Pink Bathroom Update (& Our Latest House Catastrophe)

Last I mentioned my pink bathroom, I was sharing my plans to embrace the pink-ness and go with a pink/black/white color scheme. I have A LOT of plans for this room, and it is far from complete. However, I have gotten quite a bit done on it, most of which was months ago before our first overnighting house guests came in July. I never posted my progress because I had a few frustrating things happen, but it seriously looks so much better than it did when we moved in that I felt it deserves to be shared, even in its unfinished state.

This is what the room looked like when we moved in - not terrible at a glance. Once we started looking into things, we realized how much work this room would need. The caulking was either crumbling and pulling apart or someone had smeared new caulk over it and it looked just awful. And when I say "the caulk", I mean all of it - there is even caulking around the edge of the floor time. Craziness. So, I've tried addressing the caulking issue (still working on it, but it's better now), and when I pulled out the million wall anchors from the wall, I discovered the paint was peeling away; this meant that the room was never primed, just painted, and the only way to fix it is to peel the paint off the entire room and put a sealant over it before painting again. Yeah, so that's not done yet. I have at least accessorized and cleaned the daylights out of the room and at the moment (and for the past few months), it looks like this:

I'm really loving the black and white floral theme :) It's still a long way from finished, but this has become "my bathroom" and I seriously use it everyday. This is where I shower, fix my hair, get ready for bed, everything, and the little changes that have been made have greatly improved how the room feels. I really love it now :)

This is a general idea (created with photoshop - oh the joys of technology) of what I want to accomplish in here. I made this plan back in May or June and I actually ended up getting the exact shower curtain that I put in this pic (it was from JC Penney and I had a gift card - score!) as well as almost identical floor mats with matching hand towels - all of which is the Better Homes and Gardens collection from Walmart of all places. I still have quite a few big jobs ahead (resurfacing the sink in white, painting the cabinet black and adding nobs, framing the mirror, converting the closet into French doors, getting a new light fixture, making curtains, painting the grout white, peeling off/sealing/repainting the walls, and figuring out something to go above the toilet), but at least I like where it's going and I enjoy being in this room.

I'm making little strides with it every now and then. Last night, for example, I sealed/caulked around the faucets. I've needed to do this for a long time - they were never caulked so all the water that splashes when washing your hands seeped under the fixture and down in to the cabinet. I've seriously found puddles in there and it is so mildewy and gross. I don't put anything in it right now, just a towel to help with the water. So before I start painting the cabinets and counter top, I needed to address this water issue. I had a nightmare of a time with regular caulk on tile before - turns out that's because you can't use regular caulk - duh, right? I looked around the caulk section until I found the ones that said Kitchen Tile and Bath and I knew I was good. I decided to get Dap 3.0 because it said it is water sealed in 30 minutes.

I'll be honest - this stuff was not what I was expecting which really lead to a big mess at first. Once I got the hang of it though, I loved it. You apply this like caulking - Run a bead around the fixture, press it in the crack with your finger, clean up the excess. But the cleaning is a bit more complicated than that. You have to go back over the still wet sealant with mineral spirits to clean off the excess gunk (and there will be lots of excess). I was so worried when I first pressed it in with my finger that it would look like a big white goopy mess forever, but when I went back with the mineral spirits this was the result:

Can you see the sealant in the photo to the left? No, right? I zoomed in on the middle shot to see the little bit of white in there. It's almosts invisible - I love it! The right photo is to show how it stops the water :) I'm seriously so glad I don't have to worry about the vanity cabinet anymore!

In other news, we have a new catastrophe this week. We went in the back yard to check our avocado tree (turns out we have one) only to find that we couldn't get to it because of all the freaking bees! Honey bees have taken up residence inside the walls of my outbuilding/shed.

That's the shed up there. And the avocado tree trunk - yeah we weren't getting any avocados yesterday...

See the bees? They are going up into the holes in the cement block through a little space around the pvc pipe from our water pump. Yeah. At first we weren't even sure whether they were bees, but I was lucky enough to be able to take this picture:

It's totally a honey bee :) I was really impressed with my iphone camera's abilities on that one, lol. So I have called a bee removal guy and apparently they have to bust holes in my cement to clear out all the honey and larvae inside. Yet another thing to cost a bunch of money! I'm very adamant that the bees aren't killed though - we've even contemplated having our own hive just to help with the bee situation. I'm not sure that we are ready to start one up right now, but these bees shall live! lol

Any bees in your shed lately?