safe to shower again.

so i mentioned the other day in my guest bathroom planning post about how my guest bathroom had gotten to the point where it was so very disgusting that my sister had recently refused to shower in it ever again. and honestly, i dont blame her. in fact, since Mark installed the exhaust fan in the master bathroom, we dont ever shower in here anymore either. you think we're all exaggerating or overreacting? think again:

stained tub + moldy crumbling caulking = vomit. 

so in order to keep everyone i know from boycotting visiting me based on the state of my guest bathroom, i decided it was high time to clean that mess. so i turned to my new favorite source for all sources of DIY house related tips and tricks: pinterest. and lo and behold, i found a recipe for a magic tub cleaner, using things that i had on hand at my house!

i mixed and prepared my ingredients, applied them to the tub, waited the prescribed amount of time, and even scrubbed everything down. and after all that... my tub smelled like vinegar and dish soap and only looked slightly less gross.

womp womp. the tub was super clean, but still looked super disgusting. not exactly the magic formula i was hoping for. it was becoming abundantly clear to me at this point that i needed to call in some reinforcement and resort to more drastic measures.

enter the husband and his tools, which he used to remove all of the nasty grout and the built in soap dish that i accidentally separated from the wall that one time because apparently it was designed to hold the weight of a bar of soap instead of a good portion of my bodyweight while i was using it as a leg-shaving footrest.

after letting everything air out for a while, he reattached the soap dish with some sort of liquid-nails-adhesive-in-a-tube and let it dry for a couple days.

ta da! the soap dish is back and functional for holding bars of soap. and i am under strict orders to never use it as a footrest again.

the final step was to re-caulk all of the areas where the nasty caulk had been removed, and all around the soap dish. its kind of amazing the difference a little bit of caulk can make.

of course, i forgot to take a true "after" picture, but trust me, its a huge difference. and with Saturday's addition of a new shower curtain liner, the guest bathroom is starting to look like you might actually be able to get clean in there, rather than coming out more disgusting than before you got into the shower.

of course, this bathroom still has a LONG way to go, and while we are dreaming of the day when we will be able to completely gut the bathroom and rebuild it from the studs, we are sticking to the same slow and steady baby steps method of home improvement that has worked for us so far. next step: paint!