Guest Bathroom: Lay It On Me

It felt like things were snowballing this week in the bathroom-- after getting the room cleaned up and painted, I knew it wouldn't take much longer to do everything else.  And actually, everything in this post took about thirty minutes to do.  Mr. Great Indoors really wanted this one done.

You might remember we were going with this 12x12 vinyl tile from Lowe's.  We bought one tile of this gray slate and another of the beige slate to try it out, and the gray one looked great against the existing fixtures.  And I loved the dimension of it.  It looks deceptively like ceramic tile

Image here

Here was our old floor before we tore it up.  We now know why part of the floor was discolored.  And we have more of that to look forward to in the master bathroom!

Mr. GI did a test run with the tiles we already had to see how many more he'd need to buy.  I teased you about it earlier in the week since we've been having technical issues (our hard drive enclosure came in today!).  Rather than subject you to another terrible cell phone picture, here it is with my digital before the paint.  I took out one of the tiles to test it out with our painted crates.

We opted to paint first (over concrete that would be covered with tile), then lay the vinyl tiles, rather than the other way around.  Made sense to us.  Mr. GI's first step with the tile was to make sure he started straight.  So he used our laser level to point him on the straight and narrow.

We had a lot of questions about why we were opting for vinyl rather than ceramic, and there are two simple answers to that. First of all, peel and stick.  That's the entire installation process.  No spacers, no grout, no tile saw-- just peel.  And stick.

Secondly, we're trying to be cautious about remodeling our home out of the price range of the rest of the neighborhood.  And since this home started with vinyl, it can't hurt to continue with it.  Plus it was $0.88 per tile, and we basically only needed a box of 30 plus a handful more for our small space.  So we ended up spending about $30 on the flooring.  Score.

I mentioned at one point that we were peeling up the old vinyl, which meant cleaning up the old adhesive and leveling the floor.  Well, it turns out that the floor had been leveled with something that stuck around after we removed the adhesive, so that was another process we didn't have to worry about, thankfully.  And the only thing we had to do to remove the adhesive was break out the old painter's tool.  I tell you what, if I ever get stranded on a desert island I'm bringing that tool.  It comes in handy all the time.

Oh, I should also show you the fun part of any house.  We love finding how no corner in this entire house is at 90 degrees.  Notice anything wonky below?  Yeah, it's straight to one wall but not to the other two that meet where the vanity goes.  We're hoping trim will cover that up, but we still have a portion of one tile in case we need to do some filling in.

And because I love you all so much,  instead of just showing you a teaser shot of the bathroom, I'll give you a full frontal.  Not that kind of full frontal, pervert.

And maybe another shot of the floor with that lovely gray vanity.  By the way, the instructions with the tile say that we can spot clean for now, but not to give it a full mopping for about a month.

What about that mirror?  We actually stole it out of our hallway for the time being, since we're really wanting to introduce some curves to this room in the form of a mirror (especially since the crates are also rectangular).  But for now I love the warmth of this mirror, and the size is just right.

The room isn't finished by any means, but it sure is a lot closer than it was a week and a half ago!  And our company (my dad) will be able to use it this weekend.  Woohoo!

• Remove quarter round (which we'll reuse as much as possible), toilet, vinyl, vanity, mirror  (We're keeping the old vinyl down until we finish the big work on the walls)
• Remove wallpaper and repair wall (one wall done, three to go)
• Repair light fixture location
• Repair water-damaged studs and drywall in guest bathroom
• Pick a paint color
• Clean up construction dust!
• Clean up old vinyl adhesive, level floor
• Paint walls
• Hang paintable wallpaper around tub
• Lay floor in guest bathroom
• Replace all baseboards and quarter round in guest bathroom
• Fix trim over door  We're not going to bother with this
  
• Paint trim
• Attach vanity legs, paint vanity
• Reinstall vanity
• Reinstall toilet
• Frame the mirror with trim (or we might get crazy and just buy a new mirror... we'll see) Buy a new mirror for the guest bathroom  We've figured out a work-around for now until we find the perfect mirror -- will share!
• Clean up and install new light fixture (more about that soon!)
• Paint crates for shelving
• Install shelving above the toilet (sharing next week!)
  
• Make a burlap shower curtain, plus a fabric curtain liner
• Accessorize!  Maybe some DIY wall art
• Repair water-damaged studs and drywall in master bathroom
• Lay floor in master bathroom
• Replace all baseboards and quarter round in master bathroom
• Install pedestal sink in master bathroom 

That's it for now!  Have a wonderful weekend!  Anyone got great plans before Monday?  We're watching the biggest bike race in the Southeast and going on a few bike rides ourselves.

Follow along with the rest of our bathroom adventures: our dream, the before, mildewwww, every day we're drywalling (what a terrible pun), the our thrifted finds so far, ripping out wallpaper, making up my mind on a wall color, rehauling the vanity, an updated to-do list, a teaser of the floor, cleaning and wallpapering, painting, plus my Pinterest boards for the guest bathroom and master bathroom.

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