Back To The Storage Room (And Two Costly Lessons I’ve Learned From Past Room Remodels)

If you’re new around here, here’s a quick recap to get you up to speed. This is the bathroom I’m working on. It used to be our main guest bathroom, but then I did some remodeling and turned our three-bedroom house into a one-bedroom house with all three original bedrooms subsumed into one large master bedroom suite. That left this original guest bathroom inside our bedroom suite, which is a very awkward layout, to say the least. So I’m turning this bathroom into a much-needed storage room.

The left wall that had the vanity and toilet in the bathroom will have cabinets that look something like this…

And the opposite wall that now has the bathtub will have cabinets that look something like this…

Anyway, it has shocked me a bit to find that tearing out this bathroom, which was the second room remodel that I tackled after we bought this house, hasn’t been difficult for me at all. I kind of expected to feel some sort of sadness at tearing out all of my hard work, but it’s been a decade since I did this bathroom, so I feel nothing but excitement about the future storage room.

The main thing I got done yesterday was tearing out this cabinets/shelf area that was just inside the bathroom door to the right.

All of that is gone now.

I was thankful that I was able to get all of that out with minimal damage to the drywall. I’m really trying my best to get this demolition done without having to start from scratch on all of the drywall.

But that brings me to the first of the two big (and costly) lessons I’ve learned over my years of doing room remodels. Number one…

Construction adhesive is not needed on trim!

In my early years of DIYing and remodeling rooms, I used construction adhesive very liberally. Any time I added a piece of trim to the wall, I’d use construction adhesive before nailing the trim to the wall. I used it on every single piece.

I stopped doing this a few years back when I realized that it’s just not needed. When you install trim, you generally follow the installation with caulking around the trim and the priming and painting the trim. The nails, caulk, primer, and paint are plenty to hold that trim in place. Construction adhesive is almost always overkill. But I used to use it on everything.

Not only is it an unneeded added cost to the project, but if and when you decide to remove the trim, that construction adhesive is nothing but a nightmare and it will destroy the drywall as you try to pull that trim off of the wall.

Without the construction adhesive, all of this wainscoting could have been pulled off of the walls with very minimal damage to the walls. I simply would have had to score the caulked lined with a utility knife, pull the trim off of the walls, do a bit of sanding, and then the walls could have been painted (or textured and painted if wall texture is your thing). But because of that construction adhesive, I’m left with a much bigger job.

The same goes for mirror mastic. I’m not saying that mirror mastic isn’t needed in some situations. It was definitely needed on this mirror with this design that didn’t allow for mirror clips that screw into the wall. But just a dollop of mirror mastic in each corner is enough. I can almost guarantee you that I put mirror mastic on the entire back of this mirror, which will make it a nightmare to remove and will probably leave me with completely destroyed drywall once it’s off.

I’ve learned a lot in my years of DIYing, and one of my main lessons is that this kind of overkill will always come back to bite you. It’s just not needed, and it adds extra expense to a project.

And lesson number two…

Always install flooring first (and purchase extra to keep on hand)

I know this isn’t always possible, but I sure wish I had installed the flooring first, all the way under the bathtub, and then installed the bathtub on top of the flooring.

When you don’t install flooring first and you don’t take it all the way across the room, wall to wall, but instead, you place the flooring around fixed items in the room (like vanities, bathtubs, kitchen cabinets, etc.), it will always cause problems if you decide to remodel and rearrange a room.

I’ll be left with this huge area that doesn’t have flooring, so now I have to decide what to do with this floor. Since I can’t find tile to match this decade-old tile, do I fill in with tile that’s “close enough”? Do I redo the entire floor? I could have saved myself a huge headache and extra cost had I not only put the tile in first, wall to wall, before installing the tub and other fixtures. But I’ve also learned that it’s always a good idea to purchase a couple of extra boxes of tile to have on hand for this exact reason.

But unfortunately, I’m left with no tile under the tub, and no extra boxes of tile. So now I have to figure out what I’m going to do about this flooring. I could have saved myself time and money had I spent the extra bit of money back then and tiled the whole floor and purchased a couple of extra boxes of tile to keep on hand. But that’s the DIY life, right? We live and learn from our mistakes.