06/02/16: Bathroom Update, and Why I Hate Frog Tape

Well, folks, it's been quite some time since you've last heard anything from Mont d'Or Manor. And that's a good thing; it means there's been no major home-improvement projects around here in the last few years! So it seemed like time was ripe for a little work.

Recently I decided to tackle some problems in the bathroom while Michael was out of town. The main issues were the paint chipping inside the wooden medicine cabinet--surely much of the paint was lead based, which is not a good thing in an area where items such as toothbrushes are stored--the corroded finish on the faucet, and the rust on the chrome light fixtures. So, I decided to strip and repaint the inside of the cabinet, and also replace the faucet and polish the lights.

As is always the case, the stripping did not go as planned. By my count, there were at least four coats of paint on the inside of the cabinet: bubble-gum pink on the exterior, and then coats of white, sea-foam green, and, finally, what looked like taupe. The environmentally-friendly stripper I used was no match for all those layers: the first coat of stripper failed to remove all of even the topmost coat (the bubble-gum pink). So I put on a second coat, waited 24 hours, and re-stripped. This time it got all of the pink, the white, and the green, leaving the taupe. At that point, I had to go buy more stripper and then apply a *third* coat, leaving the stripper to do its work for another 24 hours. Needless to say, the bathroom was a mess. Here is the work area:

And here is the stripper working on the pink paint. Yummy!

After three days, I finally got down to the wood. Here it is, after much scraping and sanding:

 I had taped off the molding around the cabinet, since I wasn't planning on refinishing it; the paint was in good shape there, and, in my experience, you shouldn't mess with paint that ain't chipping. But what, dear reader, do you imagine happened when I removed the Frog Tape? If you guessed, "Some huge chunks of paint came off with it," then you've just won a vacuum. Here's a lovely snapshot of the Frog Tape debacle of 2016 (good thing there's no audio . . .):

Frog Tape, you are Pure Evil.

 So, this meant I was in for the molding too. I still had no intention of painting the front of the door (which holds the mirror), but I did strip and repaint the back of the door, which had only one layer of paint, all of which came off after a single coat of stripper. And here is the inside of the cabinet now, painted with Zinsser Perma-White semi-gloss, in Benjamin Moore Decorator's White:

 And now for the faucet. The old Kohler faucet was badly corroded, and I hated the brushed chrome finish, which had a constant soap-scummy haze on it:

So out it went, and in came a new Moen faucet, in polished chrome. The install wasn't terribly complicated, aside from the fact that the water shut-off valves were totally stuck (in the open position). I ended up having to shut the water off to the the whole house and drain the water out of the pipes before starting any work. The trickiest part was uninstalling and installing the drain assembly. Here is the new faucet:

The last items were the rusty light fixtures:

Here they are after I polished the living daylights out of them:

 And here is the final product, with the door put back on: