Home Renovation Update #1 – The Bathroom

Some of you know that we are renovating our 1946 home so we can sell it and move. I thought I would start sharing the renovation process with you so you can see where we are, how far we’ve come and how much farther we still have to go.

Beware – these pictures are not pretty and may cause nightmares. You’ve been warned.

4 Months Ago…

In April of this year we started the renovation process on our home. Our goal is to have the home completely renovated in a year so that we can put it on the market to sell. I’m honestly doubting meeting the goal of a year at this time since every time we turn around another issue comes up.

We had to get our septic tank pumped, which led to finding out that our septic system isn’t even working properly. (Probably because it’s about 2 million years old.) That led to the Health Department coming out to see if we could put a new one on our land in a different place. No, of course not. We were told we have to hook up to the town’s sewer system.

After paying the deposit for hook up, we learned there are two ways they can hook us up to the sewer. One way is to go in front of the house, which would close the road for two days, which of course they don’t want to do. I don’t see a problem with this since we do not live on a main road and people can go around our road. They basically use our road as a shortcut. The second way to hook up to the sewer is behind our house, but they have to go onto the land of the healthcare and rehab that sits behind us. This of course means lawyers and paperwork.

While the town people and lawyers and whoever else is involved did their thing, we decided to go ahead and tear apart our bathroom for remodel.

The best part of a bathroom renovation is tearing down the walls. Seriously, if you have some frustrations built up inside then you should volunteer to tear up some walls in a home that’s being renovated.

I’m sure you’re probably thinking, “Why in the world did she paint the walls of a small bathroom dark green?” Well, y’all, this was before the Joanna Gaines era.

The worst part of a bathroom renovation is the drywall dust. That stuff gets everywhere! If you plan to tear down walls, wear a hat! My hair was so crunchy that I was afraid it might just break off in pieces.

Another tip: cover the door of the room you are working in with plastic, or cover up every single thing in your house. We did not do this at first and there was drywall dust all the way in the kitchen and living room!

It took a lot longer than I thought to tear down a small portion of a wall. The nails holding the wall up where really stuck in there! Some of them were so old they were just breaking apart.

Removing almost all the walls (except behind the bathtub) wasn’t as easy as it looks on all those home renovation shows. There is also no clean up crew following along behind you with trash bags. (That would’ve been nice!)

Going shopping

After creating this huge mess, it was fun to go shopping at Lowe’s and pick out the floor tiles and the new sink. We also ordered a bathtub and picked up the tiles for the wall behind the tub.

Now we are ready to put everything in and have a new bathroom!

But…

We now have to wait on the town to decide which direction they are going to go when hooking us up to the sewer system because our plumbing depends on which direction they take. So we can’t start on the bathroom.

4 Months Later…

It has been four months since we started this process. Four long months of brushing our teeth in the kitchen because we only have one bathroom. And our one bathroom has no sink. Four long months of no walls and a broken window. Four long months of yuck. Four long months of two huge holes in my backyard because of the septic issues.

On the plus side, since they took our deposit before all of the decisions were made, they now have to pay to have our septic tank pumped every three weeks. That’s a huge savings for us and huge loss for them, so hopefully that will help them hurry everything up.

Pray they hurry everything up!

Stay tuned for another update next week!