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

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.