18 Million Cracks

in my bathroom. Trust me-- I'm not making light of those more important 18 million cracks*; I'm just getting a little concerned about the stability of the joints in my bathroom.

I was a taking a shower a few days ago (I've taken them since!), and I noticed what looked like mildew in the grout lines. Admittedly, I'd noticed them before, and bought some extra heavy duty tub and tile cleaner. But this time I stuck a fingernail in the grout line...


I think these are actually places where the grout is beginning to fail. Morelike, has already failed. There's quite a few of them. My other guess was that perhaps there was a darker grout to begin with and someone decided to regrout in white. The floor looks like maybe it was a darker grout, not just stained. (We're clean people-- I swear!).

So I'm thinking-- and correct me if I'm going about this all wrong-- I'm going to clean the grout in the tub/shower and walls well with a soft brush and regrout. The sticking point is that it's the whole bathroom's wainscoting, but I think that if I just pay special attention to the areas of failure and do the entire thing with the same batch using a good float, then I should be good, right?

Then I noticed this:


That's the hot water knob in the tub. And that black thing you see is a hole. Bondo and some chrome paint? I know I should just replace them, but I LOVE these knobs. The hole is on the backside and they're perfectly vintage for the rest of the bathroom...Or can you buy those sleeve things separately?

Then, there's the crack between shower and window:


Trust-- the first thing I want to do in this joint is paint the trim. The most recent paint job was done with FLAT paint. Sigh. Dirty fingers galore. However, you'll see that the first thing I ought to do, is address the "why you shouldn't just grout your tile to wood" issue. Clean it out and caulk it, I assume.

An finally, the real crack in the ceiling that haunts me daily:


The AC guys did this and offered to knock a few hundred dollars off the total if I let it go. I was fresh off the kitchen drywalling, so I thought this was the bargain of the century and a good opportunity to practice my texturing. I'm not so worried about the texture as I am about the sheetrock falling down. I think my plan is to perhaps put a couple of drywall screws into the portions that are sagging-- there's plaster with lathe underneath, so it's something for the screws to go into, and they don't have to hold the weight of the whole sheet; just the little saggy bits. Then tape and mud and patch as otherwise.

It's a little daunting, but should be a good trial run for repairing and successfully cammoflaging the, ahem, canyon in our other ceiling:


This weekend was a bit of a dud, so we've promised ourselves greater progress next weekend. We want that final inspection and we want it now. Or at least before the permit is a year old. Yikes.

*After the last 10 days, politically speaking, I feel I need humor more than ever. I'm getting a little worried.

My biggest deal yet and other tales of the Home Depot

So I've mentioned the bathroom wall cabinet at 30% off...the Moen shower head at 80% off...the stainless steel trashcan duo for $10...our labor day sale granite tile and appliances...our Overstock.com faucet...the chandelier on clearance...We've found some pretty good deals. Well, folks, my bestest bargain so far came along over the weekend.

I almost never shop at Home Depot-- they're a little too expensive for poor little me. But they happen to be the only people we've found that carry our base shoe in the lengths we need. So we trucked on out there Saturday night to stock up on base shoe and grab a few other odds and ends we needed for our tiling project (which will get its own very special post, ugh.) and happened upon...



That's 92 square feet of Rajah slate bought at the reasonable price of $0.49/ft2. And it doesn't stop there. Remember I got a little tip that Lowes would be putting a lot of stock on 50% off clearance? After we got that information, we decided to put the search for laundry room flooring on hold for a while, at least until we had a chance to view the upcoming bargains. But when I saw this big stack of tile, I counted it and found that there was much more than the 77 ft2 that I need. I am NOT an impulse shopper, so I had to "sleep on it." Except that sleeping on it meant that before we even got to the car I decided I'd come back the next morning. So I did. And the flooring guy who loaded it up for me said that there 90 tiles, plus 2 broken ones (there were a few more broken tiles than that, but I can use them for edges if I have to) so he only charged me for 84 tiles. I can't even get nice ceramic tiles for that, and I certainly can't get half decent sticky tile at that price. It'll be more work, but I'm so happy.

Now, on the not so nice side of our trip to the depot...We needed about 20 lengths of base shoe. We see the station with a big sign that says, "CUT IT YOURSELF," in all caps, just like that. We think, "Great, we don't have to find someone to do this for us." Well, let me say that the sign should read, "Cut it your DAMN self." It is a tiny ass little hand saw. That kind of ridiculousness gets old after 5 boards, much less 20.

But the slate made it all ok. And the tiling guy was actually very helpful and seemed knowledgeable-ish. Overall, a good shopping weekend. The actual tiling project, however, is another story entirely.

When was this bathroom's birthday?

Update: At closing, above...And at move-in, below, with the paint color we decided on with the help of this post...

When I showed my friends pictures of the house, a few of them offered their services for pink tile demolition. I was outraged! I would never tear out this gaudy pink tile bathroom, partly because I love it, partly because I think some of the neighbors would lynch me for it, partly because the kiddo loves it, and largely because each individual tile has lasted so long that it seems a shame to destroy them now. Only the built-in tile soap dish has a banged up corner. Otherwise, it's all intact. I know, I know. When we eventually sell this house down the road, with so many updates, a totally retro bathroom isn't exactly going to be a selling point. But I don't care. I love it. (Ok, so I don't love the wall treatment, or the out of place cabinet above the toilet, but those things can be fixed with minimal destruction!)

Anyway, I found a light fixture on ebay that matches my living room light, and it got me to thinking about Art Deco styles and patterns and colors. I had originally thought of pink coupled with a really dark color (black or burgundy) and the strong geometric patterning of our floor tile as Art Deco, at least in spirit. The color in this photo seems a little truer on my screen than the pic above, btw:


There's also a cresting wave trim piece that goes around the bathroom, and behind the door, there's cabinetry, including a built-in hamper, with plastic door pulls-- they're certainly not original, but I wondered if they replaced glass handles that had been there at one time. The door knob is also distinctly Art Deco.

But then the inspector came; he and many other guests have since dated it as circa 1950s. and THEN we established that the tub, toilet and console sink are likely original; a family friend grew up in a bungalow nearby and said that her house had a sink and tub like ours and that they had been original. I picked up the tank lid for the toilet, and it is stamped "NOV25"; this is actually where we get the building date for our house-- HUD claimed it was built in 1940, but the K&T wiring had already suggested otherwise. Knowing what we know about the neighborhood, as well as the architectural style, old phone book listings, and the toilet stamp, we went with 1925 as the likely date. Give or take a few years; there's a listing in the city directory as early as 1922.

Anyway, I guess I'm at a bit of a loss as to the age of our bathroom decor. It doesn't really matter to me much whether it's 1920s, 30s or 50s. I still love it. It's just, as with many other things in this house, it's a total curiosity as to how it got the way it did...Any ideas? Any idea what the hell color I'm supposed to paint the walls? It's looking like white is the only safe bet here. The PO did some kind of textured treatment that looks like she glued paper bags to the wall and ripped them off before they dried.