I applied it to the bottom stairs and left it on overnight and in the morning I used a scraper and peeled the paint up in sheets. It was very liberating.

When I had gotten all of the paint off that I could, I got to sanding. When I started to sand the first step I realized that the treads were actually real wood. So I was struck with the idea that I would stain the treads to match our wood floors. Seemed easy enough.

After a couple days of sanding and stripping and a little help from Penny I was half way there.

It was taking longer then I thought...but I was not detoured. The stairs were going to look great. When I was almost done with the upstairs I ran out of sanding disks so I had to make a trip to Home Depot.

While there I decided to check out their wood stains. I talked to a worker and he assured me that the picture on the front of the containers were close to what the color would be. So, I carefully picked out a color, that would match our wood floors. I also asked him about the spots in our wood treads. He assured me that he thought they would look great when they were all stained. So off I went.

When I got home I couldn't help but try a little stain on the corner of the stair. I was just so excited.

Excitement quickly turned to sadness. The stain was RED on our stairs, not the honey pecan color it promised.

Not only that, but the little nicks in the stairs that I was concerned about? They wouldn't absorb the stain. Whatever they had filled the little holes with, back in the day, was not taking the stain...so therefore it looked like someone had spilled flour on our stairs.

With my dreams of matching wood stairs down the toilet, I turned to the only place I could think of. Pinterest.

I boiled it down to these painted stairs as my options for Blake to pick out of:

I couldn't help but think that something fun might be just what our entry needed.

Which one did Blake prefer? The most traditional one.

Which one did I fancy? The loudest of the bunch.

So I started to prime the stairs. Starting at the top and working my way down, with still no idea which one I was going to use.

I asked my friend. I asked her husband. Then I asked Blake again and again and again.

He left the decision up to me.

You would figure if left up to me I would choose the flowers. I didn't.

I choose traditional.

Painting the stairs, has so far, taken a week. I am using oil based paint so it takes longer to dry. Plus, working around "living" in the home has proven to be challenging.

The stairs going up are the only ones getting painted at the moment. The ones going down are coming next.

But the paint...it is shiny and smooth and lovely.

And, although this is a round about way right back to where we started, I am already much happier with the outcome.

Even if I still have a couple more coats left...and even if the floral stairs are still a little tempting.

Now, I am just trying to convince Blake that maybe fun tile could spice up the entry. Maybe something like this:

He is NOT on board. Turkey.

Something Old to Something New

I forgot to share this little gem. 

Months and months ago when we lived at our old house I found this cute little cabinet at an estate sale. I loved it. Plus, the guy that was having the estate sale told me that it was his sisters 50 years ago and that she used it as a toy kitchen. Once you know the story of something it makes it entirely more interesting, plus, I thought it was cute. Then I realized that I didn't really have anywhere for it to go. But I thought that maybe, I could paint it and replace this white cabinet that I had against the wall.

That was the plan anyways....

Welp. Like most things in life, it didn't quite happen that way. 

We moved and I still had this dirty little cabinet, with no where for it to go. I debated on selling it.

Then one day while we were working on the downstairs bathroom I got a wild hair and decided to paint it. We were thinking that it may be a good addition to the downstairs bathroom (prior to deciding on a vanity).

So I used my trusty Krud Kutter to give it a good wipe down.

Yeah...it was gross. Dripping yellow? How does that even happen?

Then I gave it a good quick sanding, and decided that I was going to spray paint it. It was going to be quick and painless. At least that is what I tell myself.

One thing I know? Mixing even remotely cold air, and spray paint doesn't work. Spray paint will bubble if it is too cold outside.

So I was left with a cabinet that looked like it has leprosy and so I stashed it in the garage until I had the strength to deal with it again.

That time came when I was painting the vanity. I wanted the cabinet to have a shiny finish and I was already using oil based paint for the vanity so it seemed like the easy choice.

After a few coats of paint and some caulking in the spaces (the left bottom side is caulked and the bottom right isn't. Crazy that by doing something so easy it makes it look way more finished.) it was done.

Only hiccup? I had no where for it to go.

I tried a couple of options but they didn't seem to pan out quite the way I had hoped.

In our living room I had the same white cabinet so adding another white cabinet seemed like overkill.

Then inspiration struck.

I moved the white cabinet downstairs to hold all of our blankets. 

Our downstairs gets cold so we need cuddling blankets, and you can never have enough fort building blankets. The white cabinet happens to be great at hiding and storing them.

And...the new white cabinet finally had a home.

It holds my vintage Pyrex dishes

and my pink depression glass.

The paint finish? Just as shiny and smooth as I wanted it to be.

Moral of the story?

Inexpensive furniture + paint = not too shabby.

The nice thing about redoing a piece of furniture is, if in a couple of years I decide that I just don't want it any more, then it isn't that big of a deal. I bought it for $10 so it is easier to get rid of.