Remodel or not?
My guest-room bathroom was done in a light-colored wood with linoleum on the floor; it's a perfectly good bathroom, but it doesn't look nearly as nice as the dark-wood-and-tile of the master bathroom or the dark-wood-and-stone of the kitchen.
So I always figured that a few years down the line, after selling the old place and buying some nicer furniture, I would remodel the guest bathroom to make it look more like the nicer parts of the house.
But then along came a water spill. I've been running fans across both the underflooring upstairs and the exposed ceiling downstairs, trying to dry things out, but the particle-board underflooring seemed to be holding a lot of water. So Breht came this morning and ripped out a bunch of underflooring (exposing the plywood beneath); we figured it was simpler to replace it than to wait for it to dry and hope nothing got moldy.
But now it turns out that water got under the sink cabinet as well; there's a piece of particle board under one side of the sink cabinet, and we think it wicked the water across to the plywood under the rest of the sink cabinet.
So now I have to decide between two options:
- Tear out the sink, the surrounding countertop, and the sink cabinet, make a bunch of design choices, hire a contractor, and redo the whole bathroom now.
- Run a fan for a few more days to try to dry out the under-sink area, then put in new subflooring and put linoleum over it and put in a new toilet and leave the whole thing alone until I'm ready to do a real remodel, at which point everything would have to be ripped out again.
Option B sounds wasteful—with the toilet out and the flooring ripped up already, it seems like we might as well build what I really want.
But I'm dreading option A, even assuming I can afford it right now. I don't really want to have to make a bunch of design choices right now. I don't want to embark on potentially months' worth of the guest bathroom being unusable. (I have a guest arriving tomorrow; the guest bathroom is going to be unusable for the next few days regardless, but it could potentially be up and running again by Tuesday or so.) I don't want to deal with the uncertainty of finding a contractor and trying to work out a design with them and then hoping they don't just disappear for weeks on end the way contractors tend to do. I don't want to have to decide whether to go even further and replace the bathtub (though I think the answer to that is no). And so on and so on.
And it's only taken Breht about a day's work to go from fully operational bathroom to current state. So although option B would involve a certain amount of waste (especially of the new linoleum), it would only add a day or so to the amount of time it would take to do a remodel.
The current plan is for me to think about it over the weekend and let Breht know on Monday. Thoughts/ideas/suggestions welcome.
