Whadya mean "wall" paint sticks to carpets too?!?!?!

A friend got his first condo this past week, so I went over to help paint over the weekend. Those of you who know him know he is shall we say "particular" with things. Sat night at about 1:00AM I'm up on a ladder cutting in the joint between his walls and ceiling at the entrance to his office. Imagine my horror that engulfs me as I notice that for the last 30 seconds or so, paint was running out of the pan that I was holding "not-so-level"!!! I looked down, gasped as every sphincter in my body tightened and screamed "are you f'ing kidding me?!?!!" Luckily, he didn't yell or scream. He was quite calm actually. Just kept on painting his cut in work. I got some paper towels and water and kept sopping it up. Then, on the advice of my wife, I dribbled water on the carpet, let it sit for a few seconds, then sopped that up. I repeated that process for about 20 minutes until the paper towels were coming up clean. Wet, but not paint tinged. Then I covered the spot with some damp paper towels and covered the area with a plastic drop cloth. 20/20 hindsight dontcha know... Then on Sunday, when Heidi and I got up, we went and bought a Bissel Li'l Green Steam Machine and she finished up the clean up. You can't see anything there now. I was lucky the carpet was a light brown and so was the paint I was using. God help me if I'd been the one cutting in the red-orange wall. That color would not have come out.

And the kicker? Just as I was about to climb the ladder to start, he looked over and asked "hey, you need a drop cloth?" I stepped off of the ladder and said, "nah. We'll put one down before we roller though to be sure we don't get any splatter on the carpet."

pics finally

OK I'm finally getting around to posting pics...

Here you can see the original damage done to the wall behind the shower faucet pipes. That's the back of my wall tiles you're looking at there. NO too cool, huh?



Here you can see the original vanity,sink, mirror, and medecine cabinet in the corner. Stylish isn't it?



This is my original tub and faucet handle combination. Note the gap between the bottom of the tile and the top of the tub.

Here's the corner where the vanity was. Note the holes in the drywall. Luckily, the new vanity cabinet totally covers that, so I lucked out of a pretty large drywall patch job.

And here's what the shower/tub area looked like once we removed everything. See how the drywall was only help up by those narror 1/2 furring strips? That's what caused us some trouble putting the new backer board up on the wall. The screws we used had to pierce the concrete blocks a little bit to sink enought below the surface of the drywall. It would have been much better if we'd had 2/4 studs to screw into.

I included this pic so you can kind of tell what's involved with replacing your faucet handles. Those pipes had to be cut, and new connections to a new manifold had to be soldered in place. It's easy to do, if you know how to use a plumber's blow torch.

OK On to the After Pics!!!

Here's our new faucet handles, tub, and tile work. I really like the faucet handles.

The cabinet over the toilet was easier to put in than I expected. I used a stud finder to locate the wall studs and drilled 3 screws through the back of the cabinet into them. And I also had 3 drywall anchors on the other side of the cabinet. It's prety sturdy. While I didn't hang my full weight on it, it's not going to fall with anything we could put in there. Which is good since you'd hate to have that fall while you're on the toilet...

Those corner shelves are the ones I talked about being problematic to install since my corners aren't perfect 90 degree angles. And you can also see the decorative border tiles Heidi picked out at the top of the wall. That's 3 spearate tiles, not one big one. We used a narrow rope motif tile on top of, and below a wider scroll motif tile. Not easy to grout that, let me tell you. But the end results look pretty good I think.

We had the shower head previously, but put a new wall pipe in. It's all shiny. :-) You can see the decorative tile border a little better in this picture too.

And finally, here is 2 shots of the new vanity/sink/mirror/light fixture, and you can see the floor tiles. Sorry I couldn't get that all into one shot. My bathroom isn't big enough for me to back up that far.

Well, that's my bathroom project. Next will either be the downstairs half bath, or the baby's room. I'd like to do the downstairs bath first I think since that won't take too long and I know if I wait until after the baby's here, I'll never do it.