We’ve been knocking around the idea of remodeling the master bathroom since purchasing the house in 2006.  For one reason or another, we never wanted to spend the money and eventually decided to just replace the faucets (since I broke one) and replace the outdated wallpaper with paint.  We vacillated between hiring someone or doing it ourselves, finally concluding that it couldn’t be THAT hard to do.  And so, some two years after I wrote this post, N and I started peeling the offensive old-lady wallpaper off our bathroom walls.  That was back in, oh, August?  Ah, yes.  August 2011.  Back in the days when I still truly believed in my ability to single-handedly strip ancient, poorly-applied vinyl wallpaper from a sizable bathroom, re-texture the drywall and paint the entire thing myself.

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

At first there seemed to be hope.  After scoring the paper and trying that gooey wallpaper remover spray, I had little success but soon realized that dry-stripping the top layer of paper made the rest much easier to soak and scrape off.  Great!  Except NOT great, because two separate layers of peeling means twice the work.  But N and I got into a good rhythm on a couple of Saturday afternoons and I thought, okay.  We CAN do this.

(Spoiler alert: Nope.)

I’d peel a little paper every time I went in the bathroom, but after a while I lost steam.  I got busy on the weekends and wasn’t inclined to make a big sticky mess with the wallpaper remover.  School was keeping me busy, and work got crazy and I just never felt like messing with it.

We kind of got used to it.  Hideous as the situation was, I’d just lamely apologize whenever someone came to visit (usually family) and that was that.  I kept telling myself that we’d get it done eventually.

And then N took these pictures, and it really was that depressing. I started to realize that we’d possibly bitten off a little more than we could reasonably chew, and I dug up the name of a remodeling guy that a friend had used.

I called, he came, we paid.  And now we have this.

It’s exactly what I had envisioned for this low-key no-demo job, and I love it. Now my bathroom is nice and relaxing like a spa, not an ugly, stressful reminder of all the work that still remains.

Lesson learned: Suck it up and pay the experts. Check!