Orange you tired?

This past week and weekend I've been re-doing our 'powder room' (fancy name for 1/2 bathroom). My wife had painted it already once, but the colour just wasn't working for us and the flow into the house just wasn't there. Now I'm not one to take the safe route, I do enjoy the flair (as much as any straight man can) and I look for bold colours to define the room. All the creams, and whites, and eggshells etc are just too neutral for me. In our living room we took a small risk on a deep greenish brown which works really well with the white trim, so this time I took a bigger risk - orange!

Not only did we do the colour orange, but in
finish. First step was to paint over the blue walls my wife had previously painted (and failed to remove the fixtures off the wall - stead of just paint we decided on trying our hand at a venetian plaster faux finish (see sample on the right for an idea).

While I'm not an expert in plaster, I can say that after doing this work, there was nothing fake about the effort involved in applying this finish. To start, I painted the bathroom with normal latex paint with the colour set to a very vibrant orange. At first it seemed almost too bright but it did darken a tad after it dried. That took about one night (after work).

Next I had to trowel on two layers of this tinted acrylic plaster (real plaster is made with stone). Each of these coats was taking about 4+ hours to apply to a very small room (3'x7'). I did one coat per night and of course it was hot and muggy (and we don't have AC yet). This stuff was messy and unforgiving too, and my inexperience in troweling plaster onto walls was slowing me down. After the two layers of plaster, I re-inspected for missed areas and re-plastered again.

On Saturday I sanded the whole bathroom down to burnish the plaster and give it the distinctive look it is supposed to have. I then re-plastered some more holes found while sanding, re-sanded again and took a break. After a cold drink of water, I had to wipe down all the walls to remove the plaster dust and cleanup whatever the dust had stuck to (everything, including me).

After the normal cleanup, scraping and removal of drips, I then had to install a framed mirror we bought to match our new bathroom decor. I had a fear that this mirror would be a total pain but with a level and measure tape I knocked it into place without much fuss. After picking up all the plastic, paint tins, tape, towels , trowels, plaster bits and vacuuming things looked pretty good.

The final steps to complete today (Sunday) were to install a new bronze centre set faucet. Now I've installed a faucet before, so this was going to be a cake walk for me. Just remove the old faucet, install some shutoff valves to make life easier in the future, crimp down the valves, connect the supply lines, tighten down the hatches and you're done.

Then it occurred to me that the pop up plug in the sink was silver and would not match our new faucet - crap! So I was all set to go to the HomeDepot and ask for options, but I opened the faucet box first to take some rough measurements for the supply line and what do you know! It came with a new pop up plug assembly matching our new faucet. I was very happy for about 1 minute, until I realized I've never installed anything like a new drain and nothing even close to a pop up assembly + drain. So I whip out my trusty home repair book, consult it for drain replacement and write down the things I needed (putty, large wrench) and off I went to the HD.

I spoke to one of the older guys in the plumbing aisle and he clarified what I already feared. Due to the way the drain was installed (I brought photos!) I had to cut the PVC pipe, re-cement a new adapter as the original tail piece was so deep into the PVC pipe I couldn't just remove it (without removing the pedestal sink at least).

So I got some nice wrenches for plumbing work (20$), a hack saw, putty, PVC adapter, PVC coupler and PVC cement. My wife held the sink up while (just in case) as I hacked sawed the original drain pipe off. It came off without too much issue, and I was off to the races. I did a dry fit of the entire assembly, double checked everything fit as required. I then cemented the PVC adapter, connected the drain assembly, applied the plumbers putty to the the flange in the sink, tightened everything down and was done. I finalized everything by installing the faucet and finally tested with water in the sink for about 10 minutes and then drained the water - All Good!

All told, it took me about 1.5 hrs - mostly due to the learning curve of the drain installation.

Here are some before photos:


Here are some after photos (see my hand - heh! ):


Here are some shots of the faucet and drain, one expensive toilet paper holder (but the wife really loved it) and the floating shelf which really pops nicely with the back drop of the plaster.


Britgal really likes how the bathroom turned out (I think she was iffy on the orange+plaster at first) and is already on the hunt for a bog brush and roll holder to match (*sigh*). As one of my first semi-major projects, it turned out pretty well and I think was worth the effort. Sitting in the bathroom, it actually feels bigger now and has a lot more style to it.

I'm going to go relax now :)