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I'd like to remove the Mary Kay Pink from my bathroom walls.
I'm learning a lot more than I ever wanted to know about how to choose the right kind of tile, how to hang tile, how to remove old tile, what to do if what was under your old tile is not in fact appropriate for putting tile upon, and just generally how much money and time could be sunk into a seemingly simple project like this.
I do NOT trust my house. The things we've discovered...! I half expect to pull that tile off and find oh, I don't know, bare wood underneath. Or electrical wires swinging loose through standing puddles of water. Or complete lack of studs in this section of the house, for all I know. That's the kind of suspicion a person acquires after being in this house for a while.
I have also discovered that tile is incredibly frigging expensive. It's a lot worse when you go over to Home Expo Center, A Home Depot Company, where a shower door costs (I kid you not) $2500, and that's for one that doesn't actually open wide enough for a human.
In a way, I'm almost glad my bathroom is Mary Kay Pink. If it were ANY other color, I'd be thinking "perhaps that's not so bad after all," and I might just stop and live with it, but every time I get tempted to do that, the words I actually have to put together are "perhaps Mary Kay Pink isn't so bad after all," and then I hear what I just thought, and that's the end of THAT little delusion.
I'm learning a lot more than I ever wanted to know about how to choose the right kind of tile, how to hang tile, how to remove old tile, what to do if what was under your old tile is not in fact appropriate for putting tile upon, and just generally how much money and time could be sunk into a seemingly simple project like this.
I do NOT trust my house. The things we've discovered...! I half expect to pull that tile off and find oh, I don't know, bare wood underneath. Or electrical wires swinging loose through standing puddles of water. Or complete lack of studs in this section of the house, for all I know. That's the kind of suspicion a person acquires after being in this house for a while.
I have also discovered that tile is incredibly frigging expensive. It's a lot worse when you go over to Home Expo Center, A Home Depot Company, where a shower door costs (I kid you not) $2500, and that's for one that doesn't actually open wide enough for a human.
In a way, I'm almost glad my bathroom is Mary Kay Pink. If it were ANY other color, I'd be thinking "perhaps that's not so bad after all," and I might just stop and live with it, but every time I get tempted to do that, the words I actually have to put together are "perhaps Mary Kay Pink isn't so bad after all," and then I hear what I just thought, and that's the end of THAT little delusion.
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I don't have a strong memory of the Mary Kay Pink bathroom, so it couldn't have been that bad ;-)
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They're high-gloss ceramic tile, so it might be difficult to find something that would stick. Enamel, maybe.
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It might end up being a bigger pain than just re-tiling, but it would probably be less expensive, and you could get creative (different colors for sections, stuff like that)
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Our biggest surprise came when we redid the heating system. We learned that the way the attic/roof was reworked (when the second story went on) leaves the old roofline beams just hanging in space. We have no idea how structurally sound this is. Makes it darned awkward to crawl around up there, though. It also manages to block any way to access (and therefore HEAT) the room in which I now sit. We gave up before ripping out any floors, so two years and thousands of dollars later it's still cold in here.
Redoing most of the plumbing was actually the easiest task, surprisingly enough!
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Recently the inlet valve in my toilet (only one bathroom in the house) stopped functioning. I called out a plumber. The plumber tried to sell me on the joys of putting in a new toilet for not very much more money than the price of having him entirely rebuild the interior of the existing one, plus reset it (the wax ring at the base was broken, according to the pre-purchase inspection, and I'd never had occasion to have anyone out to fix it.) He about had me sold, when I said
"... but can you find another almond one?"
No, any color other than white has to be special ordered. Well, everything in that bathroom is cream and sand and brass and light oak. A white toilet would look like crap, and I said so. Several times. He rebuilt the existing one.
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We had a bad wax ring in the upstairs bathroom, and when the plumber took the toilet off, he realized the flange upon which the toilet sits was actually an inch higher than the floor, so no wonder the wax was not sealing properly. Of course, the flange is PVC-ish plastic stuff, so removing it means drilling it out of the pipe it's in, and of course the pipe is also plastic, so drilling just might crack it somewhere along its length. And of course it runs the length of the house before dropping to any place accessible. AND of course the flange is an offset flange, meaning somebody screwed up and plumbed for a toilet that's farther from the back wall, so if we went that route we'd need a new toilet, too. And our toilet, you guessed it, is almond.
We replaced the wax and so far it's holding.
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The first time I had to pay someone to retile my bathroom, I about fainted.
Wish I could loan my granddad to you for a while. You'd love your bathroom, and you wouldn't even have to pick out colors -- he'd just make it beautiful for you. Too bad he's retired -- he might even go to California for it if you paid his bus fare and promised him a night in Reno on the way down! ;)
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If he were around here I'd be awfully tempted to twist his arm. I could tell him "Anything but PINK" and save myself having to make the decision!
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I had to laugh at the Mary Kay Pink. We moved into this house when Meredith was 5. She was upset at leaving the only home she could remember, and although I was trying to keep costs down by using stock colors for the rest of the house, I told her she could pick any color she liked to paint her bedroom. She chose one called "Ballerina Pink" -- as much because she loved the name as for the color. She was thrilled with it when she saw it. It was pretty much the same color as Pepto Bismol (http://www.pepto-bismol.com/). ;-)