For anyone out there who has ever had to manage projects for a living, you already know that one of the easiest ways to derail a successful project is to allow scope creep to enter the mix. For those of you who, luckily, are not familiar with this term, scope creep occurs when the actual project entails more than was originally planned on. Scope creep is one of the clearest trailing indicators of the overall success of a project, and so naturally Jes and I just love it.
Taking a step back, we have been throwing around the idea of redoing her bathroom for…. a long time. I can’t pin point an exact time frame, but I am sure it’s been at least a year. Every time we have discussed it, we have talked about just clearing up the textured walls, which I’m sure somebody 30 years ago thought was a great idea, but drives Jes crazy. After going back and forth on possible design ideas, we finally decided on doing a beadboard wainscoting on the bottom of the walls and grass cloth wallpaper above that. This was going to be far easier than trying to either smooth the texture or rehang all new drywall. That was it. Wainscoting. Grass cloth.
At least that was it until earlier today anyway, when our old friend “scope creep” reared its ugly head once again. As I enjoyed a nice outing at the driving range (I am getting better every time out now), Jes was toying around with the idea of putting our extra hardwood flooring over the existing tile. This alone would have required us to remove the toilet and vanity, install the hardwood, and re-install the toilet and vanity. All of which before getting to the actual plan of fixing the walls. And as if that wasn’t enough creep already, I decided that since we were going to go through all that trouble, we might as well fully replace the floors and the vanity and go ahead and “do it right”. So having said all of that, this bathroom project has gone from trying to cover up the ugly textured walls to a full on bathroom remodel. The only thing that is not going to be touched is the shower/tub.
Having said all of that, today we started the arduous process of remove the old tile, which was easy the easy part. The hard part was getting the adhesive off of the subfloor that was left behind. We worked for about 6 hours today and got through maybe half of the bathroom. Tomorrow we already have a full day planned: we need to remove the toilet and vanity and finish removing the rest of the tile and adhesive. We should also be able to go pick out and buy the tile, and if all goes 100% according to plan, we can put the new tile in. Realistically if we can get all of the old tile/adhesive up and the new tile purchased, I will consider that a success. I’ve put up a picture of what the bathroom looked like before today, for posterity’s sake. Unfortunately you can’t see how ugly the floors are so you will just have to take my word for it.
Wish us luck. Please.