A Baby, A Bathroom, and HOUSE #2 ?!?!?!
So... we bought a house. In Memphis. Again.
I know what you're thinking (if you know me personally).
"But Mary, you have been talking about moving out west for like the past 5 years. WTF?"
I am sort of thinking the same thing. 2018 was supposed to be the transitional year that my husband and I were downsizing and getting everything in order to take the plunge and move 1000+ miles away. And it was that, well sort of. We have definitely been downsizing and getting everything in order.
However, my brother went and procreated the cutest little niece a girl could have. Look at this face! I was more than a little torn about leaving. But I was putting on my brave face and my big girl pants and doing what I said I would do. That is one consistent thing about me... I usually do what I say I'm going to do (even if that is a crazy thing like buying an abandoned house in a tax auction... I digress).
I couldn't see for myself why I was so conflicted. It was my husband who figured out what was going on with me. Out of the blue (in March), he said to me, "Maybe we should just stay in Memphis for a while." It kind of took the wind out of my sails. Stay in Memphis? That is the opposite of what I have been trying to do for like... ever. I literally bought an abandoned house in a tax auction to fix it up and get out of debt specifically to have the money to move away from Memphis.
But inside my tummy there was this tiny little tingle of excitement mixed with an overwhelming sense of relief. I could quit worrying about being in a rush to put the finishing touches on Marguerite's house (that is what I am going to forever call my first project house). My sister decided she wanted to buy it from me (I guess I did a good job), but there were a few small things I wanted to do before an appraiser came rolling through (again) and I said good-bye to it. I mean, I guess it is a "sort of" good-bye, my sister has probably inadvertently been roped into hosting Thanksgiving for the rest of time since she kept Marguerite's huge dining table.
Staying in Memphis means that the last few things on my to do list for Marguerite's house aren't the rush they would have been otherwise. AND it means we get to pick a house for ourselves (my husband and I) for the first time ever. Since we have been married, we have shared a house with my brother and his wife, and then the temporary rental we deemed the transitional house (where we've been diligently downsizing). HOW EXCITING TO HAVE OUR VERY OWN HOUSE!
I was in the middle of one very small (note: semi large) bathroom renovation I promised to do for my brother when my husband sprung this on me. I mean, it was kind of my fault I had to do the bathroom... I took a hammer to the tile one crazy night back in 2013 or so, before I knew how much mortar and bullshit is behind tile installed in 1966. So I basically had screwed up the wall and vowed to fix it before I was 1000 miles away enjoying the mountains. I feel like committing to fix it is fair. More on this very small (note: semi large) bathroom renovation in a moment.
So I'm in the middle of this project for my brother, I'm stressing about how I still need to install the peg board in the garage at Marguerite's house, and I'm continually saying I'm on a timeline to get all of this in order by June (along with figuring out how we're going to move - financially and otherwise). I was exhausted. I was struggling with my eating disorder because behaviors tend to show up when stress does (see my other blog for more about that if you're interested). My left eye had been twitching for months (I couldn't figure out why). My husband could clearly see how I was struggling even if I couldn't.
So much changed when he said those 10 words. At first, I just responded with a shrug and something along the lines of "WHAT?" I said I would think about it. I spent two weeks waiting for him to change his mind before I allowed myself to think it was a possibility (but I started looking at houses online, you know, just in case). If we were staying in Memphis, we were definitely buying a house and moving out of the rental house. We had chosen it because it has the right amount of space and room for our dog to run in the backyard. But the interior (and exterior for that matter) are not our style (or ANYONE'S STYLE). It's kind of terrible. Like brown school linoleum and peach walls throughout the house terrible. Like the laundry is in the spider haven garage terrible. First world problems, I know. I don't think this photo really conveys the gross colors well enough, but here it is. Don't get me wrong, this house has all kinds of potential. I could make it amazing. But it's a rental, and it was only meant to be temporary.
We ultimately decided to stay in Memphis and to keep it a secret until we found a house and were close to closing on it. The search was pretty short as we were able to find a cute little house in east Memphis on our third trip out looking with my real estate agent. We put in an offer that day and knew the next day that it was accepted. The sellers wanted a closing date pretty far in the future (compared to what is standard), so at the point where we had done all of the inspections and negotiated everything, closing was still 6 weeks away. We decided to tell family we were staying in Memphis on Mother's Day (11 days before we were scheduled to close).
When my husband said out loud to them that we had a surprise and we had bought a house, everybody lost their shit for a few moments thinking we had bought a house in Colorado or New Mexico and it was a terrible thing to spring on everyone on Mother's Day. My aunt said, "Well that's no fucking Mother's Day surprise!" There were tears of joy and sighs of relief when he followed up with the fact that it was in Memphis. They had all been super supportive of us wanting to leave and start our adventures elsewhere, but I guess when it came down to it, they really wanted us to stay.
I am going to devote an entire post to the little gem of a house (1090 square feet), but here is a sneak peek of us the day we took possession. It has the cutest original 1954 bathrooms and a SUPER COOL original copper vent-a-hood in the kitchen. I have some awesome ideas to keep the mid-century charm for this doll and make it more of a restoration project.
But for now, to satisfy some people looking for before and after photos (immediately as always), I am going to defer to the very small (note: semi large) bathroom renovation I did at my brother's house. When we first moved in together in 2011, it was pretty much original to 1966 with white hex tile on the floor, the original vanity, and white tile speckled with gold flakes everywhere else. I love salvaging original details, but speckled tile? There was a pretty much identical bathroom to this one upstairs, complete with speckled tile. I redid it when my brother and sister-in-law went to Europe on vacation. I'll throw in some pics for that one below as well. But the downstairs bath (the one my husband and I used) always took a back burner, and just existed with the wall I screwed up with the hammer behind some clever temporary wallpaper. This is what it looked like when we bought the house in 2011 in the estate of the original owner.
I guess I failed to mention the original wallpaper. I know it was original because the sheetrock walls underneath weren't even primed (yikes) so it was incredibly difficult to remove. More pics from 2011.
I decided at the time I was just going to remove the wallpaper and give it a fresh coat of paint and some stenciling and live with it.
It worked for me. But I knew I would eventually install new flooring and vanity, and take out the half wall of tile behind the toilet to update the style a bit. While we were living there, it was a project I just never got around to completing, probably mostly because I had a whole other house to work on. But after my husband and I moved into the rental and Marguerite's house was pretty much finished, it was more feasible for me to work on this bathroom without it affecting anyone (for the most part).
My sister-in-law went out of town in January, so my brother, sister, and I took the opportunity to do the demo work. This basically amounted to removing the toilet and the vanity, taking out the rest of the tile wall behind the toilet, and removing the hex tile floor (it was scratched and damaged). My brother helped with removing the vanity and toilet. The latter of which was insanely more difficult than it should have been because the bolts that were used to install the toilet were apparently originally too long. Whomever installed it, twisted the nut onto the bolt, then cut the bolt off. That fixed the problem of the bolt being too long, but it also ruined the threads on the bolt and made it impossible to remove the nut. Long story short, we had to cut it off with a grinder (after trying unsuccessfully with a hacksaw). My brother had a massive hangover that day, and spent the better part of an hour bent over trying to get the toilet out. This basically translated to me and my sister getting to have all of the fun with Big Betty (the 8 pound sledgehammer) on the tile floor.
It would appear that I did not take photos of the demo work my husband and I did on the tile half wall... probably because I spent most of the time cussing myself (for messing it up in the first place) and the builders from 1966 (for how they built it). There was a layer of tile, an inch of mortar, and wire mesh behind the mortar (of course). I was expecting all of this, but that doesn't mean I cussed any less. The photo below shows the repaired wall in the background (I had pieced the sheetrock into the hole that was left and patched the seams and screws). It also shows the tile immediately after it was laid. We also had to do a layer of self-leveling concrete on top of the foundation because (as you can see in the photo above) not all of the mortar would come off of the foundation. This is an easy solution to get back to having a flat surface on which to install the new tile. Apparently it was not exciting enough to warrant a picture. The second photo below shows the floor after grouting the tile (we used charcoal gray grout again).
I let my sister-in-law decide what wall treatment to use because it felt too blank in the room to just leave the walls flat. It was also a lot easier to hide my sheetrock seams with some trim instead of the neverending "mud, sand, repeat" process it takes to smooth everything out. She decided we would do a board and batten trim (like I did in Marguerite's main bathroom).
She also decided on the same color I used in most of Marguerite's house: Eon by Behr. It is a soft gray color that doesn't have too much of any particular undertone (so it still looks gray in pretty much all the lighting I've tested it in so far). Some grays can look more blue, purple, yellow, beige, green, depending on the undertones. But this one seems to just be gray. The vanity was a find from Habitat for Humanity Re-Store that I bought back before we did the upstairs bath. It had been hanging out in the garage for years, but still looked brand new (once we evicted all of the spiders). The two vanities were a good find at Habitat as they were brand new donations with soft close drawers, and feet that make them look like a piece of furniture rather than cabinetry.
A backsplash behind the vanity was always a part of the original plan (which is why in the photo above you can see that the board and batten trim is only behind the toilet and on the opposite wall). When we installed the countertop, it was really obvious that the backsplash was no longer just an option (it was required). The walls weren't square (shocker), so there were gaps between the walls and the vanity top. When we demo'ed the original vanity, I was suspicious this may be the case because the top was embedded into the sheetrock. That's right, the original builder just cut a slot in the sheetrock and slid the vanity top inside the wall so it would not be obvious that the wall wasn't square.
The original plan probably would have been something similar to this inspiration photo with a small section of glass mosaic tile.
But since we were dealing with this gap from the not-so-square walls, I thought it would look better to extend the backsplash down the wall along the side of the vanity as well. Something more simple and less busy would be a better solution for a section this large. The answer came in the form of subway tile.
You can see how the tile extending down the sides of the vanity further masks the gap the less-than-square walls caused. If you noticed some weirdness at the top of the subway tiles where the wood trim abruptly ends, never fear, that is just where the mirror rests. My sister-in-law decided to keep the original mirror and give it a makeover with some spray paint. We wanted to be able to mount it at the same height (a lesson learned after the upstairs bathroom renovation - the mirror is almost too tall for my very short sister-in-law to see herself).
The ruined bolt on the toilet, the mortar stuck on the foundation, and not-so-square walls are some typical hurdles you run into in the process of any renovation. It's key to have the appropriate tools (and ingenuity, I guess) to deal with and overcome them. In the end, I am happy with how it turned out. This project basically amounted to: new floor tile, new subway tile backsplash, a new vanity with a new top and a new faucet, new light fixture, new paint, and some trim wood for the board and batten. But the difference is distinct for sure (especially when comparing to where we started in 2011).
As an added bonus, here are some before, in-progress, and after photos from the upstairs bathroom renovation we did a few years ago. Basically the same footprint, but a different design. I decided to just throw these in for shits and giggles.
NEXT STOP: NEW HOUSE!
I know what you're thinking (if you know me personally).
"But Mary, you have been talking about moving out west for like the past 5 years. WTF?"
I am sort of thinking the same thing. 2018 was supposed to be the transitional year that my husband and I were downsizing and getting everything in order to take the plunge and move 1000+ miles away. And it was that, well sort of. We have definitely been downsizing and getting everything in order.
However, my brother went and procreated the cutest little niece a girl could have. Look at this face! I was more than a little torn about leaving. But I was putting on my brave face and my big girl pants and doing what I said I would do. That is one consistent thing about me... I usually do what I say I'm going to do (even if that is a crazy thing like buying an abandoned house in a tax auction... I digress).
I couldn't see for myself why I was so conflicted. It was my husband who figured out what was going on with me. Out of the blue (in March), he said to me, "Maybe we should just stay in Memphis for a while." It kind of took the wind out of my sails. Stay in Memphis? That is the opposite of what I have been trying to do for like... ever. I literally bought an abandoned house in a tax auction to fix it up and get out of debt specifically to have the money to move away from Memphis.
But inside my tummy there was this tiny little tingle of excitement mixed with an overwhelming sense of relief. I could quit worrying about being in a rush to put the finishing touches on Marguerite's house (that is what I am going to forever call my first project house). My sister decided she wanted to buy it from me (I guess I did a good job), but there were a few small things I wanted to do before an appraiser came rolling through (again) and I said good-bye to it. I mean, I guess it is a "sort of" good-bye, my sister has probably inadvertently been roped into hosting Thanksgiving for the rest of time since she kept Marguerite's huge dining table.
Staying in Memphis means that the last few things on my to do list for Marguerite's house aren't the rush they would have been otherwise. AND it means we get to pick a house for ourselves (my husband and I) for the first time ever. Since we have been married, we have shared a house with my brother and his wife, and then the temporary rental we deemed the transitional house (where we've been diligently downsizing). HOW EXCITING TO HAVE OUR VERY OWN HOUSE!
I was in the middle of one very small (note: semi large) bathroom renovation I promised to do for my brother when my husband sprung this on me. I mean, it was kind of my fault I had to do the bathroom... I took a hammer to the tile one crazy night back in 2013 or so, before I knew how much mortar and bullshit is behind tile installed in 1966. So I basically had screwed up the wall and vowed to fix it before I was 1000 miles away enjoying the mountains. I feel like committing to fix it is fair. More on this very small (note: semi large) bathroom renovation in a moment.
So I'm in the middle of this project for my brother, I'm stressing about how I still need to install the peg board in the garage at Marguerite's house, and I'm continually saying I'm on a timeline to get all of this in order by June (along with figuring out how we're going to move - financially and otherwise). I was exhausted. I was struggling with my eating disorder because behaviors tend to show up when stress does (see my other blog for more about that if you're interested). My left eye had been twitching for months (I couldn't figure out why). My husband could clearly see how I was struggling even if I couldn't.
So much changed when he said those 10 words. At first, I just responded with a shrug and something along the lines of "WHAT?" I said I would think about it. I spent two weeks waiting for him to change his mind before I allowed myself to think it was a possibility (but I started looking at houses online, you know, just in case). If we were staying in Memphis, we were definitely buying a house and moving out of the rental house. We had chosen it because it has the right amount of space and room for our dog to run in the backyard. But the interior (and exterior for that matter) are not our style (or ANYONE'S STYLE). It's kind of terrible. Like brown school linoleum and peach walls throughout the house terrible. Like the laundry is in the spider haven garage terrible. First world problems, I know. I don't think this photo really conveys the gross colors well enough, but here it is. Don't get me wrong, this house has all kinds of potential. I could make it amazing. But it's a rental, and it was only meant to be temporary.
We ultimately decided to stay in Memphis and to keep it a secret until we found a house and were close to closing on it. The search was pretty short as we were able to find a cute little house in east Memphis on our third trip out looking with my real estate agent. We put in an offer that day and knew the next day that it was accepted. The sellers wanted a closing date pretty far in the future (compared to what is standard), so at the point where we had done all of the inspections and negotiated everything, closing was still 6 weeks away. We decided to tell family we were staying in Memphis on Mother's Day (11 days before we were scheduled to close).
When my husband said out loud to them that we had a surprise and we had bought a house, everybody lost their shit for a few moments thinking we had bought a house in Colorado or New Mexico and it was a terrible thing to spring on everyone on Mother's Day. My aunt said, "Well that's no fucking Mother's Day surprise!" There were tears of joy and sighs of relief when he followed up with the fact that it was in Memphis. They had all been super supportive of us wanting to leave and start our adventures elsewhere, but I guess when it came down to it, they really wanted us to stay.
I am going to devote an entire post to the little gem of a house (1090 square feet), but here is a sneak peek of us the day we took possession. It has the cutest original 1954 bathrooms and a SUPER COOL original copper vent-a-hood in the kitchen. I have some awesome ideas to keep the mid-century charm for this doll and make it more of a restoration project.
But for now, to satisfy some people looking for before and after photos (immediately as always), I am going to defer to the very small (note: semi large) bathroom renovation I did at my brother's house. When we first moved in together in 2011, it was pretty much original to 1966 with white hex tile on the floor, the original vanity, and white tile speckled with gold flakes everywhere else. I love salvaging original details, but speckled tile? There was a pretty much identical bathroom to this one upstairs, complete with speckled tile. I redid it when my brother and sister-in-law went to Europe on vacation. I'll throw in some pics for that one below as well. But the downstairs bath (the one my husband and I used) always took a back burner, and just existed with the wall I screwed up with the hammer behind some clever temporary wallpaper. This is what it looked like when we bought the house in 2011 in the estate of the original owner.
I guess I failed to mention the original wallpaper. I know it was original because the sheetrock walls underneath weren't even primed (yikes) so it was incredibly difficult to remove. More pics from 2011.
I decided at the time I was just going to remove the wallpaper and give it a fresh coat of paint and some stenciling and live with it.
 |
| Casper D: the ultimate supervisor |
It worked for me. But I knew I would eventually install new flooring and vanity, and take out the half wall of tile behind the toilet to update the style a bit. While we were living there, it was a project I just never got around to completing, probably mostly because I had a whole other house to work on. But after my husband and I moved into the rental and Marguerite's house was pretty much finished, it was more feasible for me to work on this bathroom without it affecting anyone (for the most part).
My sister-in-law went out of town in January, so my brother, sister, and I took the opportunity to do the demo work. This basically amounted to removing the toilet and the vanity, taking out the rest of the tile wall behind the toilet, and removing the hex tile floor (it was scratched and damaged). My brother helped with removing the vanity and toilet. The latter of which was insanely more difficult than it should have been because the bolts that were used to install the toilet were apparently originally too long. Whomever installed it, twisted the nut onto the bolt, then cut the bolt off. That fixed the problem of the bolt being too long, but it also ruined the threads on the bolt and made it impossible to remove the nut. Long story short, we had to cut it off with a grinder (after trying unsuccessfully with a hacksaw). My brother had a massive hangover that day, and spent the better part of an hour bent over trying to get the toilet out. This basically translated to me and my sister getting to have all of the fun with Big Betty (the 8 pound sledgehammer) on the tile floor.
 |
| Note the wall where the toilet was... lame wallpaper covering my hole in the wall. lol |
It would appear that I did not take photos of the demo work my husband and I did on the tile half wall... probably because I spent most of the time cussing myself (for messing it up in the first place) and the builders from 1966 (for how they built it). There was a layer of tile, an inch of mortar, and wire mesh behind the mortar (of course). I was expecting all of this, but that doesn't mean I cussed any less. The photo below shows the repaired wall in the background (I had pieced the sheetrock into the hole that was left and patched the seams and screws). It also shows the tile immediately after it was laid. We also had to do a layer of self-leveling concrete on top of the foundation because (as you can see in the photo above) not all of the mortar would come off of the foundation. This is an easy solution to get back to having a flat surface on which to install the new tile. Apparently it was not exciting enough to warrant a picture. The second photo below shows the floor after grouting the tile (we used charcoal gray grout again).
I let my sister-in-law decide what wall treatment to use because it felt too blank in the room to just leave the walls flat. It was also a lot easier to hide my sheetrock seams with some trim instead of the neverending "mud, sand, repeat" process it takes to smooth everything out. She decided we would do a board and batten trim (like I did in Marguerite's main bathroom).
She also decided on the same color I used in most of Marguerite's house: Eon by Behr. It is a soft gray color that doesn't have too much of any particular undertone (so it still looks gray in pretty much all the lighting I've tested it in so far). Some grays can look more blue, purple, yellow, beige, green, depending on the undertones. But this one seems to just be gray. The vanity was a find from Habitat for Humanity Re-Store that I bought back before we did the upstairs bath. It had been hanging out in the garage for years, but still looked brand new (once we evicted all of the spiders). The two vanities were a good find at Habitat as they were brand new donations with soft close drawers, and feet that make them look like a piece of furniture rather than cabinetry.
A backsplash behind the vanity was always a part of the original plan (which is why in the photo above you can see that the board and batten trim is only behind the toilet and on the opposite wall). When we installed the countertop, it was really obvious that the backsplash was no longer just an option (it was required). The walls weren't square (shocker), so there were gaps between the walls and the vanity top. When we demo'ed the original vanity, I was suspicious this may be the case because the top was embedded into the sheetrock. That's right, the original builder just cut a slot in the sheetrock and slid the vanity top inside the wall so it would not be obvious that the wall wasn't square.
The original plan probably would have been something similar to this inspiration photo with a small section of glass mosaic tile.
But since we were dealing with this gap from the not-so-square walls, I thought it would look better to extend the backsplash down the wall along the side of the vanity as well. Something more simple and less busy would be a better solution for a section this large. The answer came in the form of subway tile.
You can see how the tile extending down the sides of the vanity further masks the gap the less-than-square walls caused. If you noticed some weirdness at the top of the subway tiles where the wood trim abruptly ends, never fear, that is just where the mirror rests. My sister-in-law decided to keep the original mirror and give it a makeover with some spray paint. We wanted to be able to mount it at the same height (a lesson learned after the upstairs bathroom renovation - the mirror is almost too tall for my very short sister-in-law to see herself).
The ruined bolt on the toilet, the mortar stuck on the foundation, and not-so-square walls are some typical hurdles you run into in the process of any renovation. It's key to have the appropriate tools (and ingenuity, I guess) to deal with and overcome them. In the end, I am happy with how it turned out. This project basically amounted to: new floor tile, new subway tile backsplash, a new vanity with a new top and a new faucet, new light fixture, new paint, and some trim wood for the board and batten. But the difference is distinct for sure (especially when comparing to where we started in 2011).
As an added bonus, here are some before, in-progress, and after photos from the upstairs bathroom renovation we did a few years ago. Basically the same footprint, but a different design. I decided to just throw these in for shits and giggles.
 |
| Since this bathroom is upstairs, we removed the 2 inch mortar bed and built it back up with plywood subfloor and backer board (below) |
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| We did beadboard as the wall treatment upstairs |
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| We also removed the half wall of tile behind the toilet that was originally in this bathroom - you can see the open walls in the first couple of photos above |
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| My almost too high mirror |
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| We also coated the speckled tile in the tub surround with epoxy paint in white. This is also the plan for the downstairs bath, but everybody has to vacate the house for a few days when you do this because the epoxy is so strong. |
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| The other vanity from Habitat |
NEXT STOP: NEW HOUSE!
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