Next stop...bathroom

After the kitchen, I knew I wanted to pull up the lino.  In the same way that the benchtop made the cabinets look shabby, the finished cabinets made the floor look shabby.  And under that old lino are unfinished, beautiful jarrah floorboards.  There is no way I can afford to have someone come and do them, but am dying to have a go myself.

But I was so excited about the kitchen, I decided I would like to update my bathroom too.  And then maybe the bedrooms...  And wherever else I end up, the floorboards will have to be last.

So now I'm onto the bathroom.  It's pretty disgusting.  The tiles and tub are that horrible '70's pink, the shower screen is cracked, and the corner of the tub is rusty.

So the first thing was to remove that shower screen.  I want to recoat the bathtub, and seeing as the screen is attached directly to it, it had to go.  Plus I needed to be able to get to that rust spot before I paint.

It took some serious effort and much WD40 (is there anything WD40 can't do?), but finally it was gone.  Who knew these things weighed so much?

And what a horrible surprise to find that all the aluminium fixings and silicone were hiding a much worse rust situation that I had originally thought.  Bleh.

I asked a friend for advice and he offered to lend me his angle grinder, but I was so worried there wouldn't be any clean metal left under all that rust.  It was pretty crunchy.

But the angle grinder wasn't coming for a week, so I decided to paint the walls first.  After finally deciding on Silver Sage (a Taubmans colour) it took me a few days of cleaning and painting, but I got it done.  At first, I had another small panic attack, thinking that I had made a big mistake with the colour, but I now feel ok about it.  It's just the contrast with the old pink that looks awful.  Once the tiles are white, I feel it will look good.

After the walls, I got the angle grinder and after experimenting with different disks, I got the bath done with a twistwire cup disk.  I've never used an angle grinder before and it scared me a bit, plus it was stinky, smelly, and really hard work, especially with the plethora of safety gear I had to wear.  With heavy clothes, gloves, boots, ear muffs, full face mask and dust mask, I still managed to get little burns on my arms and ringing ears.

But, despite all this whinging, I feel ok with the result:

Ok, it still looks pretty awful, but I'm pretty sure all the rust is gone and I am down to clean metal.  I painted it over with Rust Converter anyway, just to be sure.

And that's where I'm at now.  Next step will be to paint the tiles with tile paint - I chose Plastikote because you don't need to prime and it was cheaper than the alternative.  I don't think it's really meant to be used in shower recesses, but we'll see.  Then paint the tub and touch up the cornices with ceiling paint.

So stay tuned and I'll post more pics when I'm done.  :)