Remodel Your Bathroom Yourself, Then Call In An Expert To Finish It.

Old houses have their charm. You just have to have enough time to be able to enjoy the charm and keep it going. Otherwise, you will usually need a professional company to come in and clean for you or finish what you started.

We made a mistake in trying to fulfill our desire to update the bathroom and do it all ourselves. We had old fixtures, the original tile floor and original tile walls. We had to be careful with the colors we selected because the tile walls were a pale yellow and the floor tile a yellow-beige with cranberry accents. Old fashioned, but very nice, very durable. I should still look so good when I am that old.

Fortunately, the toilet had already been replaced some years ago, so that didn’t need an update. I had already replaced the ceramic tub surround and recaulked it inside and out, and a new window had been professionally installed. That was the beginning of let’s do more. It’s like earning more money, there still isn’t enough.

My husband wanted fancy faucets and a shower door to enclose the bathtub. We didn’t want a major rip it all out overhaul, just some nice things to make it a little more up to date while retaining the “charm” of an older home. A little modern updating without looking like it was out of place.

The faucets we found were very nice and we were able to install those in the existing sink properly. We even found a toilet handle in the same color that -matched the faucets. So far, so good. We were batting 1000.

Quite happy with our handiwork so far, I continued to shop and managed to find an exact match to the heavy ceramic soap dish and toothbrush holders that were mounted from inside the tile wall. It was well past replacement time as both had been super glued back together even before the house was ours.

There was a lot more work than was expected to remove them from the wall and after some very unladylike outbursts, success was finally mine . A quick-setting heavy-duty grout worked perfectly to firmly and securely install the new fixtures. We were really on a roll and still batting 1000.

The perfect shower door took some time to find as the walls are sloped inward on both sides of the outside of the tub and something that fit was difficult to find. We were finally able to buy what we needed and it exactly matched the color of the faucets. It was time to tackle the removal of the shower curtain rod. It was a large fixture with fancy ends that were embedded in the sloped walls. It made a mess removing it from the wall and we had to quickly replaster and paint so we could get the rest done. Otherwise, no shower for you.

Well, that wasn’t so bad, so far; but it was tough drilling the holes for the outside structure of the new sliding door because we had to drill through the wall tile. None of the bits we had for the drill worked and that meant yet another trip to the hardware store for something appropriate. Fortunately, we again obtained what we needed, the rest of that part of the job went smoothly and everything fit well.

The last planned update we wanted to do came to a halt when my husband investigated what he would need to replace the faucets and shower fixture in the tub. The tiny door to the back of the tub had to be accessed through a closet and the space allotted behind the tub through the door was too small to permit any kind of major replacement work.

Since we had so many things already done, we gave up on doing it ourselves and called a plumber. Hindsight is always 20/20. If we had really thought about it, we could have done it ourselves and saved a lot of financial aggravation, it was really expensive. We could have done just what the plumber had to do. He had to remove the little trap door behind the tub and take out some of the wall. Now we needed some new plasterboard and time to repaint yet again. You really learn your lesson that old homes were meant to stay built the way they were originally done and the materials and workmanship were far different than today’s standards.

Now that it’s February, I can’t wait until the weather warms up as there are other projects needed to keep the charm of this old house “charming” and I can’t wait to get started.