New Project

Thank you all for pardoning my hiatus. Will and I have been preoccupied recently with a pretty big project. We recently bought a house in Austin and are in the midst of remodeling the bathroom before we move in. We have hopes of adding on down the line, but until then we’ll do a little here and there to get it up to speed.

Below is a “before” and an “after” of the bathroom. The “before” doesn’t look bad from this picture – and it wasn’t in real life – but the tile and the tub had been painted white and the paint was starting to chip, revealing sea foam green acrylic. We certainly didn’t care… I mean, Will certainly didn’t care, but we both acknowledged that this wasn’t something we could look past during our flip.

Will and I had planned to remove the tile off the wall and replace it with wainscoting – how nice. The tile came off somewhat successfully thanks to our new Dremel and chisel, but as we got to the end of our project we started to realize that some of the tiles were taking big pieces of the wall off with it – enough wall missing that I could stick my head through and look in. Only two days into our new house and I’m asking God “Why me?”

Thanks to the guidance of our friends at Home Depot, we decided to bite the bullet and go down to the studs and start from scratch with nice new moisture-resistant drywall.

Hours later and a few pep talks from Will, We were sledge hammering away at the cement and drywall. And just because nothing goes smoothly for first-time remodels, we discovered that the cement was reinforced with some kind of super strength wire mesh. Which meant that once we got the first layer of cement off, we then had to pry the mesh away from the studs and take care of the second layer. We found an online forum that told us a reciprocating saw was pretty much the only thing that was going to take that wall down. It was an adventure and like I said it’s taken us longer because of all the “surprises” we found along the way.

We’re currently 3/4 of the way done with the demo. Once we haul away the rubble, we can ask BobVilla.com how to put up drywall. Until then – I’m trying to figure out when Home Depot is going to deliver our tile/tub/toilet.

Just a few thrifty things we’ve learned thus far:

• Do your research (online and at Home Depot) and do it yourself – at least what you feel comfortable doing
• Get 10% off your first $299 or more purchase at Home Depot when you sign up for their cc card
• Find what you want at Lowe’s or HD and then check Craigslist
• Pottery Barn outlet in San Marcos – I found beautiful, well-made fixtures for cheaper than Target

I will post tomorrow about the cool things I found at the outlets and a steal of a sofa I found on Craigslist.

Thanks for following us!