So, the saga began....
First, a little background. In my last post I spoke of whitewashing the fireplace and painting our living room upon moving into our new home. When we bought this place, we were thinking we could live with it like it was for the most part.Immediate changes would involve some painting and redoing the ceilings in the bathrooms...then maybe in a few years we could remodel the kitchen a little. We plan, God laughs.
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Old Ceiling in bathes |
Since the rest of the ceilings in this place were "popcorned", we suspected the previous folks messed up the original texture while trying to wash off mildew and mold. They then re-plastered it like this....OH SOOO much ugly going on up there. Fixable, though, and I had plans to scrape that plaster off after we finished painting and unpacking.
But after about a month it was becoming more and more difficult to eliminate a growing funky smell that kept coming back, and I was developing a persistent headache. (I'm sensitive to mold, so of course I blamed those nasty bathroom ceilings thinking there was lingering mold)
In the meantime, we hired an exterminator to address a cockroach problem. He emerged from the crawlspace and said to us, "Hey! Do you guys know you have a large puddle under your house?"
After crawling under the house, Hubby and the exterminator concluded the source of the leak was from the tub in the main bath. Time to call in a plumber.
The plumber suspected it was at the shower diverter, but we needed to cut an access panel in the wall for him to fix it. Luckily, the linen closet abutted the shower's wall and we have a reciprocating saw. Hubby got busy and....voila.
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New plumbing access panel in plywood walls |
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Kitchen with ceramic floor |
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Master Bath with ceramic tile |
Nothing was salvageable. The tub needed to be cut up to remove it. So did the shower in the master. The cabinets rested on the subfloors and were warping as well. Out they went. We couldn't salvage anything except the 40-year old toilets, and we decided to just go hog wild and replace those too.
The handyman and his son started to demolish the master bath back to the walls and took down those bad ceilings as well. We decided to leave the main bath to use while we worked on the master. While they were doing this, I started working on the closets.....but that's for another post.
Here are pictures of the finished bathrooms with new cabinets, toilets, tile floors and tiled backsplashes, new hardware, and I upgraded to new in-wall medicine cabinets for more storage. The master now has an exhaust fan, too. WOOT! One upgrade we decided on was to install 2.5" crown molding. Many of the rooms (not all) had 1" molding as crown molding which looked pretty puny. Come to find out, it's purpose was to hold up wall paper that was starting to peal off....yeah....another story for another post.
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Main Bath - old vanity |
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Main Bath - new vanity |
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Main Bath - new tub and tile |
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Master Bath - new shower |
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Master Bath - new vanity |
~~ Karen ~~