BLANCO BATHROOM - Our Bathroom Renovation Part 1
So just a precursor, this is my rant post:) Everything went wrong, or not according to plan, all in one post.
A few weeks before moving in to the Blanco Bungalow, while painting the interior, we spontaneously decided to renovate the bathroom. I secretly wanted to all along, but we really couldn’t afford it, and so when my fiancé said let’s wait, I reluctantly said ok. But when you see the looks of the previous bathtub (which was horrific), hopefully you can see how I was dying inside when I agreed to wait. Lucky me though… when we were taking down one of the vanities that was halfway falling off of the wall, I “accidentally” knocked one lime green tile off the wall, and then several followed. Thank Jesus!! Strader finally agreed that we should just do the damn thing.
One thing I would advise though, don’t ever do anything like this last minute like we did! OMG! First off, you aren’t able to make choices you normally would if you weren’t in a time crunch, like who to hire, what materials to use etc. etc. I assumed everything would be in stock, and I could order and get next day like Amazon Prime:) However, in Home Renovation world, this is not the case. I could only choose from “in stock” tile, large bathtubs don’t ship for free overnight, and all the fixtures I really wanted were special order only.
We also chose to hire a local guy off of facebook instead of a contractor (to save money), who had great reviews and photos. However, after our initial meeting, he never showed up, but instead sent his brother to do the job. He screwed up pretty much everything, and took three weeks longer than quoted, not to mention we got thrown in the middle of some really awkward family drama. Eek. Since he left we’ve already had to replace and fix almost everything. He did things like installing the toilet 8” from the wall, and mounting our vanity way too high, not sealing my cement tile before installation and dying all of my white stars black, not sealing the shower grout, and any plumbing he touched, leaked. Repeatedly. Oh and when we moved in, we didn’t have a bathroom for three and a half weeks. No shower, no toiler. So we were driving to our aunts house 30 min away every other day and giving our son baths on the kitchen counter. At one point I even gave myself a sponge bath in Coyote’s baby tub!! It was rough!
Poor little Coyote had to bathe in his infant tub on the kitchen counter for three and a half weeks!
Definitely a lot of tears shed over this floor. Don’t ever assume that just because someone says they know how to install a specialty tile that they do. They failed to Seal the tile prior to to grouting, and the black grout stained all my white stars:( Attempting to wet sand them myself and re-seal just the stars.
So here is Part One of our renovation. I’m talking more about the trials and tribulations in this post and posting all the scary before pics, and in the next post I’ll get into all the design stuff:)
Disclaimer: these last images were from our walkthrough prior to closing. So no, this is not our stuff!