We’re having company for Christmas. My mom and my aunt and uncle are coming down to see us for the holiday. This means that we have to get at least most of the hall bathroom functional before then. Gads. Do you have any idea the state this room is in? Wait. Of course you don’t. I haven’t talked about it for quite a while. After Bill was here in March and the guys tried (unsuccessfully) to pull the tile off of the wall in that bathroom, in order to fix the shower, it sat, unused, unfixed, and needing tons of additional repairs, for some time.

In May, when I was recovering from surgery, Dave decided that he wanted to change the ceiling around in there. Now this bathroom is interesting. It’s basically two rooms with a connecting door. The first part of the room has the vanity and two sinks. The second part of the room, behind the second door, has the toilet and shower. This second little room has a weird ceiling. There’s a beam that goes across the middle of it. A big old support beam that helps to hold the house together. Dave’s never liked that beam. It can’t be removed, so he decided to hide it. This means lowering the rest of the ceiling to cover it up. Some framing was in order.

This photo is looking up at the frame—well, two frames, one for either side of the beam—he built and installed on the ceiling. You can see the edge of the doorframe on the right side. And yes, there are holes in the ceiling. There are actually more holes now than there were when I took this picture. It’s practically one big hole now. The large hole that you see is where the light fixture/ceiling fan/heater unit goes. Or, er, went. It got moved a bit, too, while he was at it.

That all got done in May. Then the bathroom sat again, an unwanted project for another month or two. We’ve always disliked how the connecting door between the two parts of this room opens into the tiny part of the bathroom. If you want to go in and close it, you had to move around the toilet… Awkward. To fix that, Dave re-hung the door on the other side of the frame. Hard to get photos of this. He had to rebuild most of the frame (naturally), as it was installed incorrectly. Gee? In our house? Something wasn’t done right? What a surprise. Not.

Anyway, more time goes by. Nothing done. Tools piled on the counter still. Bathroom a mess. Then suddenly we’re having people for Christmas. Egads. Well, the shower won’t be fixed by then, but the rest of the room needs to be usable. And painted. Dave decided we simply must paint the main part of the bathroom. Okay. But wait, there’s more. The guy we bought this house from did a fairly thick wall texture on all the walls in the house. Ick. Neither of us like the wall texture we’re stuck with. Dave decided that before we paint the bathroom, he simply must knock some of that down. Here’s where I wish I’d taken a couple of pictures. Talk about a disaster. All that plaster dust. In piles, in sheets, coating everything in the room. Yes, thankfully he closed the bathroom door when he was doing this so the plaster dust didn’t get all over the house.

Then yesterday he sent me to the store for paint, while he cleaned up the plaster dust and started prepping the room to be painted, washing the walls and ceiling, all that. Do you like the light fixture? Because of all the work being done, the regular fixtures had to be removed to a safe location. This old fluorescent on the stand was Dad’s. It’s heavy! But it works great. Thanks, Dad.

I had my color sample, the sale coupon, and off I went to a store where we don’t normally buy paint, but was having a great sale. Well, the store having the sale, um, their paint department isn’t, um, well… they’re nice. They just don’t know what they’re doing. We ruined two gallons of paint before throwing in the towel. I left with only a can of primer. I want this soft yellow color for the bathroom. It’ll be pretty with the oak, and it’ll go with the tile that’s in there. It’s not green. But that’s what their color scanner kept coming up with. The resulting can of paint looked great when wet, but when dry it was this sickly, pale avocado green color. Can you imagine? Go into the bathroom first thing in the morning when you’re not well, look at yourself in the mirror, and see that color? Ew. No.

So much for that idea.

The color I want is one that I saw in a Pottery Barn catalog. Very pretty. After I got home, I thought Hey, they sell the paint colors they use. I wonder if they have info about that online. Sure enough. They use Benjamin Moore paints. And they give away free color chips in the stores, or you can get a set for two dollars online. They have a nice page where you can see the colors used in rooms in the current catalog. I think my color is either Elephant Tusk or Mayonaise. I’ll have to swing by one of their stores this week to get the chips to know for sure. I don’t know that we’ll be able to afford the Benjamin Moore brand paint, but with the color chips I’ll be able to go to our regular place and get paint the correct color. Hooray!