A before and after of the only remodel I was planning on doing this year. The kids bathroom had the original 50-year-old toilet and one-drawer vanity. The vanity had to go and the toilet went when I got annoyed with it. I covered up the tile (and imperfect vanity footprint) with a peel-and-stick flooring and closed the shower curtain to hide the yellow-speckled tile that has been repaired over time with nonmatching tile– thanks once again, to Wes’s young demo skills.

I was happy enough with the good-enough bathroom update, and didn’t plan on putting any more effort into it. And then…

And then Piper saw Timmy with a not-yet-dead mouse come down the hallway. We never found the body, but we did start noticing a stench in the bathroom. Finally, I surrendered and began to remove the new vanity, where there was the teeniest hole between the wall and trim that a mouse could have crawled into before its tragic death. I had cemented the marble backsplash into place. Not only did I end up cracking the marble–only once–I cracked the mirror that covered the entire wall behind the vanity and toilet. Sigh.

That mean removing the entire mirror, and decided whether to fill the dozen of holes left behind or putting up an entire layer of sheetrock. I hate drywalling, but that seemed to be the better long term option. Which left us with a blank, unprimed wall and no mirror.

But I like what happened next. I put up a thick, lightly-textured wallpaper up and got an electrician out to install an outlet for an LED-framed mirror. I actually love, love, love how it took a “well, that’s better” bathroom into a “hey, maybe the kids shouldn’t be allowed to use this.”