Hey hey welcome back to another round of joyous suffering in the PrepFord Household where we are gently but happily struggling towards the finish line. As a reminder, we’ve decided to participate as guest in the Spring One Room Challenge to renovate our coastal kids bathroom. The One Room Challenge is a biannual forum -April and October- for participants to have a fun and supportive way to share their room transformations over a six week period.
Check out the rest of the weeks in my posts:
Week 1 // Week 2 // Week 4 // Week 5 // Week 6
Renovation is like Marriage
You know that thing where people say marriage is hard work but then they never tell you what’s so hard about it? Renovations are like that. People are always talking about renovations being bad but they never tell you why. Lean in close, I will tell you what’s bad about it.
I dislike our contractor and have from the very moment I met him. I was banking on being at work the entire time he was here working. Cue COVID-19. Now instead of being safe at home, I am stuck at home.
I recognize that that is about me and not him. The real problem is that the work is incredibly slow moving and we find ourselves doing a lot of hurry up and wait due to poor coordination. We are also attempting to not have more than one person in the space at a time. All of this makes me regret regret not DIYing it. But that is neither here nor there.
Progress in the Coastal Kids Bathroom
So where are we currently? Well in spite of the above complaints, we have progress! Such good progress. My favorite folks came this week, the plumber and the electrician!
Let’s talk electrical first. We always use Roy Electric in Cary for any electrical work. We can not say enough wonderful things about them! Always on time, courteous, and affordable with minimal mess. If you are in the Raleigh, NC area, they are awesome.
They came this week and split the electrical from above the vanity into two sconces for the two nautical passage light. They also put in two canned lights. We had no task light in this bathroom, which seems to be a running problem in our home, and this room desperately needed it. While they were here, we had them fix the electrical in the tub. Now the outlet in the room behind the tub can function again.
Now let’s talk plumbing. Like the electrician, we love the plumbers. We worked with ARC plumbing out of Apex, NC. Can not say enough good things. Brantley, the plumber assigned to our project, walked us through every single thing that we needed to buy in order to make this sink work which was no easy task. Since all of our pieces needed to be brass, we couldn’t just go to the store and pick them up. (I totally recognize this is usually the contractors job. It was just easier this way).
We ran into a relatively big problem in this bathroom. The pvc pipe that connected to the p-trap under the sink exited to the left instead of coming straight up. I’ll spare you the boring details but all this means is that, my chosen aesthetic will be off. I won’t be able to store something under both sides of the p-trap because it won’t be vertical.
We walked through what plumbing materials were needed and ordered them so that they would be ready the next time Brantley came. This is an incredibly lowered explanation because even after all of this, I don’t speak plumbing. If you look in the picture above, you’ll also notice that the hole has been cut for the medicine cabinet. And of course there is a stud there. Deep sighs.
Bathroom Tub
Back to plumbing. Brantley also did the rough in for the tub handles so we can have *drumroll please* a bathroom tub! And walls! Notice that the tub in this bathroom only has the two handles and no shower head coming through the cement board and it’s because we decided to go with the exposed shower head in here. This tub is this bathroom is going to be a looker.
The ceiling is also newly scraped. Since the contractor was waiting for the cement board to dry, this was a fast portion of the project that could and should be done before doing the floor.
So here we are. Making progress in spite of ourselves. Tune in for next week of will she have an attitude or will she just be her usual self.
XO Prepford Wife