Back In The Bathroom Again

So we've got big plans for the summer.  Our families will be coming to visit us, which means we'll have a few extra sets of hands and lots of free expertise for the projects we've been too scared to tackle by ourselves.  The first visit will be from Ray's parents and his awesome Uncle Pat and Aunt Kim from Michigan.

Now, in addition to being all-around cool people who we totally adore, Uncle Pat and Aunt Kim also happen to be bad-ass house-flipping machines.  They're a reno-minded family-- for example, two of their four kids have bought houses and DIY reno'ed them beautifully while still in their early 20's.  And I mean really renovated-- like, new floors, new kitchens, new bathrooms, basements, decks, plumbing, electrical, you name it.  And Pat and Kim have agreed to help us finish the bathroom while they're here, for which we are insanely, hair-tearingly grateful.

What's left to do in there?  A lot.

1.  Rip out the Blueberry Beast:

 

Yes, it's time to bid a not-so-fond farewell to the blue-plastic faux marble shower surround!  

To be honest I'm a little worried about this part, because-- as with everything else in this house-- the person(s) who installed it didn't do us any favors. It's sort of loose from the wall. And the corners of the plastic surround are rounded, while the corners of the walls are square.  Which means you can stick your finger down between the wall and the Blueberry Beast.  And if you'll recall, when we moved in there was this soffit-y thing:

(I'd already knocked a hole in it when I took this photo at 10pm one Wednesday night-- when, due to my dad's speakerphone encouragement, I decided to see what was in there).  See how the paint is all bubbly along the bottom of it?  That's because the soffit trapped water vapor over the tub after every shower, and the ceiling vent in the middle of the room was powerless to draw out the moisture.  So eventually it beaded up on the ceiling and ran down the walls behind the poorly-installed Blueberry Beast.  The soffit's gone now:

Please pardon the shower curtain hanging so low-- this photo was taken minutes after I finished painting my freshly skim-coated walls.

But we know there's going to be unholy mold behind that thing since water ran freely down behind the Beast for probably thirty years before we yanked out the soffit.  Like, call-the-mold-remediators-and-pay-them-$5000 mold.  Rebuild-the-wall-because-the-studs-are-rotten mold.  Tape-off-the-bathroom-from-the-rest-of-the-house-while-you-work-in-there mold.  Hairy, sticky, smelly, awful, deadly mold.

But, as our pal Franklin D. once told us, we have nothing to fear but fear itself.  And mold, but whatever.  Off comes the Blueberry Beast!  After we do whatever we have to do with the moldy walls back there, Pat and Kim will help us install backer-board, apply subway tile, and grout it.  Yay!

2.  Fix the subfloor.

[All the rest of this is dependent on how long it takes to deal with the Blueberry Beast, because we're not trying to make Ray's family spend their entire trip to the West Coast slaving away in our bathroom]

As we discovered when we tried to repair the leaking toilet a few months ago, there is actually no subfloor under it.  Yes, that's right-- the toilet is basically hovering on top of the sewer pipe, gingerly balanced on some Marmoleum that's just floating above our floor joists.  Which means that the asshole who installed the Marmoleum a few years ago (we know who you are, just sayin') KNEW there was no subfloor under the toilet and he just chose to go ahead and put the flooring down over a gaping void.  Special place in Hell, yada yada, yada.  Anyway, we're going to fix that, either with Ray's family or with mine (we'll get to our plans for their visit in a soon-to-come post).  That'll mean ripping up the fugly Marmoleum (not going to lie, I'm pretty excited about that part) and then we'll...

3. Tile the floor.

I think we're going with this:

Plain, pretty 2" white hex tiles from here (please note the hilarious caption under the photo on the site) with nice pale-gray grout.  2" hex tile is such a classic look, no?  And since we know this most likely won't be our "forever" home, we're trying to go with something that will please the maximum amount of buyers AND be pretty and cost-effective.  However, because I have champagne taste despite my hex-tile budget, I've been daydreaming about this:

I know I can't do it, even though I've found it for as little as $5.90/sq.ft.-- I need to keep this house as neutral as possible-- but I loooooove it and I can't promise it won't wind up as my kitchen backsplash.  It comes in a bunch of colors.  I need it.

And then we will just refinish the tub (right, like anything is that easy) and be DONE with the bathroom.  D.O.N.E.  Done-zo.  Yay!