Living in the Loo

I just don't understand it. This bathroom we're remodeling is no bigger than 32 square feet and it is taking FOREVER to get done. In our first house we ripped up the carpet and pried loose a billion tiny carpet nails in one weekend. We're into our second week on this silly project. You know why it's taking us this long? Well, there are several reasons. The most time-consuming task (and the biggest pain in the arse) is the bead board. Ron decided he wanted to strip it. After five days of applying that orange gelatin stripper and scraping like a lunatic, we've still got one whole side that's not completely finished. Pushing my silvery locks out of my gently perspiring face with the back of my hand, I looked up at Ron and asked whose idea it was to paint the bead board in the first place. "Tyler's." I then said I was going to make him withdraw from college and come home to scrape these grooves with his teeth we paid a lot of money for.

Here's the process . . . slather on the goop. Wait for 30 minutes (but I usually forget and it sits on there for at least an hour). Go in with my trusty little scraper and scrape the wide board first. Then run the scraper up each groove on an angle to get most of the goop out. Then go back and scrape very carefully up the teeny tiny middle that divides the grooves. Then go back up each groove again, this time with the scraper at a 90 degree angle. Every time you go up the groove, more goop oozes out onto the wide board, so you have to get up that excess, most of which ends up back in the groove. Ok, so why am I not in rehab already?

After a couple of days of fighting the residual goop, Ron comes in with steel wool and mineral spirits (labeled "less harmful" - that's not all that reassuring to me . . . ) and scrubs the holy heck out of the wood. Ah, finally, it's beginning to look somewhat done. Then I come by with a wire brush that's attached to his drill and ream those grooves one last time. I have to admit I feel a little OCDish with these grooves. I want them COMPLETELY free of goop. Is it wrong to get a little shiver of joy when I see the goop piling up on the scraper? Do you think that the Promises rehab center would take people like me? More importantly, would my insurance cover the $30,000/month tab? Yeah, I don't think so.

We plan to finish it with a satin varnish - NO MORE PAINT! We got this completely awesome sink (see pic at right) and we're waiting on choosing the color for the top half of the walls until we get it. I'm leaning towards rust . . .