Renovating During A Pandemic? Get Ready For Some Delays!

When I moved into my house 11 years ago, I knew the bathrooms would need to be updated. So about 5 years ago, I got most of the supplies (on discount or second hand cause I'm thrifty--and on a tight budget) to renovate both my upstairs and downstairs bathrooms.

One year ago, to the day, I finished the upstairs, by myself. I was pretty pleased and it only took me a weekend.

The rest of the supplies got shoved into closets and corners of my house, waiting for when I would have time, and the help, to work on the downstairs one. So, at this point, I've had tile, flooring and paint cans cluttering up all the extra space in my garage and house.

When the Coronavirus hit, and we were all ordered to stay home, I figured it was time to tackle that project. My dad, who was part of our little quarantine group, also found himself with some spare time, so we figured we'd give it ago. We had all the stuff (or so we thought) so why not?!

We started the week of April vacation, by taking up the crappy tile and removing the mirror and light fixtures...

Then the sink and toilet came out...

That's when we discovered our first hiccup, and placed our first 3 orders to Lowes, HomeDepot and Amazon, for supplies we didn't have on hand. Since making a quick run to the store wasn't quite possible, we'd have to wait for some of the stuff to come in, and also wait for the curbside pickup orders to be filled.

So we kept on with the demolition...

When the first order of stuff came in, we were able to fix the plumbing issue and put up new drywall...

And then we started to tile...

But then we ran out of grout and tile glue, so another order was made...

Once the tile was up on the first wall, it was time to prime!

But again, we needed to make another order because I needed more paint!

Once the primer was done, we tried the vanity and lights...and luckily they all still fit! So we moved on to the flooring...

I was super excited when we got to the part where we had a working toilet and sink in the downstairs bathroom once again! I was missing that with 4 kids in the house!

When the paint came in, we stopped and painted the walls...

Then came the hard part. With all those kids in the mix, this bathroom was seriously lacking in the storage department! So the plan was to borrow some space from a big closet in the adjoining bedroom, and create a built-in shelving unit.

But then we ran into our second plumbing hurdle...and had to make another order....and wait some more!

With the shut-off valves in place, we got to work building the closet...

And then painting the closet...

And adding the shelves...

And then filling the shelves! (My favorite part--because all the bathroom stuff that we were using daily was stuck in the backroom, and blocking a huge pile of laundry!)

It was all starting to come together...

We had to make another order to get the right paint for the vanity cabinet, and an extra storage thing for the hairdryer...also a new curtain rod because the other one broke.

But when that came in, those went right up on the wall.

Another order for some finishing touches...

And a few more odds and ends and curtains...

With 12 online orders to Home Depot, 14 to Lowes and 6 to Amazon (for small stuff like paint and tool parts, etc.) it only took us 1 month to finish!

I will never again take for granted being able to make a quick trip to the hardware store to grab supplies! With shortages and restrictions on what you could and couldn't get, this project went from taking about a week to complete, had we been able to get what we needed, when we needed it, to taking a month.

It was an eye opening experience, to say the least.

Aside from finally having a bathroom that doesn't make me wince, one really great thing that came out of this quarantine project, was the time I got to spend with my dad. The kids got a kick out of seeing him every day, and since we were the only ones he was seeing, and he was the only person coming in from the outside world, it did us all some good to spend that time together, safely.

Bottom line, it took way longer to complete, but the payoff, in so many ways, was worth it.