I’m sitting in my living room right now feeling a sense of deep, deep shame. My dear, sweet husband went to CVS last night to buy Grant some Pedialyte and I asked him to get me one of those tiny Valentine’s Snicker’s hearts. He returned with a family size bag of Reese’s cups, which I’m going to say I only ate three servings of this morning (I lost count) before throwing the rest of the bag into the diaper trash can, the only place from where I’m certain I won’t be tempted to retrieve them. At least I got a good workout yesterday.
My attempt to cover up the exterior wood paneling that comprises the walls of our basement bathroom is coming along much better than anticipated. It would probably be easier (and not much more expensive) to just sheetrock the room, but this is my current nap-time project, meaning I’m working on it when J isn’t home, and I don’t have the physical strength to drywall unassisted. So, I figured I would give skim-coating everything a shot.
After getting one coat of drywall compound on half the room, I let it dry for three days, then sanded it down to a smooth finish. This is one coat, before sanding:
All in all, sanding took about three hours. Then I did a second skim coat, using a dust control product. The dust simply falls to the floor and doesn’t fill the air in the room at all, although I still take the proper precautions with an N95 mask.
My second coat resulted in much smoother finish. Once it has dried for a couple days I will sand again, and then a light, third coat to smooth out any imperfections should do the trick. It doesn’t look like much now, but after the paint and trim are installed I don’t think anyone will be able to tell what we have going on underneath.
As for my wonderful husband, he was up to his elbows in demo work, removing the fiberglass shower surround:
It was even uglier underneath:
Then he used a saw-zaw to cut out the wood paneling.
We’re going to install backerboard around the shower and then I’ll finish the remaining walls. The fun part of selecting tile will come after that, so at least we have something to look forward to. At the moment I’m thinking a slate floor and subway tile shower after seeing this:
That’s a little too modern to fit the style of our house, but I can definitely work with the color scheme. The worst part of winter seems to be upon us, and I’m cooped up in the house with a teething toddler, so at least this project gives me something to focus on. Grant’s favorite snack right now is frozen waffles-as in, still frozen, straight out of the freezer. It’s the only thing that seems to soothe his gums. Poor kid. Unfortunately, he communicates his pain by running up to me with his arms outstretched saying, “Mama!”, and when I reach down to hug him, bites me on the stomach. I’m in as much pain as he is at this point. Hopefully this ends soon!
