El Baño

One of the ickiest rooms we have to deal with on a daily basis is the master bath. The tile is in very iffy condition, and the walls, as you saw in the post of electric updates, are covered in yellowed remnants of wallpaper paste. Or rather, THEY WERE. We had a big week around here- updates to come on that later- but in the midst of not-fun expenditures on stuff that was visually unrewarding, we also squeezed in a painting project. Hallelujah for paint; it's dirt cheap and high impact. (Let's hope I can maintain this positive attitude as we tackle the six other rooms that still need paint.)

Let's review the baseline:

Well, hello. Yeesh. This is my view from bed when I wake up in the morning. A visual breakfast of champions.  

Blech.

Lookit this dumb valance, just waiting to be put out of its misery. Eric and I actually came home from a stressful day this week and just cursed at this valance for a while. It felt real good. It felt even better to take it down. 

Here we have a closeup of the dirty wall/dirty grout situation. This type of tile is called "salt and pepper" because of all the flecks in it, and I actually like it, except for the filthy grout.

And here you'll see that someone in the past helpfully scrawled a reminder to "paper walls." Thanks, but we'll pass on that! 

Here's the layer of dirt we found on the vanity lights when we took off the covers. How does a light bulb even last long enough to collect this much dust?

So we'd had about as much of that as we could take. Fifty days' worth, to be exact. I put on my safety goggles and remedied the situation. 

Oh, did you think I wouldn't get a picture of that? The reason for the safety goggles was that I painted the ceiling too. I have certainly blown off many an admonition to use goggles, but in this case the thought of paint glopping into my eye was enough to make me take the precaution.     

Aaand results! This color is Behr Cumberland Fog, which goes nicely with the bedroom color, Valley Mist. Fog and mist, har har! We noticed that now when you look into the bathroom, the bedroom color looks much greener in comparison, so that's a nice side effect.

Pleasant improvement!

I really love these sconces, and now that's it's not white-on-white you can actually see them better. 

No more "paper walls."

Side by side. Subtle, but good.

So, a cheap and very gratifying project. This room now looks about 67% cleaner. I'm still planning on touching up with caulk soon, and I'm also going to remove the dirty vent cover and paint it white. For a longer-term project, we'd like to regrout the whole bathroom- inside the shower and out- and I also want to replace the floor tile in the shower, which is weirdly mobile. That can't be good. Luckily the basement ceiling under this room is unfinished so we can keep an eye on it and make sure no leaks are happening. We're also thinking the vent fan installation will help the tile stay in better condition now.

The funny thing is that this whole project probably took me a total of three hours, and it makes the room look sooo much better that it's hard to understand why the previous owner wouldn't have done it prior to listing. I guess we're glad for it, if it helped scare away other buyers. Some people just don't have any sense for these things. But have I mentioned that the seller was an interior decorator?

The cobbler's children, amirite?