Courtney and I had so much fun renovating the dining room in our new house back in August that we decided to spend part of our Christmas break doing more renovation. This time, we set our sights on the half bath downstairs. Here’s what that bathroom looked like when we moved in:

Certainly it didn’t look bad, but it just wasn’t our style. For one thing, the wallpaper had to go. That, as it turned out, was much more difficult than either of us had expected.

When we renovated the dining room, we actually had a relatively easy time taking down the layer of wallpaper that was glued to the wall as it came down in giant sheets with just a tug. The half bath, however, made us earn every single square inch. On the first night, it took me two hours to pry off a few square feet of wallpaper with a scraper and a spray bottle of vinegar and water. Courtney joined the struggle the next night, but it was still slow going. We turned to Google for help, but it wasn’t exactly comforting when the title of one of the first articles in our search results read “Patience is a virtue.”

It was then that we decided to get a wallpaper steamer. After just a minute with the steamer, we were both ready to profess our undying love for Peter Ravenscroft Wilkins, the inventor of the device. We were also kicking ourselves for not getting the steamer the second we realized that the wallpaper in this particular room wasn’t going to come down quietly. We could’ve saved ourselves a lot of time and effort. With the steamer, we peeled the walls in the entire bathroom in about the same amount of time as it took for us to chip away a few patches the previous two nights.

Even after the wallpaper came down, it wasn’t done tormenting us. Because we had to use a lot of moisture in removing the wallpaper, it had caused wrinkles in patches of the drywall — patches that couldn’t be just puttied up and sanded down. So we had to cut away the wrinkles, prime, prime again, putty, sand, and prime again (and sometimes repeat the whole process) to fix the troublesome spots.

After about four days’ labor, the wall was finally done. The rest of the bathroom renovation came together pretty quickly in comparison, as it only took a couple hours to put the vessel sink, vanity, and faucet together.

The fruits of all that hard work: A light blue bathroom with a touch of Asian sensibilities:

By the way, we now have a spare white porcelain pedestal sink and an ornate wooden-frame mirror, both in good condition, if anyone is interested :-)