(Don't) Do it Yourself

So, one of the most annoying things about my house is the kids bathroom. Unbeknown to us, the former owner had decided to do one of those "make it sell" details by painting the bathroom floor. Not tiling or re-laying vinyl for $500, but spending $30 for a can of paint and splashing it down on the floor over the current vinyl.

All of this would have been fine if we didn't have...boy children in our house. As anyone who has raised children with penises knows, they don't really master the whole "aim" thing until long after college so after a few days the bathroom starts smelling like a homeless shelter if you don't go in there with bleach and scrub brush. Imagine my surprise the first time I did this and floor started bubbling.

A year and a half passes and the bathroom floor looks like this:


So, we went to Lowes to find out how much it would cost to replace the floor. Lowes essentially fed us a bunch of crap and demanded $40.00 to come out and measure the room, even though we came in with measurements. They also said they couldn't do it even though they did the exact same job for us in our Beaverton condo. We thought "ok, we will just scrape up the paint" like this:

After a few days, it became clear that we were tearing up the vinyl trying to get the paint off so I went to Floors with Flair where I found out we were actually scraping up some asbestos(!) with that paint (it lives in the glue and felt in pre 1986 vinyl). Despite having two screaming children running around, the sales guy was very nice and took me into the warehouse to view "the absolute cheapest vinyl available because, seriously, this is a kids bathroom and it just needs to be durable." I found some remnant for $30 and made the deal to have the whole thing done for $380.00 including labor and materials.

The next day they came out and now I am looking at this:


So, despite being total DIY people, don't do this at home, just have the professionals do it in 2 hours.