The Bathroom Project
In what seems like a century ago, I decided the hallway bathroom needed some updating. It had wallpaper on it -- and when I put the wallpaper on, the kids had been toddlers. This wallpaper was designed to just be torn and put on in pieces - no measuring, no seams, etc. It was just rip and stick. Loved it. The beauty of it was that every time the kids tore a piece, I just tore a bigger piece and stuck over it.
But they were at an age that I thought they could live without tearing the wallpaper on a regular basis, so we (I) decided to re-do the bathroom. Part one of "the plan" was easy for me. While I went to Alaska, the kids were to strip all the paper off. Work on it one hour per day and by the time I was home, it should be ready to "fix."
There was revolting in the home camp. I would call home and get the inevitable question of "WHY?" I told them to consider it vocational training. They all quickly decided they did not want to be lifetime wallpaper strippers. Nice that I could narrow that choice down for them from a cruise ship. They did not appreciate the life lesson.
When I got home, amazingly, it looked pretty much like I had hoped it would. Next, came what has come to be known as one of the worst mistakes of my entire 27 years of motherhood. I over estimated the attention span of a 13 year old boy.
The "fix it" plan was amazingly simple. And very cheap. New shower curtain, a little bit of materials and be done. I did NOT want to sand the walls. I HATE sanding anything, but especially dry wall. The fine particles of dry wall dust that fly through the house no matter how well you think you have a room shut off are inevitable. And that dust will get into every nook and cranny of every room in your house. I kid you not. Open your sock drawer a year later and you'll find drywall dust from a project that was on the complete opposite end of the house. So my plan involved NO SANDING. It was a beautiful plan, simple in execution and design.
I tinted some dry wall mud the color the walls were to be finished. I had bought a special dry wall brush for texturing the walls and I showed Jacob how to texture the walls. Done correctly, we would have to put a final coat of paint on the walls and replace the trim and be done.
Notice I said, done correctly. My area of "teaching" was done correctly. So was Jacob's....for about a 2 foot square. After that, I left the house, ignorant to what was going to happen next. Really, I have no idea what happened, but his need to be creative must have took over his need to do it correctly.
When next I laid eyes on the bathroom, "done correctly" was no longer a possibility. It seemed as if our 6 X 8 bathroom had shrunk to about 4 X 6. The walls looked like they had stalagmites growing out of them. It was a death trap to walk into the bathroom. The prongs sticking out of the wall of dry wall mud could have been used for clothes hangers.....or some sort of medieval torture chamber.
And there was paint EVERYWHERE. Places paint should never have even been next to were painted. With dry wall mud. I could sit here forever and not come up with words to adequately describe the hideous way the bathroom now looked. When you have to take a hammer -- I kid you not -- and knock the texture down before you can take a BELT SANDER to the walls, you know it's bad. And did I mention I didn't want to sand? Much less with a belt sander!
By the time the "recovery" phase of the project was done, I hated the color I had chosen -- perhaps because it would forever stain the floor cracks between the wood. So Sherie and I went shopping for all new bathroom stuff -- shower curtain, rugs, towels, and paint.
Once the new paint color was on, it struck me that it was the exact color of Jif -- the peanut butter. My bathroom now looked like one big brown peanut butter sandwich. The white trim looked like the bread. And no splashes of color detracted from the Jif effect. How we had not thought of this can only be attributed to desperation.
Phase 3 would then kick in --- cover the whole mess up. Zac came and spent some time painting
hundreds of dollars worth of bead board and all new trim. I donated the new shower curtain to the church yard sale and went shopping for a third shower curtain and accessories. Zac was paid for his time and we bought a second new light fixture -- because Jacob had misplaced the parts to the first new one we bought way back in Phase 1.
But it is done and no matter what happens to it, I think I will live with it forever.
