House updates

Last weekend we shipped the kids off to Nana & BB's house (Matt's parents) for a LONG weekend!  Nana came on Thursday night to get the kids and then brought them home on Monday about noon.  The plan was to for us to re-do the half bathroom downstairs.  When we bought this house, we said that was going to be the 1st thing that we did.  Well, almost 2.5 yrs later, we are finally updating the bathroom!  Better late than never I guess!  Really, other things just needed to be done sooner...windows, VERY leaky gutter needed to be repaired/replaced, new deck, add a baby to the family, and the list goes on.

Old bathroom with hideous wallpaper!

Bad wallpaper, light, and mirror (which was plastic!)

Matt took Friday off and started stripping the wallpaper off.  Thankfully, the wallpaper came off without too much of a fight.  The wallpaper had to know that it's time was almost up and not to fight the removal.  It was HIDEOUS!  I got home in time to help with the last of the wallpaper removal, mainly because Matt ran out of wallpaper adhesive removal spray and he couldn't get his dad's truck to crank so he had to wait on me to have a car.  It actually was sort of fun pulling the old stuff off.  Not that I would want to do a big room of it, but it wasn't that bad.  On Friday night, we patched all of the holes and smoothed out the drywall as best we could.

Wallpaper removal well underway

Saturday morning the plan was to sand the walls well, vacuum/clean up all of the wallpaper mess and dust, then start painting.  It was relatively warm on Saturday plus the heat in a small space helped the paint dry really quickly.  We got 2 coats of paint on the walls by noon!

Paint is going up

Matt pretty quickly & easily switched out the light fixture, mirror, replaced the toilet paper holder, towel rack, and started in on the vanity.  That was where things got ugly.  After some discussion, internet searches, a wasted trip to Lowes, more looking/thinking, some molding cutting, a nice dinner out (along with a glass of wine and 2 beers) and another trip to Lowes, Matt figured out what the problem was with the vanity and was able to pretty quickly get the vanity installed. 

We got the sink faucet from my dad on Sunday and Matt installed that on Monday afternoon. Long story on the faucet...we have this same faucet in our master bath which we bought at Lowes about 1 year ago.  The weekend before our bathroom project, we went to Lowes to purchase everything.  They didn't have the faucet in stock so we drove to another Lowes.  Same thing.  So we asked if any Lowes in the Raleigh area had this faucet...only 1 did and it was on the other side of town.  I looked online to see if I could just order the thing and not waste time & gas driving across town to get it.  Of course, it was available on line.  I placed the order...except that I had a $10 off coupon that I wanted to use.  The online website wouldn't take my coupon.  I called customer service & was told that they couldn't take my coupon either (it was a Lowes coupon sent in the mail) but that they could offer me 10% off (not the same thing but whatever...I needed my faucet!).  The order was placed with a guaranteed 1-3 day delivery (it was shipping from a store about 2.5hrs away).  This was all on Sunday evening, so I figured that I would have at least heard something by Wednesday.  When I didn't hear anything, I called to check on the status of our order.  Customer service called the store who wasn't even sure if they had received the order, even though they certainly had already charged my credit card!  I was promised a call within 24hrs by the store manager.  I never received that call so I called back on Thursday.  Again, the store wasn't sure about the order.  At this point, I decided to try a different route.  I asked my dad to check out the Lowes in Albemarle and sure enough, they had the faucet.  My dad got the faucet for us, I called and canceled the online order and we were back in business.  Of course, by the time I called back to cancel the order (no more than 2hrs after being told that the store wasn't sure about my order), the faucet had already shipped (and it was delivered to our house on the following Tuesday!).  Now, I have an extra faucet that I need to take back to a Lowes Store :)

Finished product :)

The final two things to be done are touch up trim painting & to get some art work above the toilet.  I have plans for the art work and just need to get a few more items to be done with this. 

The half-bathroom looks SO MUCH better now!  I am glad that we took the time to make these updates to our house.  We have a few more things planned for down the road...master bath, master bedroom needs paint, and the kids/guest bathroom needs new paint.  But those can wait a little while!