swingchickie | powder room - before and after pix

thanks

swingdoc for the reminder to post pix of the new bathroom! i just took the "afters" yesterday, because we had to install a new ceiling light (the first one jack installed had a really cool glass "shade" that cracked so bad within a week i was worried it was going to crash to the floor). so, here we go:

for anyone who might be newer to my LJ, this bathroom was the cause of much drama a few years ago. it's on the lower level of my house, and when i first moved in i just didn't use it... one month after i moved in, i opened the door to get in there and clean, and was HORRIFIED. turns out the previous owners had covered up the fact that this bathroom had a history of a lot of water seeping in through the walls... within 1 month of moving in, there was water all over the floor, mold and mildew caked on the baseboards, and tree roots growing up throgh the floor and out the walls (because they were after the moisture). tree roots were snaking up the toilet, crawling along the floor... it was like something out of a horror movie. a few weeks after that, the moisture continued to be so bad that the drywall was buckling and the paint was bubbling off the wall. it truly looked like this little bathroom was possessed.

i ended up having to spend a small fortune to fix the problem -- had to tear down the trees, had to have the damaged lower half of the walls cut out and sealed off, then had a sump pump installed so that any future moisture drains into a trough and gets carried into the sump to be pumped out of the house. it was a pain in the arse, but it's much drier down there now.

that was 2 years ago, and the bathroom has sat there, gutted, all that time while i saved the money to get it rebuilt and worked on paying off what it cost to tear everything down. so finally, last month i had enough in the bank to make it all better again.

before: (it was hard to take these shots, this powder room is soooo small... it's literally 28" wide!)

in these shots you can see all the mold, water damage, and tree root nastiness. and this was after i had CLEANED.

besides the damage, the bathroom was just UGLY. celery-colored walls, wooden fixtures straight out of the 70s (and not in a fun retro way).

and... *drumroll* the afters!

i had the walls tiled halfway up with subway tile, and installed brand-new everything else (sink and vanity, toilet, mirror, etc)

i'm so in love with the floor tile.

hard to tell from the photos, but the paint is actually metallic. so the upper walls and ceiling have this cool sheen to them.

much better light fixture than before!

over the toilet, i really wanted a picture of a tree as an homage to the tree roots that had ruined the bathroom to begin with. jack took a photo of the beautiful weeping cherry tree in my side yard, converted it to B&W, and had it professionally printed for me.

so, that's it! i'm so happy with the results...

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From:

bohemianrapsody.livejournal.com

What a relief to have that saga behind you! It looks great. I love that you put the tree picture in as a homage..the poor roots were doing what came naturally.
Weasley previous owners..they must have *just painted* -I'm sure they were aware of how much time house inspectors spend in the basement.

swingchickie.livejournal.com

yeah, they literally caulked over a whole string of tree roots growing along the baseboards. they were pretty shady. the inspector just wrote "potential for water damage in the future"... little did i know that "the future" = "a few weeks".