1970’s Bathroom Renovation (Product from Lowes / Work done by Me)
This half-bath still had the original wild looking yellow wall paper the 1970’s before we launched our attack on this room.
We chose to buy all our products, materials and tools through the Lowes QSP program and saved a bundle of money through this process and by doing all the work ourselves.
This half-bathroom room was plain ugly, but it had the only working toilet in the house. However, the original gate valve for the water supply to the toilet was frozen open and actually broke apart in pieces when I put a wrench to it. I had the water main turned off so there were no issues just in case something like this happened. I replaced all gate valves with nice quarter turn ball valves. I also replaced all plumbing including pipes, water lines, fittings, seals, etc. I replaced the electrical outlet with a GFCI, the wall switches, wall plates and vent covers with new products.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get any pictures of the wall paper in place, but it was a nightmare to remove on one of the walls compared to everywhere else in the house. I used a paper tiger to poke tiny holes in the wall paper, and then sprayed the walls with a solution to loosen the glue. This process worked very well much of the time. However one wall was glued so well that nothing seemed to work except for picking the paper off in tiny pieces. We had to remove two layers of wall paper to get to dry wall. After patching all the dry wall, I shot texture on all walls and the ceiling to mix things up and give the walls and ceiling a fresh uniform look. We chose to paint everything the color ‘Cool Gray’ using Valspar paint from Lowes.
The linoleum floor wasn’t in too bad of shape, but we planned to replace it with the same tile we were using in our other bathrooms. I had to remove a couple layers of linoleum, but it came up pretty easily with a long handled scraper tool.
Please realize that we were working on a very limited budget. This entire home was in serious need of work, so we had to spread the money wisely and make hard choices. We would have loved to have done more to this room such as installing a new vanity and sink to match the kitchen cabinets with Corain countertops that I just installed, but our budget constraints didn’t allow it. However, we were still very pleased to have a nicer looking clean and sanitary half-bathroom compared to what was there earlier.
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Here’s the bath room after the wall paper was painstakingly removed bit by bit. I think the walls actually looked nicer in their ugly gold color when compared to how they looked with the wild yellow patterned wall paper. This was our starting point.
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Here’s a picture of the long arm scraper I used on all floors throughout the house. If you look closely, you’ll see two different layers of linoleum flooring showing. This tool works great!
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The ceramic tiles went down quickly with minimal cutting. I used a hand held tile cutter that used a 4” dry cut diamond blade to make all cuts throughout the house. This little saw worked GREAT for all our needs. The grout comes next!
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I just finished grouting the tile and what a difference it makes!
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The half bath is now complete with a newly textured and painted ceiling and walls, all new plumbing fixtures, new ceramic tile flooring, new towel holder, a new oval mirror, and new base molding to complete the picture. We could not find a new ceiling vent that was square, so we stripped off the horrible paint job and brought it down to its original beautiful aluminum finish and left it at that. It was a very simple and inexpensive make over and we were happy with the end results.
