Renovation porn

So I took Friday off and spent a full three days (minus a 12-mile run, a trip to Home Depot, an hour drooling over Pat Tillman’s foul-mouthed brother on Bill Maher and an hour finally catching up on Glee, which also involved drooling over the new blond dude) working on our bathroom.

But the old-timey marble vanity top I ordered seven days ago has been sitting in a fucking warehouse in fucking Tennessee for six fucking days:

And without a vanity top, there’s a ripple effect on all the things I still can’t accomplish:
• I don’t want to buy the backsplash tile until I can match it to the marble in the vanity top.
• I can’t install the backsplash tile anyway until I have the vanity top installed.
• I can’t install the medicine cabinet until the backsplash tile is installed.
• I can’t install the medicine cabinet lighting until the medicine cabinet is installed.
• BONUS FRUSTRATION! The vanity top purportedly has an 8" spread for a faucet, which is a relatively uncommon faucet size for a bathroom … especially on a vanity top that’s only 31" wide. Since I bought the towel bar and toilet paper holder that match the 8" faucet I found (which is mega-cool in an old-timey French apothecary kind of way so I’m actually excited about it) I don’t want to install them until I see the actual holes in the vanity top to confirm that the specs on the Home Depot web site aren’t a bunch of hooey.

But!

I did get a lot of other important bathroom stuff accomplished in my 72-hour bathroom-renovation marathon, though most of it was the non-sexy important bathroom stuff like patching holes and waterproofing the window in the shower and squirting endless ropes of painter’s caulk in corners and cracks and crevices to make the walls and the moldings as smooth and professional-looking as the exact opposite of Bristol Palin’s dancing.

And!

I got a shit-ton of painting done, including the mega-hella-awesome semi-opaque silver-and-snow-white stencil that anchors our weirdly proportioned bathroom with an Art Deco sense of color and structure and moxie (which is Art Deco-era slang for mega-hella-awesomeness). The stencil is an inch-wide stripe that runs up the edge of each wall, across the ceiling and back down the opposite wall, intersecting in the ceiling corners to create a frame of silver that adds elegance, sophistication and a shiny distraction from my not-amazingly-professional-looking repairs to the bubbly ceiling drywall.

And of course I took pictures. Lots of pictures. Too many pictures, in fact, to get the idea across. But I’m going to post them anyway.

Here are our newly painted ceiling (in Sherwin-Williams “ancient marble”) and walls (in Sherwin-Williams “svelte sage,” which in a freakishly random coincidence is the same color my sister painted her front hallway and my mom painted her guest bedroom) taped off after hours and hours of painstaking measuring and swearing so it’s ready for stenciling:
Even though it’s just a blue-taped-off negative of the eventual stencil at this point, I got totally excited about the relentless Art Deco verticalness of it all when the taping was finally done.

Here’s the corner with the door, which blocks most of one of the wall stripes, which means less stenciling for me:

Here’s one of the corners of the shower (see what I mean about too many pictures?), which blocks off most of two of the wall stripes, which means even less stenciling for me:

Here’s part of the stencil finished and un-taped because I was too excited to wait to do all the stenciling before pulling off the tape:
Little-known fact: Stenciling a ceiling is a bodybuilder-grade deltoid workout. At this writing, it’s been about 30 hours since I finished stenciling—which, for the non-crafty among you, involves distrubuting a thick, oily, uncooperative paste of color onto a wall or ceiling using a stiff, short-bristled brush using an aggressive swirling motion—and my damn shoulder is still twitching.

And here’s one corner completely done:
The stripes look pretty straight in this picture, but since they follow the shoddy edges of the shoddily installed drywall by the shoddy contractors who did the shoddy rehab of the condo before we bought it, the stripes are as straight as a mega-church pastor who campaigns against marriage equality. But since they’re a muted silver, they’re not even half as faggy.

As you may recall, the water supply for the toilet wouldn’t shut completely off when I removed the toilet so I could repair all the cracked grout from the shoddy floor tile installation, so I was forced to rig an improvised bridge-and-funnel connection between the drippy wall plumbing and the poop hole in the floor.

And since that forced me to leave the poop hole unplugged, sewer gasses were escaping into the house. And the lonely candle I left burning next to the hole wasn’t enough to burn off the smell, so I was in an understandable hurry to get the stripes stenciled in the toilet corner so I could re-install the toilet—taking a moment to savor the almost-never-in-a-lifetime thrill of squishing a toilet down on a fresh wax ring—and get the house back to its usual eau de sweaty gym clothes and wet running socks. I have never been so happy to see a toilet installed on its poop hole in my life:
Note the white square on the wall next to the toilet. Since the new white vanity doesn’t have a back on it, I taped off and whitewashed the wall that will be the back of the vanity cupboard when you open the doors. It’s details like that that separate the humans from the McCains.

And!

I also installed my new favorite part of our soon-to be-awesomist-bathroom-on-the-planet bathroom: a crystal-beaded, bordello-inspired, patina-distressed bathroom chandelier:

And the only thing gayer than a crystal-beaded, bordello-inspired, patina-distressed bathroom chandelier is a crystal-beaded, bordello-inspired, patina-distressed bathroom chandelier on a dimmer. Seriously. How much do you love this chandelier? It has crystals and beads. It has olde-worlde charm. It has swirly S shapes and faux-melty candle bases for the bulbs. Its leaden patina nicely complements the semi-opaque silver-and-snow-white stencil in the background. Its leaden patina probably also leaches lead into the atmosphere. And I put it on a dimmer, giving our bathroom infinite levels of dramatic lighting opportunities for all the dramatic teeth-brushing and showering and pooping we do.

And we gays can’t do anything without drama. Just ask the fucking vanity top that’s been sitting in a warehouse in fucking Tennessee for six fucking days and fucking up my entire renovation schedule.