From Nasty to Nice

The bathroom upgrades continue! We have really ugly hardware throughout the kitchen and both bathrooms. Seriously, gross. Maybe they were cute and shiny in their prime but today...

Pardon the poor iphone quality before pictures. My camera battery was dead. womp womp. 

Aren't they seriously disgusting? I tried to clean them but they still look gunky and gross. I thought about ORBing them but A. I thought it might be too dark with our cabinets. B. We have a nickel towel bar so I was hoping to tie into that. I decided to try out the Rustoleum Satin Nickel Metallic Spray Paint. 

After like 20 thin coats, here is the much cleaner looking finished product:

The overall effect is subtle but I like it. It's definitely an improvement over the grody old ones. Someday I'd like to replace them entirely, but for a 7 dollar can of spray paint this will do for now!

ORB TIME!

After painting our hall bathroom I've been itching to ORB our mirror.

The mirror itself doesn't bother me too much, but it's just kind of meh. It was here when we moved in and we aren't particularly attached to it so we figured there wouldn't be any downside to ORBing it. For anyone not familiar with the terminology, ORB= Oil Rubbed Bronze.

I propped the mirror up on some scrap 2x4's that were lying around and spread out some trash bags for overspray. To protect the mirror I just taped down some printer paper. Classy, I know. Gotta work with what ya got!

Here's what it looked like after I impatiently ripped off all the tape and printer paper:

I'll be the first to admit that I didn't do so great at the whole "thin, even coats" thing. It was more like one thick and uneven coat followed by a few thin and even coats. whoops. In real life it looks pretty even.

Here's a solid Before & After so you don't have to scroll up.

I approve. Although I want to shimmy it over a smidge to the left so it's properly centered. That sucker is sorta heavy though. I'll get there. The next step might be to ORB that hardware as well... too matchy-matchy?

Hot Tub Removal

I know... that phrase is blasphemous. Why would we remove a built-in hot tub from our deck? WHYY?! Well, if you recall, our hot tub looked like this:

This sucker gots to go! Back in October we finally made it happen!

First we had to dig out all the weeds, er, plants and re-locate all the dirt to the woods behind our house. When we got 2/3 of the way down we hit rock bottom. Literally. The previous owners filled the bottom of the hot tub with red lava rock for drainage. Getting through all of the rock wasn't quite as easy as shoveling out the dirt but we got the job done.

After digging came the fun part! Sawing the hot tub into pieces.

My dad cut the hot tub into 3 or 4 pieces and we lifted it out.

Afterwards we were left with a gaping hole in the deck and a pile of crap on the deck.

We then built in some supports and laid down some new decking.

Later we made our neighbors proud with a classy dumpster in our driveway. Finnigan enjoyed gazing out at it.