Laowai

A few weeks ago somebody (Brian) left the leaky shower hose out of the tub in Claire and Bea’s bathroom. We didn’t discover the dripping problem until probably a whole day later and by then the whole bathroom carpet was a squishy puddle. So we tried to dry the carpet by pulling it up a little and running fans for a long time. That didn’t work – and worse it spread a mildewy smell all over the house. Yuck. Brian decided, rather quickly, that the carpet was never going to dry and even if it did we were sick of that disgusting bathroom carpet. So he took it out in one fell swoop and put it at the side of the road for the trash man. Then we were left with the old, old black linoleum tile floor. It seems like it might be origional to the house. The tiles are popping up all over and there are splotches of paint here and there. I tried to scrub it down so we could live with it a bit, but it just turned my rag black.

So now we find ourselves in the middle of another renovation project. Really I’m not sad at all – I couldn’t wait to get rid of that gross carpet. And since we moved in I have been dying to know if we could use the painted over tile in the bathrooms. The tile has all been painted in a creamy white and it doesn’t look good. I’ve been crossing my fingers that we would discover the tile underneath is fine – it goes part way up the walls and it’s nice thick old tile. As long as it is in pretty good shape I am willing to work with most any color. So far the tile seems to be in good shape. I’ve been working away at removing the paint so we can decide on a floor color and get moving with this project. The best way I found to remove the paint is by steaming it with the same machine that I used to remove the TV room wallpaper. I figure it will be easiest to get both upstairs bathrooms done at once.

In the girls’ bathroom I revealed yellow tile – I’m fine with that. I’ll use mostly white everywhere else in the room. We don’t want it to end up looking like Ronald McDonald’s bathroom so we’ll replace the red sinks with white ones.

In my (and Brian’s) bathroom I found turquois blue tile with black along the top and bottom. I’ll never understand why the former owners painted the white tub a turquois color and changed the turquois walls to white – the color scheme is not that different from the original. It just looks like bad thick paint instead of shiney clear tiles. Again I think I’d like to make the walls and everything else white. As much as I like green, I don’t want to keep the green toilet and the green sink. Nope.

So I origionally thought I wanted a gray tile for the new floors but after looking at a few and being swayed by low prices I think we’ll go with basic small white mosaic tiles. 

This type is the winner right now:

or this:

In the meantime our stairs are half sanded waiting to be painted and there are light fixtures sitting in the hall waiting to go up. Pretty much everything from the stairs up in our home looks bad right now. I hope to finish a project soon. And so it goes…