Bathroom redo, Part duex

After finally finishing the tile in the bathroom and putting the brace in the wall for the pedestal sink, I really thought it would be smooth sailing from here on. Oh silly me, I should know better. For some (stupid) reason, I decided to wait until right before we painted the bathroom to take down the old light fixture. I thought that the two screws holding it in were attached to the junction box, so it would be easy to replace it. That was a bad idea. Turns out, this light didn’t have a junction box (that is required by code), it just had wires dangling out of the wall.

Oh, and the two holes you see on either side of the giant hole, well, the light had been “anchored” to the wall, meaning the anchors were there but didn’t give the light any support. Instead, it was being held up because it was painted onto the wall. Fun! With the power to the whole house off (just to be safe), MC and I made a trip up to the local Ace Hardware and bought a new junction box. I had to make a slightly larger hole to fit it in, but once I got it in, I was able to run the wires more securely and add a brace for the new fixture.

Even though the power was off (because we hadn’t installed the light just yet) we figured it was time to paint. We had put a few swatches on the walls a while back, and we both agreed that we wanted a lighter color, something with a little green in it. It’s hard to tell from the photo, but we went with the one on the far right. In case you are wondering, the first was a greyish color, the second is actually the color of our upstairs bathroom, the third was a darker green, and the last was a greenish/blueish color.

Now that we got that done, I also wanted to add a new GFI outlet since it is a bathroom, and the outlet is near the sink. Since the power was still off, I figured it would be the best time, and besides, I had installed a few in the kitchen before, how hard could it be. Well, I’ll tell you I installed it four separate times before I got it right. Why? Well, I forgot to push in the rest button the first time (when I actually had it right), so I tried various combinations and finally got it right. I have to thank my Dad for the assist on that, because I called him a handful of times trying to figure out what the heck I had done wrong. Then he said it, “did you push the reset button?” Ugh. Well, it’s in, and it works…finally.

I had finished patching the drywall where the brace was, but alas, I didn’t do a very good job…at all. You could see every imperfection. I’ll have to go back and touch that up, so I’ll spare you for now. In the interim though, we decided to go ahead and paint the majority of the bathroom, install the base board and get to work putting in the new toilet.

Finally, the gaping hole in our floor is covered. Getting the bowl down was pretty easy, but it did take me two attempts because the bolt popped out on my first go round. Lucky for me I had two wax rings, so I just scrapped off the first and put the second one on and got it down again. With the bowl down, I just had to hook up the tank, the water supply and the seat. For whatever reason, the toilet seat was the hardest thing to get on! The instructions that were sent said “seat installation will vary” and had pictures of pieces that weren’t included with the toilet. It took me a good 20 minutes before I figured it out, but in the end, we had a new toilet (along with baseboards, paint, and a light fixture).

BEFORE:

AFTER:

I know, it’s a toilet, nothing super special. But at least you can see what the new tile/paint/baseboards all look like together. So here’s where we are at with the bathroom (for those keeping score):