Weddingbee Blog

Crazy title, isn’t it? It’s (fortunately or not) true. Because we’re having our wedding at home (a decision that both excites me and gives me moments of panic), our home renovations are taking on an additional level of pressure.

Soon (I promise) I’ll take you on a photo tour of our slightly creepy and incredibly outdated home, but right now I want to do a little happy dance about a project that we just completed: updating the main bathroom! *happy dance, happy dance*

Here’s the Before and After:

Before: four layers of laminate tiles, a ginormous toilet from before the dawn of time with a HUGE water tank, a fake wood vanity with an unattached (and crooked) sink, and a loose tub surround. Oh, yea, and the Sears & Roebuck Co. medicine cabinet complete with attached sconces. And did I mention the golfer painted on the lid of the toilet?

After: bungalow-style tile, modern and space-saving sink (and it’s attached!), Mr. Cheese’s backlit mirror design, a high-efficiency toilet, bright white tub surround, new plumbing (that doesn’t leak!), vinyl wainscoting, kicker and trim, and updated paint (Benjamin Moore, thankyouverymuch).

Muddy Indiana* got the inaugural bath last night, and I took a wonderful bath there yesterday — it’s SO nice to have a bathroom on the main floor again (though we’ve been very thankful for the downstairs bathroom, let me tell ya).

Lessons learned:

- Laying tile is easy; getting the layout right is hard.

- CompromiseCompromiseCompromise (and sometimes wine). He’s a perfectionist; I am all about getting it done. Halfway through it occurred to me how incredibly stupid it was of me to argue AGAINST doing something better/ nicer/ prettier. So I stopped. And it took forever, but we’ll be happy with it for decades.

- Most grout sealers only last for 3 - 5 years. THREE TO FIVE YEARS. Who knew? So, if you buy a new house, be ready to reseal your grout in a few years, and if you buy an old one, ask the owners when they last resealed it (and if they don’t know, do it ASAP, otherwise water leaks under the tiles and bad things happen). We paid an exorbitant amount of money for the super-duper sealer that will last 15 years and I’m still bitter about it.

- House projects with your future husband are fun! Well, okay, doing them is not so fun, but realizing that you are, in fact, capable of doing them together and that your children will one day make a watery mess in that very bathroom is pretty cool.

- (To make this wedding-related) The shelf right below the sink is perfect for a little toiletry kit and the wide hallway outside the bathroom is a good place to put a bench and some embarrassing childhood snapshots in case there’s a line to use the facilities.

Would it be too cheesy to put a vertical line of three pics of us on that wall to the right of the window? I have some great pictures of us making funny faces, but then I’ve heard people complain about other people’s houses that are plastered with pictures of them.

*This is Indiana Jones Jr., our six-month-old mutt puppy (probably German Shorthaired Pointer, definitely mixed with Tornado).