The Bathroom Door Deja Vu

I feel like I'm living in Deja Vu. You see, ten years ago when we bought our little blue house we did what most new home owner do-- set about to fix up the house.

It needed new paint, new carpet, some minor repairs, and some major ones. Among the major repairs were holes in a few of the walls and holes in (literally) every door.

It is our theory that the house held a violent household before we bought it, but that is neither here nor there.

My husband wanted to save the money and refinish the existing doors. He has a friend that does woodworking and invited him up to show him how to mend the hole, putty it, sand it, and then finally refinish it (in our case, paint it).

This process, as you can imagine took months, so in the meantime we lived without doors for... boy, I want to say it was somewhere between 8-10 months. No bedroom doors, no closet doors, no bathroom door. Okay, got that? NO BATHROOM DOOR.

It was so bad that at Christmas time I sent out a newsletter with our annual Christmas cards exclaiming that if you truly wanted to get to know your spouse you should take the bathroom door off because pretty soon you'd know everything. Much, much more than you'd ever, ever want to.

LOL... to my utter disbelief, we are once again living without a bathroom door.

You see, we decided to paint the bathroom and replace the door to match the new doors we were putting in the rest of the house. If you've read my earlier blog entries you know that any type of "project" in our house is rarely limited to what we originally set out to do. I wanted to paint the bathroom yellow and maybe choose a different theme. It was ducks, I've switched to the "Bugs N Bloom" theme (in case you wish to look it up and see for yourself what it looks like).

Anyway, we set out to paint the bathroom, which my husband did. However, once all three coats were put on (don't buy Behr paint, it sucks), and the color was even and looking pretty, my husband said this...

"You know, since we have the door off, we really ought to replace the vanity. It's ugly."

I responded, quite sensibly I thought, "Yeah, but if you do that, you really have to get a new sink and counter."

"Oh, I know, but that's okay."

*sigh*

"Well, okay if that's what you want to do." I paused for a moment thinking about how, even if we replace everything in the bathroom, nothing is going to look good with the linoleum that is still in there. (The only flooring we haven't replaced since we purchased the home.) "I wonder how much it would cost to replace 70 square feet of flooring in the bathroom."

"I doubt it's 70 square feet."

Our bathroom is incredibly tiny. "Hmm... what? Maybe 50?"

"I doubt it."

"Well, we should look into it then."

Let's pause and recap here. We've now gone from painting the bathroom and replacing the door to painting, replacing the door, replacing the flooring, replacing the vanity, replacing the counter, and replacing the sink.

Sometime later, LJS had me measure the vanity. It is 42" long. He goes to Home Depot to scope out the options and brings home a couple flyers. We're looking through said flyers and I notice a shower I really like. It's the type that's made of sandstone and instead of having any type of plastic or metal anywhere, it is ALL sculpted sandstone (meaning that there are no rails for a sliding shower door, it's sculpted to about three or four inches high and then a shower curtain is put into place).

Anyway, I comment to him that this is the shower I really like (we'd also been talking about how nice it would be to take the bathtub out and just have a shower since Short Person is now independently taking them-- can you believe that? I mean, we have to wash her hair, but sheesh!)

LJS goes, "You should see how much it is."

Sometime later... we also find out that they don't make 42" vanities standard-- they have to be custom made.

And to conclude this story, that is how a $150 painting/door replacement project is now costing us about 40 times that much!

And I'm suffering from lack of bathroom door deja vu. What? Do I need to reconnect with my husband or something?!

*And in a dramatic fashion Mel bangs her head against the desk-- but in typical dork fashion forgets that there's a keyboard there. Ow."