On the hunt for new parts of the house to destroy!

So we're basically finished with the basement. We're still waiting on a few things before we can officially call it DONE, but I'll hold off on posting pictures where I'm basically the only one who can tell what the difference is in favor of a big reveal later!

Now that we don't have the basement to tear apart, there's time to destroy other things in the house that could use some work. First stop: the main floor powder room. So this bathroom was renovated at some point in the past 10 to 12 years, I think, so it is generally not in bad condition. Unfortunately, like many of the other redone parts of the house, the way the walls that were handled in previous renovations was just patching and slapping on another coat of paint. That's normally not a problem, and it didn't look that bad when we moved in. I mean... after having drywalled the basement where I spent HOURS fretting over making sure the walls were flat and smooth, I definitely judged the approach that was taken with the walls in other rooms when they were updated; however, improvement can be relative, and I'm sure the bumpy walls were the least of the concern at the time. In photos (with a bright enough flash, you can't even see what I'm talking about!

powder room when we moved in. looks nice! walls look deceptively smooth!

So you might be wondering why we would mess with something that looks perfectly fine. Some months ago (I can't even remember at this point...the basement reno has caused all house things to blur together), we started to notice that the paint was bubbling and cracking. These weren't tiny bubbles and crack, either. I can really only handle one destroyed part of the house at a time so for months, both Mr. Handy and I resisted the urge to rip the giant paint chips off the wall.

Well, one day I realized that the end was in sight with the basement, and while Mr. Handy was at the gym, I just ripped a whole chunk of paint off. YEARS of layers of paint came off in a huge sheet all the way down to the plaster. Apparently this is a thing that can happen with plaster walls. After years of being coated in paint--and probably with different KINDS of paint--you can apply just one coat too many, causing the entire sandwich of paint layers to detach from the wall. It seems to be sort of a mystery how many coats of paint that is, and it can also depend on the wall conditions in various parts of the room. In the powder room it's mainly concentrated on two walls, but there's no good way to address it without removing all the paint in the room. Adding another couple of coats on top of the paint that's currently intact could cause those spots to fail, so it's all gotta come off.

Mr. Handy has been had apparently been itching to rip the paint off the walls and was psyched to see that this was now a sanctioned house activity. I arrived home yesterday to find the sink, mirror, and other removable parts of the bathroom in the living room. You can see in the pics below some of the places where the paint peeled all the way to the plaster, and some of the places where we got it scraped to an impressively pepto pink layer of paint.

So now we've got a date with a tub of paint stripper and prep work for upgrading the look of the walls in the bathroom! I know how wrong I was about the basement timeline, but I'm thinking this is a couple weekends of work, tops. We're going to go a different direction color-wise, and class it up a bit in there. Stay tuned!!!