In The Sh!tter

Please pardon my nasty French.  It's just that I've spent the last two weeks hanging out in the bathroom, and I'm beginning to tire of spending all my time in a 4'x8' space.

Most of that time has been spent slowly building layers of joint compound onto the drywall patch we installed after The Thing came down.  You see, the ceiling and walls over the tub are wildly uneven from years of being soaking wet.  They have gentle rolling hills, craggy cliffs, and a rocky coastline--  I'd compare them to the general topography of... Ireland, maybe?  So in places I'm having to build lumps out of joint compound so that the drywall patch will match up to the lump that's already in the ceiling.  This. is. crazy.

But it's okay, because this summer we're obviously going to have to rip out all the ceilings and drywall in the bathroom before we tile the shower surround.  This is a temporary thing, and I'm considering it a learning experience.

I finally finished one side of the wall patch, and I decided I'd go ahead and sand it and apply the orange-peel texture (mmm, my favorite! blergh.) so it'd match the rest of the drywall in the room.  Here's a shot of my orange-peel drying (you can really appreciate the giant lumps in the ceiling here, no?):

 

You can also see some brownish mold, courtesy of The Thing, on the wall there on the left-hand side of the photo.  Thanks a lot, The Thing.  And you can also see that my corner piece appears to be a bit uneven; not sure if you can tell that this is because there's a massive lump on the other wall.  I'm working with what I've got here, people.  Like I said, it's temporary.  And I'm actually fairly pleased with myself for getting the actual wall so even and replicating the orange-peel.

And since I couldn't resist, I went ahead and painted the patch too:

Paint's still drying, and you can REALLY see how crazy the ceiling is in this photo.  Few more layers of mud to go up there.  Ugh.

So, while I was between layers of drywall mud last week, Ray and I decided we'd finally tackle the leaking toilet.  A bit of water had been seeping out from around its base with every flush.  We'll just replace the wax ring, we thought.  No big deal, right?  This'll take twenty minutes.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.  We failed to take into account that hiding behind every wall, light switch, and fixture in this house is an unpleasant surprise.  We removed the toilet and discovered that 1) the flange under the toilet was cast iron, 2) it was broken, 3) there was literally no floor under the flange.  The flange was just sitting on top of the pipe.  We thought.  So we tried to remove it-- we'll just replace it with a modern one, we thought.  Off to Home Depot for a replacement!  We'll be done in an hour.

Nope.  Wrong again.  We could. not. pry. that. thing. up.  And we broke it a little more in the process.  We checked on the Internet and learned that cast-iron flanges are generally attached to the sewer pipe with lead.  Yup.  On to Plan B.  Back to the Home Depot.  But they don't have the piece we need to repair the floor (which is to say, a set of metal plates that go underneath the flange instead of floor).  I don't even want to TALK about what we had to do to repair the flange as best we could and make it as stable as possible.  Suffice it to say that McGyver would be proud, and that when we finished, we were laugh-crying and there was old toilet wax all over everything we own and we were barely speaking to each other.  But we reinstalled the toilet, and to our continued surprise, it's not leaking anymore.  So we "fixed" it.  We didn't fix it, but we "fixed" it, and that's good enough for us until the whole thing falls through the floor (or lack thereof).  

And finally, I decided to tackle something that's been making me crazy since we moved in.

When we bought the house, the shower had the grossest sliding glass door:

Also loving the old wooden toilet paper holder that was roughly four feet from the toilet.  Why? 

And just in case you need a reminder, here's what the faucet and emergency drain looked like.  Can you BELIEVE I begged my husband to buy this house with me?  Even I can't wrap my mind around how I managed to fall in love with the place after seeing this:

And as I mentioned in the third-ish ever post way back in August, we ripped the shower door out immediately.  And this is the horror we found beneath the track:

Aaaand I just gagged.  Anyhow, as I mentioned in that super-old post, I scrubbed the hell out of every surface in the bathroom.  Eventually I got the majority of this evil off the tub.  But a huge clump of funk remained where the wall meets the tub meets the Blue Monster.  And as you can see in the photo, there's also a huge gap there that was never caulked.  And there was a five-inch-long strip of ugly mildewy adhesive about halfway across the tub that would. not. come. off.  So basically every morning when I get in the shower I cringe at the horror.

But I'll cringe no longer.  Today I set to with a chisel, some extra-fine-grit sandpaper (we'll be refinishing the tub when we tile the shower surround anyway, so taking a little finish off was hardly the worst thing that could happen) and a brand new tube of caulk.  I scraped all the old moldy caulk out and replaced it with a nice fresh bead, I filled the weird gaps, and I sanded the stubborn adhesive off.  And now, ladies and gentlemen, if you'll pardon the dirty footprints in the tub itself (don't want to get any water in there until my caulk dries!), please admire my handiwork:

Finally funk-free.  And now a detail shot of the faucet wall.  And yes, I know there's still a HUGE BLUE PLASTIC shower surround here.  Still, give me some credit.  We're getting there.

 Sloooooooooooooooowly.