Well, I don’t know how to break it to you fine folks, but my wife was taking pictures again. There aren’t many, and the ones I do have are fuzzier than an elderly man’s ears. But honestly, I don’t mind. I hope you don’t mind either. After all, if my wife’s vision was any better, would she have married me? It’s doubtful. And I’m beginning to wonder about her hearing. Is it possible that she’s just been nodding at me and smiling all these years, and hasn’t heard a word I said? These are the sorts of things that keep a man up at night.

So, we begin our master bathroom saga in media res, and we’ll have to skip over things, at least as far as photographs go. You’ll have to take it on faith that I didn’t make my family bathe and brush their fangs for ten years in that hellhole I showed you yesterday. When we moved in, we at least took the curse off the place. We replaced the toilet. Non-negotiable, that item. We demolished the sink/counter/closet arrangement, and bought a cheap particle board cabinet with a plastic sink top at the Orange Place. When I said cheap, I meant it. It cost something like forty bucks. But it was clean, and we didn’t scorch it with any ciggie butts, so it banished the downscale vibe an iota or a smidgen or something.

I painted the walls with a yellowy off-white. I disassembled the closet. It was built like a tree fort, so I could save almost all the lumber. I used the  salvaged wood from it to make a workbench down in the workshop. It was another example of the way the former occupants spent more money than we did on the house, but never improved it one bit. It was all sort of wasted. It was a bad closet. It’s a good workbench.

I put a coat of shellac, tinted with a dark walnut color, on the birch strip flooring. We ran plumbing and electrical for a washer and dryer, which took the place of the closet and half the vanished countertop. We scrubbed the tub with everything we could think of, from soap to lacquer thinner. I stand by my opinion that it’s impossible to actually clean a plastic tub, never mind a fiberglass job. The finish just ain’t hard enough. The tub still looked like the communal hot tub at a leper colony, but it sorta felt clean. And we lived with it, while we took care of more pressing matters.

In Maine, you learn quickly that only two things really matter in your house. The roof, and the heat. Anything else you manage to fix is gravy. In the kitchen, I think some of it actually was coated with someone’s gravy from Thanksgiving 1974 when I ripped it out. But we pecked away at the house and finally got around to the bathroom. Our roof is solid enough to keep out large animals now, if not every raindrop, and we actually have a thermostat on the wall that does things when you operate it. It’s time.

My number one son decided to help me. If you’re young, and don’t have kids, I’m going to do you a big favor. I’m going to try to describe to you about 1 percent of the marvelous feeling you have when your children become adults, and hang around with you even if they’re not required by law to do so anymore. They have driver’s licenses and can flee, but they don’t. They come over and bash with you. It’s like you made a gift for the world, but the world wasn’t home when you dropped by to give it to them, and you got to keep it. And my son and I bashed at this room, I tell you what.

I’ve lectured you previously that most of the demolition you see on home and garden teevee is done by imbeciles. They think demolition is smashing at things. I often caution people that demolition is taking things apart, generally, not wrecking them. But I’m an honest man. I’m not going to lie to the internet. I don’t want to be the first to do that. I admit that we acted exactly like the people on This Old Flip, because I hated this room. Hated it. I didn’t just want to fix it. I wanted to make it suffer, like we had suffered. This wasn’t renovation, it was a reckoning. We went at every surface like it owed us money, which in a way, it did. If you haven’t figured it out yet, we’re not paying to live in our house. It didn’t cost enough to make lifelong mortgage slaves of us. It’s worth eight or ten times more than we paid for it. In my mind, I was a legbreaker for the Sippican mob, and I was going to beat some equity out of it right now. Mere threats wouldn’t be enough to satisfy my bloodlust.

So we smashed, and banged, and sawzalled, and pried, and wrenched, and levered, and didn’t spare the horses. We were starting fresh, and we were going to spend a little money. Because bathrooms cost money, yo, and there’s no amount of sweat equity that can make, say, a toilet. I know a toilet is just mud baked in an oven, but I can barely get the house up to room temperature as it is. I won’t be making one of those in the basement. But I’ll also testify that it’s never been easier to end up with a great bathroom on a small budget. The stuff to make it has gotten better in the last ten years. I’ll show you how we did it. Well, I’ll tell you how we did it, and post some fuzzy pictures.

[To be continued]

[Update: Many thanks to John L. for his generous smash on the tip jar. It’s greatly appreciated]