Today, we start work (well, sorta) on our next home improvement project: destroying our larger bathroom and replacing it with something that doesn’t leak.  (After that?  Destroying our smaller bathroom and replacing it with something that doesn’t leak.)  The bathroom has forced us into a cascade situation, where each thing we want to replace has forced us to replace another thing, until finally we’re gutting everything but the walls.  And we may still need to pull those down, depending on how successful we are at getting the previous owners’ wallpaper down.  I’m guessing we’ll need to drywall.  We definitely need to kill an unnecessary bulkhead over the tub, so there’s gonna be some drywalling no matter what; we’ll see if we have to do everything.

The budget is $2500 and I’m betting we can come in at 70% of that– it’s a small bathroom, and we don’t exactly have extravagant tastes.  Today’s project is to locate flooring; we’re thinking hard about cork tile and are going to bring the grandparents over to babysit while we hit a bunch of kitchen and bath stores in the area and see what they have available.   If you happened to notice the Instagram picture of the tile floating in a bowl of water from the other day, I bought a bunch of samples home from Lowe’s and spent an afternoon trying to destroy them.  I’m sufficiently satisfied with cork’s resilience to be willing to use it in the bathroom, especially since we’re planning on glue-down and not snap-together tiling.  It should be manageable.

The bulk of the work, right now, is slated to be done over Labor Day weekend, which is– gulp– just a couple of weeks away.  We’ve got a bunch of basic decisions made (picked out the tub, the toilet, a new ceiling fan, etc, although we still need a vanity and we haven’t bought anything yet– we probably ought to spend some money today, though, since the stuff probably isn’t going to show up immediately) but there’s still a fair amount of work to be done before we can start actually doing any work.  And then all of you get to look forward to the blog post where I describe how I destroyed my entire house while trying to install a toilet.

Whee!