Brooke here:

The hallway bathroom has been remodeled.  It…  Oh boy.  Let’s start with how it originally looked when we first bought the house:

Yeah, that’s a lot of yellow. It’s not a large bathroom, about 50 square feet, so the yellow was extra-concentrated.  The bathroom came with a built-in pantry closet (door on the left), which jutted into the room.  The vanity, toilet, shower liner, and shower doors had been replaced, but everything else was probably original to the house, including the shell sconce light fixture and an overhead light that was so corroded that when you touched it, rust flaked off like snow.  And there was no fan, which probably had something to do with the rust.

Also, the floor was painted.  I strongly believe they used industrial boat paint, as I found a half-empty gallon of that in the basement which has the same gloss and is the same shade of white (I would say something negative about this, but I would be hurling pot-stones in my black glass kettle).  Scrape some of that up, and guess what!  You find the source of (some of) that weird rubble that I kept turning up in the backyard.  They were discarded bathroom tiles!  And while that question has been answered, I still don’t know: (a) why there were so many bathroom tiles – we’re talking multiple wheelbarrow loads of them, and the teeny-tiny bathroom has not been renovated, ever; (b) why they were dumped in the backyard; and (c) where that one blue tile with the writing stamped into it came from.  There’s a possible answer to (c) under the linoleum in the front hallway, but we are not in the right mindset to rip that up and see if there’s a blue tiled floor underneath.*

The possible answer to (a) is the shower stall, which was plastic laminate over drywall.  We are not sure if this is original to the house or was a later renovation.  It’s possible that the shower was originally tiled in the same red squares as the floor, and they gutted this at a later time.   I would not blame them for doing this, as these are not attractive tiles.

Despite knowing that we’d eventually gut the whole thing, I got fed up with the YELLOW! and painted the ceiling white and the walls a dusky purple-gray.  When we started prepping for the remodel, we decided the skylight and the stained glass window were definitely the best features of the room and that we should keep these.  Everything else, from the tub to the plumbing to the floor to the electric work, would have to be updated.

So that’s what we did.  More later.

*Read: Please not another renovation, not right now, please please please…