*bath time.

It is now day 4 of The Great Bathroom Cover-up, and I'm ... well, a little bored, frankly. While it is nice to have something productive to do after work that doesn't involve yelling at J for muddy paws/frantic indoor-outdoor scrambles/begging whilst downing mindless mouthfuls of cheese products, I'm already ready for the room to get put back together, and I've discovered that painting is sort of lonely work.

Cry for me, Argentina.

One of the first steps we took in this endeavor was to remove the chipping, sad mirrors on the back of the bathroom closet door. They were two garden-variety 12- by 12-inch squares of glass affixed to the wood. Just nonchalantly hanging there, dorm-room style, belying the NASA-grade adhesive that lurked beneath.

While I held on to the doorknob and protected my eyeballs, the mother chiseled them off, shard by shard, with a screwdriver and, eventually, a hammer. By the end, she was covered in glass dust and bleeding from her leg, her nose, and her finger.

I mostly stood behind the heavier bathroom door and barked helpful orders like, "BE CAREFUL!"

After the massacre, and a coat of paint, we had this:



So there will be sanding.



Honestly? The Woodside is crumbling from its gutters to its foundation, but you've really stuck that mirror up there but good! This house was remodeled by crazy people. Or people who were actually huffing glue at the time.

The mother figure seemed slightly shell-shocked by the experience, until I reminded her that she's in K World now. It's a place where Murphy's Law is martial law.

After the first coat of gray went on the tiles, there was still some yellow showing through. You know, where there wasn't blue showing through. I have Mondrian's bathroom.



But everything looked rather shiny! And clean! The best part is that the previous painters were Pollock sloppy. So if I drip, I can always blame it on those who came before me, and their controlled substances.



See? That's after coat two, and I have it on good authority that that drip is not the result of my shaky hands or the fact that I turned the paint tray into a catapult at one point. (We're painting the floor for sure now!)

I included that shot so you can see the contrast between the original color—pee-stain yellow—and the new improved shade.



Curses! I forgot to put a second coat on the towel bar. That blue corner is eyeballin' me. It turned out the bottom of the towel bar had just never been painted at all. It was turquoise as the day it was born. A thorough job someone did, let me tell you.

Tonight: I attack the shower. That means carving out old caulk and applying the first coat of paint after first cleaning the walls with denatured alcohol. I don't know what denatured alcohol is, but I suspect there will be all of the hangover of regular alcohol without any of the benefits.