Bathroom Updates

Bathroom update and the headaches that come with living in an old house.

don't get me wrong, i love our old house. it has grown on me over the 10 years that we have lived here. (that wasn't always the case) but doing a remodel on an old house can be a bit challenging.

we had plumbers come out and give suggestions on what we should purchase, like brands and all. so we headed to a local plumbing supply store (not Home Depot or Lowes, although we did go there too)

we were looking for a toilet, toilet seat, replacement knobs for the shower and vanity and a new vanity.  We looked around and were a bit over whelmed at the cost of some of the items. someone asked us if we needed help, my initial reaction was no we are just looking. then my hubby says to me, well maybe we do need some help. but we continued to look. we started with the toilets and found the brand that the plumber told us to get, Gerber (not to be confused with the baby food)

then we looked at the faucet items that we needed. we searched and searched for something to replace these three knobs but weren't able to find them anywhere. this is where asking for help came in. we had a gentleman that first helped us with the toilet selection and answered come questions about the Gerber brand toilets, there were three (good, better, best) we decided to go with the better model. he did talk about the no slam seat and i was hooked. especially after hearing my friend Lindsay talk about loving her no slam seat in her new house. that all seemed to go fairly well. then it was deciding about faucets. the gentleman that was helping us said that they don't really make this kind of faucet anymore. that he could probably get us one in a chrome and glass knobs but the circle ones were code now. of course then we had the problem with what to do about the other tow holes then. he showed us a conversion plate that he had to go onto the tile to hide the holes and then you place the on off controller over that. see the picture below.

during this whole buying stuff process my hubby called the plumber letting him know about some of the changes, like the face plate for the shower (mainly that)

the next morning he got a call from the company saying that the plumber that was assigned to our job had called out sick and would be out all week. my hubby asked for another plumber to come out and the guy who came out basically said that the first plumber was a new plumber and under quoted us and got in over his head on this project. WOW! what had we gotten into. 

back at the plumbing supply store: 

the gentleman showed us which sink faucet was the matching one to this shower set up and we got it to replace this old thing (that was really my main reason for doing any of this)

the kids had a hard time turning it on and turning it off and it would drip or run all the time.

you can kind of see the back splash in the picture above. i will get to that in just a bit.

so we have our toilet covered (and the toilet seat, sheesh)

the shower and sink faucet now on to a vanity. here is the old one. it use to be white or maybe ivory is a better word, or even better yellowed ivory. shook i don't know.

it was ugly. when we repainted and went with the Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse theme for the bathroom (embracing the yellow tile) i painted the cabinet black on the outside.

since we were changing some things out we decided to go with a new vanity as well. we measured the width and went looking. we really wanted some drawers and not just the double door cabinet.

what it looked like once the vanity was removed.

the tile was a mess

my wonderful husband did a lot of cleaning and scraping there and when i got home i just had a bit more scraping to do with the blade.

 we found this vanity and really liked it (it apparently came with a solid white top (which i think that i would have liked better) but by the time we knew that this one was already installed)

Remember that picture of the old sinks backsplach? HERE IT IS! another thing we didn't realize was that the back splash was there to cover up the four holed in the tile that is behind the sink. we researched what to do about that. this company doesn't have the same marble (or whatever it is) in a back splash but they have it in a side splash. however, they cost a little over $30 and they are about 4-5 inches short for the back splash. we thought that we could buy two and then cut them each to fit and then just have a seem down the middle where the faucet was but we really weren't willing to drop $60 on it with the cost of everything else. i think that we decided that we were going to get a small piece of composite trim and cut it the right length and put it there.

 that wasn't the extent of our bathroom vanity woes. the plumber told us that the drawers weren't going to work because of the piping. we went back and fourth on what we were going to do and came up with keeping the drawer system but cutting the bottom drawer to fit (thinking that was going to be the only one with the problem. or we thought about taking it out and putting in a basket) well come to find out it was both bottom and middle drawers, once it was installed and we were now looking at cutting both of them. 

here is what the drawers looked like out.

we removed the silver piece

my father in law cut the back end off

we measured from the front of the drawer, 12 inches (we cut about 4 inches off of the back of the drawer)

this is the back piece that we gorilla glued back to the drawer

we let them sit overnight and then next day i attached the silver pieces back on and slid them into the vanity

here is the top drawer opened

and here is one of the bottom ones. ( i think this may be the middle one but i had the bottom one opened too.)

needless to say we have it pretty much all completed.  there is still some major shower cleaning to do but i just don't want to do another thing right now. it is crazy how messy the whole house can get over one room being in disarray. things are slowing getting back in there but like i said s-l-o-w-l-y.
we like the look of everything (even though i told  my hubby over and over, we should just rip out all of the tile) again we are embracing the look of the yellow tile and the colors of everything else work for now. i don't think we will have the Mickey and Minnie theme forever. If you have some suggestions of themes that could go with yellow tile i would love to hear it.