When Bathroom Reno Gets in the Way

Of Knitting

Updated! It’s done!

Armed with only a cheese knife and a spray bottle from Ikea (that I bought to water my seedlings last year), and less than a month before our wedding, I decided to attack the purple paisley wall paper that was handing in our bathroom.  Our 1950’s style brick ranch was built in ’59 and has a lot of the charm that comes with homes from that period.  That and it’s solid, built before accountants started crunching numbers and switching to less expensive building materials.  But with that age comes a bit of nicotine still on the ceiling and wall paper that is starting to come off the walls around the very pink tub and tile bits.

We eventually plan on getting the tub bead blasted and recoated in a white color, but for now we are embracing the pink…just not the purple.  It seriously looks like a Vera Bradly print is on the walls of my bathroom – and while I love their glasses, and their bags (the things are indestructible – I have a weekender from when I graduated High School in 2006 that still looks brand new), just not in large swaths, like walls.  So yea, one day I started with “just the shower”.  You know that little bit of space between the shower and the awkward bulkhead that is in the shower for I don’t know what reason? That was the first to go.

Then, I move on, bit by bit to take off the wall paper in the rest of the bathroom.  Oh, did I mention that I’m hosting Easter in two weeks…and going out of town this weekend…Anyway, the bathroom update still seemed like a good idea.  Later on my parents gave me the tools that you are really supposed to use in the removal of wallpaper – and I’m sure my Fiancé has them somewhere in the garage but I couldn’t find them – but the cheese knife was a thicker and more sturdy tool that worked better.  Though, it still required a lot of work.  My hands and arms are so sore that I haven’t done any real knitting in days.  I’m hitting a serious withdrawal.

And it’s still requiring a lot of work.  God bless my dad – he was in there with a respirator and vibrating sander to take the rest of the glue off of the walls and get them a bit more even/smooth, with the aid of painters putty, to get them ready for a hint of pink that we decided to try as a way to embrace the pink and look like we actually want it in there.  Smoothing out the grout/caulk on top of the tile was one quick but huge step toward making the bathroom look polished again.