avocado8

A Leak of Faith

I never would have guessed when we met with our contractor in May 2006 about re-doing our tiny master bath that we wouldn't have a completed, more usable (but no less tiny) bathroom by the end of the year. Well, here it is January 2007, and not only do we not have a completed bathroom remodel, but we haven't even STARTED yet. Heck, we don't even have a PROPOSAL from our contractor.

Don't get me wrong; we love our contractor. He did a beautiful job on our kitchen in a reasonable (even short) amount of time. He did such a nice job, in fact, that he's been getting more and more work all the time. And, to be fair, we should have guessed that it might take awhile to get his attention; our front door and closet project took many more months to complete than we expected. We were thinking, when we talked to him in September, that we'd have a new front door by Halloween. Later we found ourselves practically demanding that the closets be finished before The Beaner was born (no such luck). In the end, we finally got our door installed sometime early in 2005 (I apparently didn't blog about it, and the first photographic evidence I can find of it is in April, but I'm sure it went in by February or March). So anyway, we should have realized that asking him to do our bathroom—especially when we had a smaller budget than he's used to in mind—might result in exactly the fix we find ourselves today.

In short, our master bathroom kinda sucks. The counter with the sink on it is far too low. We hate the sink (it's brown; the walls and toilet used to match, but we painted and replaced those, respectively; the ceiling still matches because I didn't have the energy to paint it white the day I painted the bathroom green). The laminate countertop uses a really busy pattern, and I've always hated the distressed-white cabinetry (which appears in every bathroom in the house, though I've painted one of the others plain white). Plus, as you can see from the first photo below, we don't have enough storage space. Although the bit of green you see on the left is the bump-in of a bedroom-facing closet that we use for extra toiletries and medicines, there's nowhere to store the ones we're actively using. Some drawers would be a godsend.

Our tub is worn; the washers in the tub/shower faucets are constantly being stripped (probably because of corrosion), causing them to leak; the water pressure is crappy (it's fantastic upstairs, so I'm not sure what the problem is); and bits of tile grout keep disappearing into the wall. And speaking of tile grout...I've never been a fan of the 1-inch ceramic tiles that cover the floor, mainly because the grout always looks dirty. Al used to like them, until they started doing this about a year ago:

It was me getting tired of kicking tiles around and tracking crusty chunks of tile adhesive into the bedroom that caused us to call the contractor about finally doing a remodel.

As mentioned, we replaced the toilet with a plain white model that was a little higher off the floor than the icky brown one when we did the kitchen remodel (because we had to fix a sewer pipe leak that necessitated removing the old toilet anyway); I painted the bathroom walls green to match the bedroom; and we added towel bars where previously there were only two towel rings that we hated (one, sadly, is still there because when I discovered the giant hole it left in the wall when I removed it, I put it back); and we hung that giant mirror because the previous owner took her custom, bejeweled mirror with her. Of those four changes, we quite like three of them: our remodel plan called for leaving the walls as-is (i.e., not trying to steal space from the closets, though we knew we'd have to repaint afterwards), keeping the towel bars and getting other hardware (i.e., faucet, possibly a shelf) to match, and keeping the toilet and getting a new tub from the same line. Al doesn't like the mirror, so we'll probably replace that.

So anyway, we're sick of our bathroom. We were a bit exasperated with our contractor by late summer and tried to find someone else to work with us, but everyone was busy and we had as much trouble getting other people to return our calls as we did our current contractor. In October our guy e-mailed us to say, "is it too late?", and we replied, "sadly, no." He sent us two designs, we picked one, we talked about whether to do an under mount or an above-the-counter sink bowl, and he said he'd send us a proposal. A couple weeks later I sent him info about the tile we'd picked out, and he replied that he hoped to get to the proposal that weekend. That was the last we heard from him, even though I sent him a gentle reminder in December in the form of a link to a few photos of faucets we liked.

About a week ago I said I'd had it. It's officially on my to-do list to find another contractor or to figure out how to do the project ourselves. Of course, my to-do list has been known to languish for a while, so I suppose you could say it's fortunate that Al noticed water oozing out of the caulk near the soap dish tonight while playing hide and seek with the Beaner. I went up to investigate, and I ended up prying off a bunch of caulk to see if I could detect where the water was coming from. My theory was that water was getting behind the tile through either one of the spots where the grout had popped out or, more likely, through a spot where the caulk had worn or cracked (yeah, our house is known to settle seasonally, and the tub hasn't quite recovered from the last settling). However, it was also possible that something behind the wall was leaking.

We talked about it for a few minutes, and we decided we were so sick of the way things were and concerned enough about what might be going on behind the wall that we were willing to knock a tile out to see what was going on. I got a hammer and started tapping... and after pulling out a tile and looking around a bit for the source of the flow, I finally hit on it: "I bet the caulk around the soap dish is leaking, and there's water trapped behind the soap dish." Al pried it out, and sure enough, it was full of water. We were thrilled that it wasn't something major going on behind the wall, but pulling out the tile and the soap dish was a huge leap.

It means that we'll be using the upstairs guest bathroom for showers and Beaner baths for the foreseeable future. And it also means, contractor or no, our bathroom remodel has finally begun.