It All Began with a Vanity

It seemed so simple.

Pull out the outdated vanity in the bathroom, toss it in the trash, and install a pedestal sink.

Have you seen pedestal sinks?  They’re compact and don’t have many parts.  I couldn’t think of an easier first project to ease ourselves into home ownership.  HGTV figured prominently into my television viewing line-up, and pedestal sinks were so basic they didn’t even have their own show.

Looking back, I must have known it wasn’t going to be exactly painless, because I neglected to tell Ryan about my plan before enlisting my mom’s help to rid the bathroom of the offending vanity sink and cupboard.

Awkward and unwieldy, it protested only slightly as we pulled it into the hallway, making room for modern, streamlined bathroom décor.

Not wanting to sit on the curb alone, the vanity convinced parts of the plaster wall to come along on its next journey, leaving gaping holes in our bathroom wall.

Undeterred by the prospect of patching a wall, I stood by the decision to start remodeling before even deciding on a paint color.

My eyes drifted down, noticing that the tile border along the floor stopped where the vanity had once started.

We would have to find matching tile.

Inspired by the unique and quirky finds HGTV home designers manage to conjure from thin air, I traipsed out of the house to buy some tile.

Trips to several tile stores failed to find matching tile to continue the border.

Trips to several more tile stores failed to find anything remotely close to complementary tile to continue the border.

Discomfort began to set it as we pulled the rest of the tile away from the wall, planning to replace it with wood molding.

Projects always take a little detour, right?

More wall damage.

So we would need thick wood molding.

Perhaps we could paint it a funky color, like an HGTV home designer would.

Still more wall damage.

Make that extremely thick wood molding.

Maybe white molding would work.

We lacked any knowledge of miter saws and cutting on an angle and somehow making straight, extremely thick wood molding fit against the curved wall in our bathroom.

Ninety-seven trips to Home Depot, several panicked calls to my dad, and countless borrowed tools later, our bathroom was again presentable, complete with a gleaming white pedestal sink.

I turned off HGTV.

Lesson learned.

the prompt:

start or end with "lesson learned"

a little note: years later, when cleaning out our basement, we found an entire box of brand new tiles, obviously leftover from the bathroom project

curse words were spoken

giggles ensued