The Bathroom Revealed!

Our little bathroom project finally got finished last week and here is my promised post, much later than I initially promised but better late than never!

Here is the before. Although I forgot to actually take a proper before picture since the medicine cabinet and linen cabinet had already been taken down and the vanity painted.

All of the fixtures were a golden oak color with brass hardware and the wall color was too minty green for my tastes.

You can see the white stick on tiles with the roses in the center in the picture above.

And AFTER!!

Our bathroom is tiny so this is the overall shot, even though you cannot see the tub.

I think the best bargain we got for the entire project is that wood blind in the window, I got it on clearance at Target for $7.49!

I painted all of the wood fixtures in the bathroom a dark espresso color and we also purchased the cheapest light fixtures we could find.

Although they are not what I would have loved to get they were the right price and putting a light over the medicine cabinet instead of beside it would have been to time and cost intensive what with all the patching and sheetrocking that would have had to happen. I just tell myself they are Hollywood Glamor lights.

A shot of the linen cabinet.


My big splurge for the bathroom, a new shower curtain from Target.

A few weeks before I decided to redo the bathroom I saw a simple white shower curtain with a border around it on clearance for $12.99 but I decided I didn't need it because I was not going to be redoing the bathroom for awhile. Ha! Although I feel a little annoyed that I missed a good deal I really like the graphic pattern on the shower curtain and I like the modern feel it gives the space.

Here you can see the wall color a little better.

I am not completely happy with the color. I wanted more of a tan/taupe and this color has undertones of green/yellow. But you can't return paint and I had already started so I decided to just live with it. Its definitely better than what was in there!!

The best part of our bathroom remodel is how cheap it was. A lot of items we had from different projects or had taken from our previous house or had been given to us.

Here is a quick price rundown :

Quart of Brown Paint: $8
Half a gallon of wall color: $10
Flooring: Free, leftover from my sister's bathroom remodel
Flooring installation supplies: $6
Window Blind: $7.49
Shower curtain: $26.99
Shower curtain liner: $5.99
Shower curtain hooks: Already had
Rug: Already had from our previous house
Towel bar and toilet paper holder: Already had from our previous house
Wall towel hooks: $5
Door handles: Leftover from some I bought for our kitchen
Light fixtures: $20
Miscellaneous painting and installation materials: $10

Total bathroom cost: $99.47

Thats right, for under a $100 our bathroom looks completely different!

I still need to touch up the white trim around the window (if you look closely at the picture of the window you can see holes that have been patched) and it would be nice to have a rug that fit, ours is too big, and of course something decorative for the teeny tiny wall space by the door. But I think I can safely say this is the only room in the house that I would considered decorated to my taste and for the most part, done!!

Tell us what you think!

The Bathroom Saga

So Rachel has been wanting to change the bathroom. I have not been so excited. I didn't want to start another project. My list is already too big. (Sorry Gary and Kay about your snowmobile. On a good note; I think a already have a buyer for it. I just need to get it done.) So, the other day I'm in the basement while Rachel is going to the bathroom. She gets done and flushes like usual. About a second later I hear drip,drip, drip, drip, drip. Drip... Drip... Drip... I think to my self "Well that can't be good."

I look into it and sure enough our toilet has a pretty good leak every time you flush. So our no pressure, low key, project just became a very important one. I still didn't want to do it. Rachel kept on painting when ever she had the chance. (I should also add that I have not been feeling good for a couple of weeks. So that adds to the lack of interest for me.)

On Saturday I woke up at 5:30 to go hunting. For the first time in a long time I feel great. While out hunting I decide I'm going to finish the bath room. TODAY! So I came home about 1:30 - 2:00ish and got right to work. I needed to remove all of the old floor.

Here is the mess.

This is after I have ripped up all the floor.

 

 

This is where the toilet should be. Notice the very large discolored old wood floor. (Not the really black stuff. That's old flooring that I couldn't get up.) The darker brow is all black mold. That's right Black Mold! You can only guess at the smell. It was bad. I found some stuff to kill the mold and sprayed it so much that it drowned. Then I scrubbed it all with a scotch pad. I wore a plastic bag over my hand so I wouldn't get it on me. Then when I finished I flipped the bag inside out with the pad in it tied it up and in the garbage it went. I then used a blow drier to heat the flow in an attempt to dry it out. I got tired of doing that so I took our little space heater, pointed it at the floor and turned it on high. This entire time the door to the bathroom is closed. It reached about 90 degrees in that little room in no time. 

 

I then painted everywhere Rachel could not get. My father then came over and we laid the flooring and started to reassemble. I still need to install the molding around the floor and then we are done. Maybe I will do that now. After all it's only 9:00pm... The night is young!

Sneak Peak

We are nearing the finish line with the bathroom. We just have the small finishing details to do, like put down the quarter round, touch up the paint on the vanity, put up the towel bar and toilet paper holder and so on. But I thought I would give you a little sneak peak so you could get a little bit of a feel for the room.

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out considering our very limited budget! Although I will be very happy when this little project is finished and I think Nic will be too. I still need to purchase a shower curtain and figure out what I am going to do (cheaply) for a window covering since I am trying to phase out the mini blinds we have. I'm thankful we have something for the windows but most of them are really old and stained and are held together in some form by masking tape. Yes, masking tape.

Because I will not be buying anything else for the bathroom until Friday I may wait to post the final pictures until then but we may have a post about laying the floor or something like that to tide you over.

Messy

Our vanity is in our living room.


Nic is scraping up the floor as I type this.


You can't really tell from the picture but the tile is the stick down type and it has a lovely maroon rose in the center of each tile. Just my style, or not!

By tonight we will hopefully have new flooring!!

Rachel's Project

I bought some paint for the hallway and bathroom today. While I was on my way to pick up paint I had the bright idea that I should buy paint for the vanity, medicine cabinet and linen cabinet in the bathroom. They are standard, cheap, oak items from any home improvement store. I dislike them. Intensely. I like clean-lined, modern things and these are definitely not. We have looked at different options for replacing them but to replace all three it would run us, at the cheapest, around $250 - 300. Yikes. NOT IN THE BUDGET! (Well technically paint isn't even in the budget, but whatever!) But I thought; why not paint them a dark espresso color? That is huge right now and it would update our sorry little bathroom so nicely.
So for another $9 I bought a quart of espresso colored paint. While Remy was napping I started working on painting them. But then painting them led to taking down one of the hideous lights that are on either side of the medicine cabinet so that "I could paint the side of the cabinet". Then Nic informed me that in order to patch the holes from the lights (since I am scheming to put one over the cabinet instead of beside it), he would have to cut out everything in between two studs and then patch it. So I took everything down so he could do that. You know when he has time. O, did I mention he is sick right now?

So this is what it looks like above our sink right now.


I forgot to take proper before pictures but this will have to do for now. You can kind of see the wooden monstrosity of a light over on the edge of the picture. Yes, we had two.
I am super excited to do this project though because we have so many free items to use for it! Not to mention that I painted the kitchen and its a little too close to the color of the bathroom for comfort. Oddly enough I really dislike the bathroom color but love the kitchen color. Go figure.

Hopefully by this weekend we will have the little remodel finished and I will be able to post a few pictures of the finished result.

The Boat Story

This post is very long. However, this is a great story about how God blesses us even when we think He doesn't care. So Enjoy and try to stay awake.

So I have had an old fishing boat for, I don't know, ten maybe twelve years. It was purchased for $100. It did not have a trailer or a motor and was sitting next to a bike trail we were riding on a fam vacation. I have a trailer my Grandma had given me and my dad let me borrow his motor off the pontoon boat. So we made it sea worthy again. It had been sitting for a number of years outside uncovered. We had to do some big time cleaning. But we made it work. After a few years fo using my dad's motor I bought my own. I got a really good deal on a boat, motor and trailer. We pulled the motor off the boat, towed it to the junk yard, and tossed it. The trailer was a little more heavy duty than my old one so we opted to use the new one instead. The motor was an 85HP Johnson. It ran perfect. So that was the boat set up for many years.

Fast forward to present day. Through the course of a few different events our motor had been taken off our boat. We had toyed with the idea of getting a new boat but we had too many more important things to spend our money on. So I went to pull the boat out of storage for another year. After pulling the boat home I discovered that the floor was a little soft in some areas. I decided to fix it. I cut out the floor that I thought was bad. After I got it out I realized that the foam in the bottom of the boat was filled with water. (Really not good!) I made some plans to rectify that. However after a little investigation I found that all of the wood in my boat was bad.

Crap. We need a new boat. Ours is no longer safe. Maybe it would be ok with Just Rachel and I but it is not good enough for little Remy. So I started looking at new boats. You guessed it. Project boats. The old boat was fiberglass and very heavy. (Mostly because it was half filled with water.) So I decided this time around I wanted aluminum. Being that we have no money I started with the cheapest boats I could find. There is not rally much for under $1000. But that is all I looked at. I found a couple of ok deals but nothing great.

Then I found it. I found a late 1960's early 70's Blue Fin Aluminum boat with a trailer. No motor. I did some research and found out Blue Fin's have a very good hull. So it will last a long time. It was north of the cities about 45 mins. I little far for us but it was not far from my Aunt and Uncles. So We were going to stop in and see them too. The best part... The guy was only asking $250. That's cheap everything else was around $600. We still had a money issue. So, I decided to sell my nicest gun to fund our little project. I sold my gun for about $100 to $200 less than I should have just to get the money quick. But I felt it was ok because the boat would be something my whole family could use. Well when I called the guy to set up our meeting time he said he sold the boat the night before. Ouch. No gun, no boat that stinks. However, he said he had some other boats that were very close to this one. He said he would email me pics. So I gave him my email address and waited. He said he would email me in a couple of hours. Well after about six hours I called him. I told him I was going to be buying a boat soon and would like to meet him on Sat. or Sun. He told me he was too busy to email and he was not interested in meeting me. What a guy. A real trooper if you ask me. That's craigslist people for you. Oh well. It could have been worse. He could have set up a time to meet me and then killed me. Or set up a time and then flaked on me. So at least he told me before I drove down there.

I was very bummed. So I kept looking. My dad felt bad enough for me that he spent some of his Friday night on the phone with me both of us searching the internet for something that would work.

Then we found it. I was on St Cloud Craigslist. I had been searching boats $400 and under because that about what we could spend. I did a search for $600 and under. I came across a boat in Evansville. Here is the listing:

It was titled Sylvan Fish/Ski

"1980 Sylvan Fish and Ski boat. Spartan Roller Trailer . Motor is an 85hp evanrude that has three scored pistons, so the motor does not run! All motor parts are in the boat. Trialer hitch is slightly bent, but can be fixed. Boat has a small hole above the water line just below the drivers seat. Need to get it out of my shed. Great boat if you have a motor."

Now if you have been following my very long story... I have an 85hp johnson that runs great. The problem was the guy was asking $600. I emailed the guy, asked if he still had the boat and if I could call him. He emailed me back right away. So I called him and we set up a time to meet that night. Our good friends Molly and Ryan were in town and Rachel was working. So Molly, Ryan, Remy and I all loaded into the Honda and we drove to the middle of nowhere south of Ashby.

The story was the guys had bought it in 98' used it once. Bought a bigger motor. Used it for an hour and the new motor blew up. He then parked the boat in his shed and it had sat there ever since. He had barn cat's so it was dirty. Very dirty. Rachel and I went back down the next day to look at it again. I offered him $400 cash and he took it. That is not what we thought would happen. So there it was... Our New Boat. Here are some pics.

This is the bow.

This is the rest of the boat.

and the back...

As you can see it needs a cleaning. But all in all a huge blessing to our little family. Check back soon for updates.

Welcome!

Hi everyone and welcome to our new blog! I (Rachel) thought I would expand just a little bit more on what Nic already posted.

As he said, we will be posting mainly about projects he is working on. I think it is so interesting to see how he can make something out of practically nothing and I think that there are people out there who would find it fun to read about and maybe inspiring too.

Besides the fact that Nic is a Larson and they are all pretty ingenious at building things, he also has limited cash resources to get the things he wants. But he always finds a way. Whether its buying something for basically nothing and using parts he already has to fix it up, or trading repair work or other things he has for something he wants but we can't afford (case in point; a GPS map system that he had been wanting but was too much for us, he traded some computer repair work for one from a co-worker), either way he makes it happen.

Hopefully we can post some of the projects we do around the house as well. I recovered a couch (well I still have to staple around the bottom), we are doing a small remodel of our kitchen (paint, backsplash, new pulls) and we have many more things that both of us need to work on around the house. Maybe next summer we will post about gardening.

A lot of the projects we do we have never done before, so it will be a learning experience for us and hopefully we can pass whatever knowledge we gain along to you as well.