Knotted Sugar: Fighting the Big Red Monster

Okay so Jose and I created this blog in order to chronicle our adventures in home ownership and so far we have fallen behind on actually updating this thing. However this weekend we attempted our first interior big project as homeowners. (We redid the yard a few months ago and I will hopefully post about that soon) We remodeled the bathroom! (emphasis on THE bathroom, as in the only one in the house!) In my head before we started I just knew this was going to end in utter frustration and in a flooded bathroom. We, however, managed to conquer our bathroom remodel with only minimal flooding and frustration.

For those wondering why we would need to remodel our bathroom here is a before picture:

I do not know about you guys but that red was just not going with our mission of beachy and relaxing.

You cannot see it very well in the picture but the pedestal sink was also not very handy for storage or even both of us getting ready. So we decided to rip out the sink to opt for a more space saving option with storage. We also replaced the toilet for a more eco-friendly and more manly version. And of course we painted the walls!

So we started by hoping we could just rip out the sink carefully in order to sell it or donate it, since we like to reduce, reuse, and recycle when we can. However the sink had different plans. Apparently the previous owners had gotten a little over zealous with attaching the faucet and the only way to remove the pedestal was to break the sink. So break away we did, with a hatchet none the less. The pedestal decided as we were removing the sink to come crashing down onto my leg. (so there was my battle scar for the bathroom remodel) After removing the sink we removed the old not eco-friendly, and kinda grungy toilet. We then primed over the entire red bathroom in order to put our new milder paint color on. This is what our bathroom looked like at the demolition stage:

As you can see the toilet was really grungy, no amount of cleaner was getting that job done!

Anyway our next step was to start putting our new color on the walls. We chose Valspars Neon Mint for the new wall color. The fun (and I mean sarcastic fun) part of this was it had to be done by flashlight because our bathroom only had one light that had to be removed for painting purposes. All in all however it turned out pretty well without being able to see perfectly.

During our paint drying imposed waiting times we began assembling our vanity and medicine cabinet (I thank God for Ikea and their small space solutions but there was lots of assembly required.)

This is me almost done with assembling everything (please excuse the messy living room, it became our workstation for three days)

The next step was to put it all back together again as quickly as possible (a very important step seeing as how this is the only bathroom in our house). This step proved to be much easier than demolition and painting. We only ran into a few hang ups, such as the Ikea sink and vanity not quite matching up plumbing wise to the old sinks pipes. A quick trip to Lowe's fixed this problem.

Without further adieu here is our new clean spa like bathroom. I love it so much I could almost sleep in there!