Our Old House - Pacific 1902: Suspended Animation

Ever since my son’s wedding back in August, the bathroom has been in sort of a state of suspended animation. My mom was flying in from Mississippi so I had to get the waterproof wall board put up to cover the stubs and busted plaster in the bathroom. But I wasn’t able to get the walls mudded and painted nor the flooring put in before she arrived.

The next big push of activity came when I found out my niece, Krystan and my oldest son, Kory, and his wife, Serene, were planning an early January visit. You can tell I was in a bit of a rush because I didn’t take in pictures of the work in progress until I started on the flooring. The flooring in the bathroom is a 12” X 48” sheet of DuPont white and black slate laminate.

It had to go down quickly because this was the only bathroom in the house and I had to pull out both the toilet and the sink to lay the laminate.

In retrospect, I wish I had gone with 12” inch squares of laminate (once we’d seen this product we didn’t look further.) It was a major pain in the ass to install. To get the checkboard pattern, I had to cut off at least one square from every other row, more when necessary to stagger the seams. Plus, I had to make sure the “grout” lines lined up. Because this is a small room, I also had to center the laminate in the room.

But all in all, I’m happy with how it came out and how it looks. That bit of laminate leaning against the wall is all that I had left from the two cases I’d bought… Cut it a bit closer than I would have liked.

Once this was done, everything other than the floor molding came together fairly quickly. I wanted to keep the old-style look of the molding so I made my own using a high grade of 1”X4” pine, with a piece of quarter-round on top and another piece around the bottom. I didn’t think about that by doing this, I tripled the number of cuts I was making over what I would have had to do if I had used a piece of manufactured molding.

However, it looks much nicer than most manufactured molding. Because this is a bathroom, I sealed all of the seams once the flooring and molding was in.

Then it was time to decorate. This “lean-to” shelving unit was purchased as Menard’s. There is a 1X block behind the top shelf which is attached to the wall and the shelf is attached to it.

Robyn was in charge of decorating (as usual) and had been accumulating items for the past couple of months.

Rudy, the tissue holder, was a gift from her friend Patty. Robyn was happy to finally have it up on the wall.

It was a good feeling to also get a shower curtain up in front of that clear shower liner.

Eventually I got the correct wall hanger and now Rudy rests flat against the wall. (And Robyn learned after one middle-of-the-night adventure to not drink from my shaving cup.

In every room, we incorporate something old. The wall hangings and shelf, plus the mirror on the adjoining wall were on Robyn’s bathroom in her Ohio home.