There was a little mishap with the title of my last e-mail. Oops! This post is not about the Victoria Stationery set (but I’ll be choosing a winner soon!)
My husband and I are renovating an older home for our “final resting spot” as we call it. When I think back on it, I have been renovating my whole life and I get this from my Mother. She is the queen of redoing, reusing, and upgrading homes.
I recall one of the escapades that we had one week when Dad was away on a business trip. We got the brilliant idea that the ceramic towel bar was in the wrong place in the “girl” bathroom that my sister and I shared with Mom. If you are old enough to recall, ceramic towel bars were literally mounted in the wall, then the sheetrock surrounded it. Our small, seemingly useless towel bar was going away! And we were going to accomplish this while Dad was gone and have our newly painted bathroom ready when he returned.
Our first step was to remove the towel bar. Sounds simple doesn’t it? We cut a hole in the sheetrock around the ceramic brackets and proceeded to lift it from the wall. It was a lot more difficult than we had anticipated and, in fact, I think we resorted to using a crowbar to pry it loose. All of a sudden we heard a loud crunching sound and the towel bar was out, along with about 8 inches of the sheetrock all around it. Oh my goodness! What were we going to do?
Mom got the idea we would stuff the hole with paper, but soon realized that every piece we put in the holes dropped to the bottom inside the wall. This was a “Lucy and Ethel” moment in our lives. I remembered a college professor of mine telling of a similar dilemma and how he solved it.
So here is what we did next. Using the “Dr. Bryant method” of wall repair, we cut a piece of cardboard for the two sections of the wall that had the cavernous opening. In the center of the cardboard, we cut a hole and inserted a balloon. Then we put the cardboard inside the wall, holding it in place by the balloon.
Now is the tricky part. We had to blow up the balloon (that was now inside the wall) with the mouthpiece right up against the wall and tie it off so that the pressure from the inflated balloon held the cardboard tight up against the sheetrock. It worked beautifully after many tries. It is hard to blow up a balloon and tie it off when you are laughing. The cardboard covered the hole from the backside of the sheetrock leaving the front to be filled in.
We decided next to put spackle this area and that should do it. And we thought it would spread like cake batter. Hum, not that simple. After many cans of spackle, we finally got it covered. A good sanding, a fresh coat of paint, and no one would be the wiser.
Dad came home and we showed off our work. The look on his face was priceless and he asked the convicting question, “How did you get the towel bar off the wall without ruining the wall?” I am not sure how we wormed our way out of that, but judging from his laughter he knew we had made a colossal mess. Mom told him it was a snap!
I can only imagine many years from now the house will be remodeled and what a surprise there will be. Inside the bathroom wall are two red balloons attached to cardboard with a pile of newspaper below. I hope they call in an archeologist to solve this one.
Have you remodeled? Do you have enough courage to share your disasters with us?
