Ah, the bathroom. This was the room I really thought I had the least stuff to do in, and yet it’s been my biggest personal project so far. First it was blinds for the window – seriously necessary, so it’s the only window in the house at the moment that has a window treatment at all. Then painting, which I have to do a second coat on to make it as nice as it can be. And I replaced the showerhead with an adjustable one so it actually reaches above my head. Those were all things I knew I was going to do from the moment I moved in.

But then Sunday morning, I snapped. That recessed medicine cabinet, the metal-edged one from the 50’s, so obviously original to the house, so nasty I refused to put anything into it and hadn’t yet mustered the energy to clean it? It was going to have to go. Out of the wall, out of the house, just OUT. So before church, I attacked it. Closed the sink drain so as not to lose any hardware down it, and then unscrewed every screw I could find – harder than you might think, since someone had painted the interior more than once, leaving me prying paint up with a mat knife just to get a spot that my screwdriver could grip. Having unscrewed everything, I cut around all the exterior edges of the box with the mat knife, on the theory that the six layers of paint on the wall (one of them applied by me earlier that very week) might hinder the exit of the box from the wall. And then I braced myself, made a mental note that this was indeed a mirror I was dealing with, so breakage would be bad, gripped the corners of the box, and PULLED. And the box came out of the wall, remarkably smoothly, and there I stood, awkwardly holding a medicine cabinet as I heard a unexpected sound: whooshtickatickaticka.

Since the medicine cabinet in my hands was blocking my view of events, I turned, carefully set it in the corner, and looked up to see what had happened. And I see a pile, no, let’s go with a mountain, or an avalanche, even, of double-edged razorblades, half in my sink, half still in the wall. Because someone, lost in the sands of time, had the brilliant idea: when you’re done with your razorblade, you don’t want to throw it away, because that’s dangerous for anyone who deals with the trash. So why don’t we put a slit in the back of your medicine cabinet, and you can just shove the blade back there, into the space between wall studs, where no one will ever have to deal with it? Except, maybe, that new homeowner fifty years later who decides to replace her medicine cabinet at 9 am on a Sunday morning, and is unexpectedly faced with a thousand razorblades. So I went and got some gloves and a trashbag, and carefully removed every single blade from the sink, and from the wall. Unfortunately I didn’t have the presence of mind to take a photo before I was more than half done removing the blades, so just picture this pile at least double the size and with as many in the sink as well.

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With that done, I knew my next problem was going to be finding a cabinet that would fit in the hole, so I measured the space where the cabinet had been… and then measured the actual space between the studs, because my walls are built on a 16″ standard, but the space where my cabinet was had been made smaller, and I figured I could probably get out to the studs if I needed to. With a little online research, I determined that I did indeed need to make the space bigger to fit a standard modern cabinet. And then it was time to go to church, so I left the gaping hole in my wall, a trashbag full of razorblades in my kitchen, and the old cabinet on the floor for a few hours.