Shower remodel

Although most of our posts have been about outside projects, we do work on the inside of the house here and there. My approach to home improvement is to dwell on something I dislike for 6 months or so, stewing about how ugly it is and how much better it could be, until one day I finally get motivated and tackle the project in a whirlwind. And a feature of this house that I've been stewing about since the day we moved in has been the shower doors.

The shower as it was. Not hideous, but not good.

I think shower doors can be fine, but the ones in our master bathroom were really gross along the edges and impossible to clean. They were also too low, so I had to duck or smash my head every time I got in and out of the shower and water sprayed over the top. I also kept imagining how annoying it was going to be to bathe a baby while leaning over the sharp edge at the bottom and having access to only half the tub at a time.

Grossness at the bottom -- and this only a few months after we'd already stripped and replaced the caulking.

I finally got motivated this week to remove the doors, and then I felt ridiculous for having procrastinated so long when the entire project only took an hour.

I started by taking off the doors and spraying all the caulk on the frame with Goo Gone Caulk Remover. Then after I took out the screws holding the frame to the edges of the shower, the four metal sides of the frame were pretty easy to pry off. What was left on the two sides of the shower was pretty scuzzy, but what was underneath the bottom piece was downright frightening.

The horror!

Miraculously, by using a scraping tool equipped with a razor blade and a bit more Goo Gone, it only took a little elbow grease to clean up all that old caulk and gunk. I scrubbed all the surfaces with a bleach solution and steel wool for good measure, and then they looked shiny and new!

The perfectly smooth, clean surfaces revealed after a bit of scrubbing.

The only remaining task is to fill the screw holes, visible in the picture above, with dabs of caulk. They'll still be noticeable, but the shower curtain will hide them most of the time.

In my humble opinion, a vast improvement.

I feel much better about the whole bathroom now. I always felt icky having something so dirty and uncleanable so close to where we wash ourselves. Now the bathroom is perfect . . . except for the rusty light fixture, the flimsy door, the ugly doorknob, the missing towel rod, and the mismatched light switches. One thing at a time, I guess.