Today we woke up fairly early and met Kyle from Handyman Heroes for the first time. We checked out the bathroom with him and discussed what we wanted to do. We were pretty worried that inside the bathroom there would be mold, mildew, or rot, and that it would really slow down our project.
I headed to Home Depot and called my mom on the way. I hadn’t filled my car with gas in forever and the tank was low, so I also did that. Still fairly expensive even with the pandemic. I pulled in the Home Depot parking lot and Kyle texted that he had some questions and wanted to meet at 12:30. I was getting painting supplies for painting the back bedroom and our first power drill! Everyone was super helpful at Home Depot. I was rushing to meet Kyle at 12:30 and once I was on Skyline I remembered my original purpose for the trip to Home Depot…the shower faucet. I turned around and pulled over in front of Westmoor High. I arranged for Colin to meet Kyle because at this point I would be too late.
I ended up using the curbside pickup for the faucet and made it to the house by 12:40. I pulled up and saw Colin in his car, and received a text from him at the same time.
“Ok, summary is everything was good. Wasn’t plaster, it was Sheetrock. Wiring looks new, so adding an outlet is easy, we just need to tell them where sometime today or tomorrow. He asked if he could just replace the Sheetrock with the wallpaper instead of removing the wallpaper which would be time consuming I said ok. Plumbing is new on tub, so that’s good. He asked if he could replace some of the pipes for the toilet and sink, maybe $50 each to bring them up to code, less likely to leak, I said yes.”
Here’s the bathroom in its naked state! This is where the tub was on the left, then toilet, then sink/vanity. 
Check out that plaster and lath wall! Gooey.
This was great news! Kyle wanted to ask us some questions so we planned to meet back at the house after their trip to the dump at 3:30. I managed to move all our books, all our plants (except my avocado tree, which didn’t fit in my car) and about ⅓ of our kitchen items to the house.
After bringing the load of kitchen items, I decided to clean the cabinets. I discovered a bunch of mouse droppings in MOST of the cabinets. I also discovered that some of the cabinets are painted inside a really old yellowish white and some of them are unfinished, bare wood. The mouse poop and pee had really soaked into the wood so I decided then and there that I needed to paint the cabinets.
I spent over an hour cleaning the kitchen and it’s still pretty dirty. So much mouse poop. I didn’t even really look behind the stove. I’m calling an exterminator tomorrow. Hopefully they can assess if any mice currently live in the kitchen and can advise about getting rid of these mice and sealing off their entrance.
So, I have shifted my focus from repainting the back bedroom which has lead on the 2nd or 3rd paint layer down to painting the kitchen. Ugh. Well, now I feel pretty ready after all my research to paint both things before we move in.
Before I left the house I tested the kitchen cabinet paint for lead- negative, thank goodness. I got home and we had leftover Mexican casserole and watched a very long video about painting cabinets. I’m going to start that project tomorrow and hopefully I can power through priming the cabinets themselves by the end of the day.
I showered and put Colin on paint-choosing duty. He chose some darker dusty blues. Hopefully the samples turn out ok.
Colin’s blue cabinet inspiration. 
More blue cabinet inspiration in a galley style kitchen like ours.
Overall we are really glad about the bathroom being relatively problem-free and the kitchen situation is a small setback that will hopefully result in a nice-looking kitchen!
