Be Still My Heart

*** Drats! I meant to schedule this to post on Monday but I hit the wrong button. When I went back to save it as a draft it still showed in my reader and I can't un-publish it in my reader so I guess I'll just go ahead and publish it today as well. Oh well.

This has been a big undertaking and I've been reminded of why we never tried to do this before - living without a bathroom with 4 boys is less than comfortable.

My mom took the 3 littles for the first 2 days which was so helpful. While the boys were away the biggest priority was to get the new toilet installed.

Steve removed the sink and cabinet combo, the medicine cabinet and the light fixtures so I could paint. I painted before we took out the old floor. This house was originally painted in all oil paints so I made myself high and painted all the walls and ceiling and the big linen cabinet in Kilz oil based primer.

The fumes were intense.

We have had to paint everything in this house in oil based primer if we want our latex paints to stick. I'm pretty sure I need to do a liver cleanse after inhaling all of those chemicals. I went with the recommendation to paint the ceiling in a semi-gloss paint. I would have never thought to do that and I was concerned it would look weird and shiny but we had issues with mildew forming on the ceiling so I went with it. Our painted ceiling extends into our shower and I'm confident the Behr Premium Plus Semi-Gloss in Ultra Pure White was a good choice. It is a mildew resistant paint and that is what we needed in our bathroom. It looks great. I painted the top half of our walls with Behr Premium Plus Ultra in a Satin finish. The Behr Ultra is their paint and primer in one combination and I used that on top of the oil-based primer I already applied. I didn't probably need to but I wanted really good coverage and I wanted this paint to last well for a long time. I choose the Behr color Aqua Spray. It is so, so pretty. I love it.

Once that was done the guys tore out the floor. The toilet stayed put until the very end just because it is our only bathroom. :)

Isn't our new subfloor pretty? Well, it's pretty to me because it is clean and new and did I mention clean? Sigh.


Flooring was the biggest question for us. When we originally planned to redo the bathroom, 11 years ago, we planned to install tile flooring. The thing is, I don't actually like tile flooring. At all. It is easy to clean but it is cold and hard and slippery when wet and I just don't care for it. I have yet to meet a tile floor I like. We looked at all of our options and when we found Traffic Master Allure vinyl flooring I was sold.

I have issues with laminate floors because they just don't wear nicely, especially in lighter colors. I have seen so many scratched and the dark color under the film shows through. Our floors take a beating and I knew I wouldn't be happy with that. The Allure flooring seems significantly more durable than any of the other laminate floors I have found. In fact, I stood in the store scratching away at it with a key, as hard as I could, for several minutes and it didn't even leave a mark. I liked that the floor is floating and wouldn't have to be glued down and sealed. I liked that it looks so nice and installation looked so easy. And it was - I installed the floor myself, with the exception of the piece under the toilet because that had to be cut around the plumbing stack. I was able to do the entire floor in a couple of hours and I'm really happy with it. I do think the one negative is that the sticky strips (they stick to each other in an overlapping pattern, not to the floor below) should be the color of the floor and not the darker gray color. Nothing in this old house is perfectly level or straight and in a couple of places if you look you can see a faint crack between the tiles. If the sticky side under those cracks was the same color as the tile you wouldn't even be able to see it. I'm so, so pleased with the floor overall and our plan is to do this same floor, but in a darker wood finish throughout our kitchen, living room and main floor bedrooms.

We went with the American Standard Champion 4 toilet. Major bonus points for this toilet being able to flush a bucket of golf balls. You can watch the video of all the funny things it can flush in the link above. So long, plunger... hope to see you never!


Once the floor was in, Steve started on the baseboards. The 7" baseboard was a real hassle but he got it done and it looks great. Our walls are uneven and bowed in some areas so when they are finished with caulk they'll look even better.

After that we started hanging our wainscoting. I knew this was what I wanted to do because it would cover so much of the wall that had sustained damage over the years. This was trickier than I expected because, again, our walls aren't flat like drywall walls are. Overall, I'm really happy with the way the wainscoting turned out and I am certain it was the best choice for making these old walls new.


We still have lots of little finishing touches to put on the bathroom as a whole. By the end of the weekend we will hopefully be 100% done with everything and I'll just need to still buy a few accessory pieces. Here is a sneak peak at where we were as of Wednesday afternoon. So pretty.

We choose the Kohler Portrait Pedestal Sink. I love it - it's perfect for our space. The faucet we chose was the American Standard Highgrove.


I'll be back with a wrap up post in a day or two.