Well, this one is embarrassing, but I’m posting about it to hopefully kick my ass in gear.

When last I posted about the upstairs bathroom, we had ripped out the old tile. That was February 20. You’d think with all this quarantine time on my hands I’d be on fire to finish this. All these other bloggers have crushed their home improvement projects during quarantine. (I’m thinking Jen’s amazing laundry room, swoon.)

Where are we?

Well, I removed the last of the wallpaper scrids and scrubbed the walls. That was something.

Then I realized three things in succession.

First, I was going to have to skimcoat 2/3 of the wall to get rid of the faint faux-brick outlines that were underneath the wallpaper. (If we’re being strictly accurate, it was originally a faux-brick plaster design, and then they did a half-assed coverup job to get it flat-ish for the wallpaper, so it was just uneven all around.)

Second, I wanted to remove the built-in medicine cabinet on the left wall. I actually liked it as a medicine cabinet, but it was in a genuinely terrible location, right in the middle of a wall. So, yanked that out and rebuilt the drywall at the same time as I finally filled in the huge hole left by the plumbing work.

Third, if I was going to all this trouble to make a nice new bathroom I needed to yank the existing wall lighting, and then I discovered that I did not like any of the sconce-style lighting I found in my budget (apart from like $$$ art deco style sconces, sigh) oh and also they were not centered over the vanity anyway. So: centered lighting it was, but that would require an electrician, which…quarantine.

So, where am I now?

The wall is about 85% skimcoated. I’ve probably done about 5 rounds of applying plaster and drying and now I’m in the agonizing final obsessive part of it, which can last as long as I want, because it’s not like anything else will move forward. So, corners, smoothing the patched bits, the agonizingly finicky bit underneath and around the toilet.

What’s left to be done?

• finish the skimcoating
• prime the walls
• choose a paint color (going to be a sort of medium gray)
• apply waterproofing membrane around the tub to prep it for tiling

Those are all things I can do; then we hit a big currently-immovable roadblock.

• have electrician move box for lighting, then fix up plaster around those holes, touch up primer
• paint walls
• have area around tub tiled & waterproofed
• choose showerhead (thinking something with a detachable wand so we can wash the dog in more ease
• put curtain hanger back up (I have an existing one…but the crazy part of me wants to build my own from piping?)
• paint wooden bottom of vanity, replace hardware
• find corner cabinet for toiletries

…see, now I’m discouraged all over again.

On a brighter note, I decided on tile.

I really don’t like subway tile but this is the precise color I wanted, so I’m going to suck it up. We may see about laying it out in a herringbone pattern on the shower back part.