As of this week, my husband and I are back to similar work schedules. Thus, for the first time in several years, we face a daily Battle for the Bathroom Mirror.
Our house has one-and-a-half bathrooms, an assessment that I feel is a little generous. The half bath is pretty much a toilet and a pedestal sink in a closet. There's no place to set a makeup bag or haircare tools, so it's out of the picture as a potential morning primping station.
The full bath is not much better. I'll start with the decor: paneling on the walls that's supposed to look like tile, aging linoleum, beige shower enclosure, yellowed beige marbled sink and countertop, and cheap brown under-sink cabinet.
The exhaust fan broke a while back, but the sheetrock of the ceiling is too compromised for it to be possible to just put in a new fan without replacing the whole ceiling. Thus, I'm fighting a constant losing battle with ceiling mildew, even if we shower with the bathroom door open. When people come over, it's all I can do to restrain myself from telling them, "You can use the bathroom, but please do not look up."
There's a cabinet in the wall next to the shower that is inexplicably about four feet deep. Once a bottle of Skin So Soft makes it to the back, it's years before it sees the light of day again. The cabinet door swings over the edge of the countertop, often knocking things directly into the trash where they're immediately buried by tissues, never to be seen again. I'm pretty sure I've lost some nice cosmetic items that way.
There's just the single sink, so if my husband is using it, I can't see past him to use the mirror. He's 6'3" and I'm 5'7", so you can imagine the scene. My only advantage is that I get up earlier than he does, but I usually blog first thing in the morning, so that kills my edge. Luckily, I don't care all that much about my hair and makeup anyway.
I have a plan for remodeling the bathroom to make it more useful and beautiful. I would take out the tub and shower enclosure (how often does anyone really ever take a bath?) and replace it with a corner shower. I would remove the huge, useless cabinet and extend the counter and mirrors all the way across the width of the room so we could have two sinks. The extra under-sink storage would make up for the lost cabinet. There would be no more "tile paneling," but real tile on the walls and floor.
I forgot to mention that when some previous homeowners did the remodel that resulted in our current bathroom, they blocked off the window. In the back of my house there's a much-painted piece of plywood covering what should be the bathroom window. In my fantasy remodel, I would restore the window and glass-block it for light, perhaps even adding a second one.
Until the Money Fairy waves her wand over our household finances, we're stuck with the awful bathroom. We have no skills at all for doing the work ourselves, and for that matter wouldn't be able to afford the materials. Someday I'll have the gorgeous bathroom of my imagination. Until then, I suppose I'll have to start getting up a little earlier and invest in yet another bucket of Kilz for the ceiling.
Your bathroom is not as bad as you think it is.
For a brief time, when I was 7 years old, we had to rent a house while we were waiting for our new house to finish being built. Unfortunately, we also lived in a teeny town that didn't have a lot of rental property (read: we had to take what we could get). I can't even begin to describe how SCARY the bathroom was. Like, I REALLY was scared to take a shower! The kitchen wasn't much better - if you opened the cupboard underneath the sink, you could see OUTSIDE. We were a family that named all their houses and for obvious reasons, we still refer to that one as "the Shack". JUST remembered, this was also the very same house that we found molted SNAKE skin in the basement. EWW.
See, you don't have it that bad, you big whiner. :-)
Posted by: cagey | August 24, 2005 at 07:50 AM
Sometimes I get on a stepladder and sponge a little bleach on the ceiling. It works. But goggles are a MUST for this kind of chemical assault.
Posted by: Michelle | August 26, 2005 at 08:22 PM