Home improvements

[cjsmith]

My itch to retile the bathroom is getting severe. (For viewers just now tuning in, the one public bathroom in my house has a tub-surround tiled in Mary Kay Pink. No, a little darker: Pepto-Bismol Pink.)

Etiology: Trying to take a weekend day off work results in me being inside my house.
Symptoms: I re-read the tiling book and the bathroom remodel book.
Prognosis: Those books are very effective and I am well on my way to being cured of this outbreak. Removing me from the house would speed recovery.

Comments

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

I would if I could!

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I'd enjoy just hopping over to have lunch with you.

"I would if I could" applies to the tile, too. That looks like something I could seriously screw up in any number of ways.

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

I know some nice restaurants nearby...

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

*wistful sigh*

[datagoddess.livejournal.com]

At one point, weren't you thinking about painting it?

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Painting the tile? Yeah, ugly as it would probably be, I'd be more willing to give that a try first. I would probably not cause structural damage to my house with paint. :-)

[lesliepear.livejournal.com]

I've seen stickers for applying to tile. Maybe they could help?

I know the color you have - my MIL's bathroom is the same color. I like pink, so I'd keep the color if it were mine.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Hmm, maybe! I haven't seen those.

Wish I could trade ya. What color do you have?

Here's an example

[lesliepear.livejournal.com]

http://www.pressedflower.com/tile.htm

My bathroom tile is off white and brown. Mark won't let me do it in pink - we did enough with the bathrooms just pulling off the 70's foil paper and painting over it :(

Re: Here's an example

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Oo, nifty flowers.

I'd trade with ya! :-) I wish that sort of thing were possible. I have a friend a ways north of me who'd take our pool, too.

Re: Here's an example

[just-cyd.livejournal.com]

Dibs on the hot tub!!! :-D

and yetch to the pink tile. my tile showers need some attention, but it'll have to be hired out. hopefully years from now, by new owners. :-/

Re: Here's an example

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

You can have the one that's attached to the pool, if my friend up the peninsula doesn't want it. The hot tub that's not attached to anything, we're keeping! :-)

Sadly, I can't even claim that this tile needs any work. It's in great shape and in that sense it would be sad to rip it out. But it's pink.

[allanh.livejournal.com]

Would that I could. Unfortunately, I'm not yet in good enough shape to drive to the corner drugstore, much less your house. However, may I take a raincheck on that? [Homer Simpson voice] Mmmmm.....Chef Chu's!

someday I'll escape from pink tile bathrooms

[shadopanther.livejournal.com]

Was your house built in the 1960s? My mother's house & the 2 that jemtone & I have rented were all built sometime in the 1960s & they ALL have that same pink tile in the bathrooms!

At one time, to make all the pink tile more tolerable, I attempted to decorate the bathroom at my mother's place with conch shells & starfish. My theory was that if I could think of the pink tile being like coral, it'd make it somehow better. It was still a stretch of the imagination to think of the pink tile as coral... but in addition to changing the walls from white & bright orange to mint green, it was an improvement.

The tile in the bathrooms at my mother's place didn't get changed until after I moved out. My brother did the re-tiling in blue-white marble tiles. It looks great! (However, the one thing he would have changed if he were to ever do it again is to NOT use floor tiles on the walls. The thickness of the floor tiles was very difficult to attach to the walls.) The tile in my mother's bathrooms were not re-done until the sinks in the bathrooms & the window over the tub were replaced. (The sinks were replaced because they were rusting through. The window to upgrade it to double-pane.)

Anyway, if you should decide to re-tile -- good luck!

-- Shadopanther

Re: someday I'll escape from pink tile bathrooms

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Yeah, what is UP with pink tile? Sheesh! I'm getting almost as tired of that as I was of the 1970s mustard- and avocado-colored refrigerators that seem to be in almost every apartment on the peninsula.

My place was built in the mid-fifties, but had had some interior rework done at various times. I actually think the pink tile might be pretty new. I know all the carpets were new when we bought the place, for example. Or, hey, it could be surviving from the original construction. Gah.

Thanks for the luck! This is the kind of house where, if you try to replace a light switch, you keep uncovering more and more problems until you wind up having to move a wall. I'm scared of what's behind that tile.

[jupiter29.livejournal.com]

You have public bathrooms in your house? I would think the homeless people and the drunk men with bad aim would be a slightly bigger problem than the tile color! ;)

However, I must add that my grandparents had tile that exact color (Pepto-Bismol Pink) in their kitchen for decades. I have never enjoyed any house project more than when I got to rip that stuff off the wall!

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Haha! Well, by "public" I meant "easily accessible by guests".

I wonder if ripping the tile off, even with NO clue how to replace it, would be satisfying enough to be worth having to go shower in the guest bedroom's bathroom until I figure it out.

[jupiter29.livejournal.com]

Replacing tile isn't all that major a problem, I suspect. But I would definitely suggest waiting until you have all your plans finalized, or are prepared to shower elsewhere for awhile. :)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Well, it's probably not major the second time one does it. I'm quite intimidated by the idea.

Fortunately, I won't be at home for a full day until at least mid-March, so I'm safe for a while. :)

[jupiter29.livejournal.com]

Well, good, that will give you time to prepare. And you can probably take a class or something at the local Home Depot, or look for some kind of book. Getting past the fear factor is probably the first big step. :)

And don't think I am belittling your fear. I feel exactly the same way about certain things. I can't do much more than lift the hood of my car and I am just majorly intimidating by the thought of poking around in there. So I don't. But that's not really very supportive, so forget I said anything. ;)

Or you can just tear the stuff out and get used to showering elsewhere. You can even post about the showers, I suppose. It will give a new dimension to the fetishes involved in your journal. I noticed even your pissed off rants revolve around feet these days. ;)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

A class at Home Depot would be perfect. I have two books, both of which make it look like I'd better be prepared to take the whole room down to its framing. Those books are GREAT antidotes to the Retiling Itch!

I'll consider posting a long detailed description of washing my feet in the shower. ;-)

[jupiter29.livejournal.com]

I can usually follow things from a book pretty well, but I think a class of some sort would definitely help for a project like this. So you might want to look and see if they offer something like that. Heck, if you ask and sound interested enough, maybe you can even talk them into it. Get some friends together or something and convince them there's a real demand. :)

Oooh, foot porn! We may have just invented some new kind of smut. Isn't the Internet a wonderful thing? ;)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I think it might be a new kind if a goat were involved. ("Specify type of goat.")

[jupiter29.livejournal.com]

Hmm, the Internet is just full of information about cloned sheep, but I see nothing about goats. If we could clone a goat and then you would have sex with it, you could charge money for that!