The Guest Bathroom Remodel: Day 4

We are in the home stretch.  All the things we thought would be tough (light, doors, trim cuts) are all behind us (or so we thought), and it is all about the finishing.  We started the morning finishing out hanging the trim.  Teddy worked at drilling pilot holes and then nailing the last set of nails needed on the trim.

He's hammering away

And then drilling more holes for the next door

I took a swing at hammering for a while, and before we knew it, we were done.  Teddy set all the nails.

And I got to work on the putty.  This was our big moment of celebration.  The doors were hung, the trim was up and we figured another hour and everything would be done.  Everything else left was easy.  Changing out the toilet seat, putting on a new faucet, hanging towel bars, etc.  All sounds pretty simple, right?  Well, it was, except for one part.

Nope, not this part, this was easy.  Teddy got to work replacing the toilet seat

Nope, this was easy too.  I installed our new toilet paper holder

Oooh shiny

And here it is.  The biggest pain in the @#$ of the whole remodel.  Now this may be a slight exaggeration, but it was what we believed to be our last day, it was New Years Eve, and all we wanted was to no longer be in this bathroom.  Unfortunately, Teddy spent a lot of time as you see him in this picture.  Now the first issue (notice, I say first) was just getting the old faucet uninstalled.  This thing was put in there to last for life.  We thought it would be simple, we had put these things in before at my old condo, so why would this be harder.  Well, if you can't get the old one off, it's kind of hard to put a new one on.  We tried loosening the nuts, unscrewing the fixtures from the top, hammering at things, in the end, we end up breaking everything apart piece by piece.  I think it took about 2 hours to finally pry the pretty finishes off.  And this is what we had.

Notice the faucet is in pieces, but the plumbing lines are still securely held in place by those gold rings at the base of the hot and cold valves.  Those gold rings were our problem.  What they were hiding underneath was a locking ring that wasn't letting anything through.  And underneath the sink, they had sottered on a cross bar to prevent anything from moving, so we couldn't get it out from that way.  So, using my dad's mantra of "be smarter than the material your working with" we came up with the perfect solution.  A lot of swearing, and then some tin snips to slowly snip away at the gold rings until we could pry that d#$@ locking ring out.  This took about another hour if not longer.  OK, so maybe we weren't smarter than the material, but we finally got the darn thing removed. 

We then made the mistake of doing another victory dance.  (When will we ever learn - you don't celebrate until the game is over!!)

So, we're moving along, and things are looking good.  The sink is cleaned out, the new installation is working great. 

And then we put in the hot and cold valves.  Teddy's noticing things are a pretty tight fit underneath for all the materials.  Then we try to quick fit the new faucet and valves, and guess what.  It's all about a millimeter too close to each other, and won't fit.  ARGH!!!  So, Teddy yet again is loosening everything he just installed to push it all apart just enough to gain that millimeter of space so that we can fit the pretty fixtures on top.  Well all his maneuvering worked, and we got everything to fit.   

And we did yet another victory dance (There is something really wrong with us)

OK, so what else could have gone wrong?  See in this picture on the back of the faucet the thing you pull to close the drain.  Well, it was the final part to install before putting the drain back together and turning on the water.  I went to put it in, and guess what, the medicine cabinet did not provide enough clearance to be able to fit the post in the faucet.  Seriously?!?!  What the heck were we going to do?  We couldn't take the faucet off to put it in because the hole it had to go in was also the housing for the allen wrench to tighten it down.  We could take down the cabinet, but Teddy was not having that option.  So, what did we do?  We obviously got it in as you can see above.  Well, we bent the heck out of it until it was at the right curvature that it cleared the cabinet and had a straight shot to the hole in the faucet and then Teddy straightened it back out.  He says that he wished we got a picture of my face when we first tried to put it in.  I wanted to stab my eye out with it. 

We were smart enough this time (finally) to NOT do a victory dance, and just held our breath as we finished reconnecting everything and then turned on the water.

Success!!!  The water worked just fine, and no leaks, although we are keeping a close eye on it the next few days just to be sure. 

Now that that was over, after 4 hours, lots of swearing, and promises that the faucet will remain as is forever, we moved on to finish the rest of the final touches.  Towel bars were hung, a hook was hung, we cleaned everything up, put all the tools away, and put back all our accessories.  So, we can finally show the reveal of the final product. 

But first a before shot

Plain cream walls, gold and chrome fixtures are now looking like this

I think the blue really makes the tile pop.  It's amazing what a coat of paint will do.  And while the towel bars are similar, replacing them with just chrome vs. gold and chrome I think updates the look.

Remember our old doors, original to when the house was built.

Now they are solid oak, six panel doors stained to match the trim of the recently installed windows. 

I didn't take a before from this angle, but it gives you a sense of the proximity of the medicine cabinet to the faucet for our final bit of remodel drama.

We are officially done, and did finally have our victory dance. 

While there were a few hiccups along the way with getting this project done.  Teddy and I did have a great time working on it.  We're so excited that another project has been crossed off our list, and we still have a couple of days to relax before heading back to work.