Worth Doing Well

I couldn’t stand the bathroom anymore.

I wrote a about our surprise remodeling. A commenter wisely said that the worst part of remodeling is the phrase “While we’re at it, why don’t we do this or that?”

I asked the question. I turned to my husband and said “While we’re at it, can I paint the bathroom?”

He warned me, “Don’t you want to wait until things have calmed down a bit?” Uh, no, honey. Waiting is for wimps. How hard could it be? I bought paint, a shower curtain, hardware. He had no pressing opinions about which toilet paper holder or towel bar was best, so I found what I wanted. My life motto: shopping is half the fun.

We are first time homeowners after buying a townhouse this fall. We lived in Prince William County for a year before deciding we really liked the area. The house was a foreclosure that had been flipped quickly and despite its good condition, showed signs of careless owners. Cooking oil covered the kitchen, soap puddled under the washer and dryer, and crooked light fixtures taunted anyone sober.

Slowly, as our knowledge and budget allowed, we have cleaned and fixed small things such as doorstops and outlet covers. But when the surprise remodeling was necessary, I was inspired to make the master bathroom something other than the blah beige that it was.

I had enough practice that there was no need to use painter’s tape, so the change showed immediately. Two coats of light gray later, the room was transformed into something that I loved. The bathroom was lightened and personal again. Excited to be done, I nearly put away all my tools until I realized that the previous paint was still coating some of the tiling. I thought about leaving it there - who would notice? I would, of course, so I started to scrape. And scrape and scrape. It took about an hour, but the lines of tiles finally stretched before me, clean, unpainted. They were beautiful.

After painting, Daniel and I attempted our first plumbing repair. The grimy faucet was easy to replace, but the drain much more difficult. It took over half a day to learn that the pipes were different than our instructions, so the replacement would have to be a combination of the old and new parts. Forced to disconnect the whole pipe underneath, we saw that the u-bend was filthy and partially clogged. Cleaning it slowed the let’s-get-this-done rush, but we knew it would save us trouble over time. The pipe was cleaned and soon we were proud of our new plumbing knowledge.

We are putting the last touches on the bathroom this weekend. It has taken longer than I wanted, but every time I walk in it, I see what we did right. There’s a smudge of gray in the corner where I got some on the ceiling, but it looks good. I’ll have to remember this the next time I fix something on my home to-do list: what’s worth doing is worth doing right.