The Cupboard Under The Stairs

I’ve been feeling fairly useless lately, which while not an altogether unnatural sensation for me, I don’t like at all. So, after I got tired of doing things like shooting flaming arrows down my hallway in a scientific experiment to see how best to set off motion-detecting track lights with a high-speed arrow (I’m not entirely without Dangerous Ideas when I’m feeling bored and useless), I decided to do something productive.

It all started with a nasty, unused bathroom to which we’ve left the door closed for around a decade now. The toilet never did work right and the faucet was spotty at best, so we just kind of ignored the whole thing like it was some kind of elephant graveyard Mufasa warned us never to go to. And time took its toll.

We’ve used it off and on, mostly as a storage closet for hiding Christmas presents and the like because it is a shadowy place and The Child never ventures into it. But now that I have oceans of time on my hands, I decided to get it back in proper working order. All while having absolutely no plumbing or home improvement skills whatsoever, of course. It’s how I roll. Here’s what the bathroom looked like when I cracked open the ancient door and found myself stepping through a portal to Hell. It really was awful and disgusting and a whole lot of other adjectives my editor would probably cut out, if I had an editor here. But I’m self-editing these days, and I think I’m growing as a person. Or whatever. Let’s move on.

The sink was entirely useless. Apart from the basin being an unholy graveyard of mineral deposits and Nagini knows what else, the faucet was completely non-functional. With it having had what I would discover later to be an incessant drip, the various nasty things in the hard tap water of Beaumont, Texas had left their mark by completely clogging the works. Turning the valves accomplished exactly nothing. No water. No pipe gurgles. Nada.

I tried to prise the nozzle doohickey loose to clean it, but it was no use. I have the combined strength of a 7-year-old schoolgirl and about half a dozen Smurfs, so that just wasn’t happening while there was so much buildup acting as cement. I then attacked it with a wire brush and some CLR cleaner, which is supposed to be powerful stuff, but the faucet only pointed at me and made fun.

That’s when the hydrochloric acid happened. After dipping the spigot into an acid bath – the fumes from which smelled like a dead man’s farts – I was able to dislodge the mineral buildup and clean things properly. Soon, I had a fully functioning faucet again, although the sink was still a mess. And that’s when I discovered the aforementioned incessant drip.

I attacked the sink with the best cleaning product known to man, which is something called Bar Keeper’s Friend that I was somehow still allowed to buy even though I’ve never kept a bar in my life, and I’m certainly not on familiar enough terms with the few I have been to that any of them should deign to call me friend. Nonetheless, I purchased it and after a lot of furious scrubbing, the porcelain finally started becoming white again.

After that, I added “compression valve stem repair” to my list of life skills, which was nice. I had no idea what I was doing, but I somehow managed to turn the water off to my house, then dislodge the very stubborn valve stems, take them apart, find the bits and bobs that needed replacing, supply the new parts, and put everything back together again without anything exploding. And the leak was gone.

Next, I attacked the toilet, which still has a very slow leak because the new flapper isn’t making a watertight seal. I’ll probably fix that soon enough, just as soon as I figure out how. But I got it back into a working state and cleaned the heck out of it with my new Bar Keeper’s Friend friend, so it’s all pretty and shiny and fully functional again. (Not that it matters, because I turned the water off to it eventually, after I decided it wouldn’t be a bathroom anymore. But more on that in a second…)

After that, I cleaned everything out that we’d tossed in there over the years, and I was done.

Or so I thought.

Later that night, I started feeling bored and useless again, and had a brilliant idea around 2:00am.

The bathroom is a little half-bath off of our main bedroom – which makes it sound a lot fancier than it is. I live in a small house, so the “main” part of the main bedroom just, I think, means it has half a bathroom stuck to it. A toilet and a sink, and not much in the way of space. Very cramped.

Or cozy.

Like, say…a cupboard under that stairs! Ten points to Gryffindor!

To say my wife is an avid reader would be akin to saying fish are often in the habit of being in water, and she deeply loves J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Like, a lot. Way more than should probably be legal in most states.

With that in mind, I decided to transform the bathroom into a reading nook/vanity for her to get all tarted up in. (I think that doesn’t mean anything awful, but I’m not British. I’m just going with the Potter theme here. Roll with it.) There was no other choice than to turn it into her own little cupboard under the stairs, but with fewer stairs and more toilet.

I went to the used bookstore and bought a few Harry Potter books, along with supplemental materials such as Fantastic Creatures and Quidditch Through The Ages. Then, I murdered them in the spines. At my kitchen table. With a paper cutter. I then used some clear wallpaper paste and began slapping the pages onto the wall, to cover it with Harry Potter books. It wasn’t as straightforward as it sounds though, because paperback book paper has a tendency to be rather on the thin side, which led to more than a few ripped pages as I fought the great Air Bubble War of 2015 with my useless plastic scraper thing.

However, I eventually found the right amount of wallpaper paste to combat this. If I used what would be the correct amount of paste for actual wallpaper, the pages would misbehave in the worst way and usually rip before the end. If I used what I thought was too much, then they would go on straight and flatten correctly, but shrivel and bubble up as they dried. Therefore, the correct amount of wallpaper paste to use when papering a wall with book pages is Way Too Much.

Using Way Too Much paste meant the paper would go on straight and flatten, then not do anything awful while it dried. I suspect it has something to do with the pages absorbing more moisture from the paste or something sciencey like physics or whatever, but regardless of the reason, using Way Too Much worked. So that’s what I did.

And then I bought a lot more tubs of paste than I’d planned for. Eventually, it all started coming together, but the walls were literally walls of text, which I broke up as much as I could with title pages and then with the pages from the supplements that contained illustrations, but it still wasn’t quite enough. I managed to find a really neat deck of Harry Potter playing cards at another book store, which I was able to slap up on the walls for some added pop (or whatever the term is that actual interior designers use). I added the book covers too, which also helped.

But then, the irregularities of the book pages meant that the top of the room was left a bit jagged, with some pages going all the way to the ceiling while others stopped short. This, I overcame with a bit of red fabric trim I picked up at the craft store for about six bucks. It worked perfectly.

The paste interacted with the book pages (and the underlying paint beneath) as it dried, and ended up adding a nice yellow tint to them, which I thought was a happy accident. Something about yellowed book pages just speaks to me on a primal level. I don’t know why. I’m just weird, I guess.For the finishing touches, I went to the dollar store and picked up ten LED candle lights for five bucks (two per $1 pack). I used fabric glue sticks (because the glue dries white, to match the candles), and melted on some dribbly bits to make them look more authentic. After that, I suspended them from the ceiling at varying heights by way of transparent monofilament line.

I put my wife’s un-murdered Potter books on the window sill behind the toilet, then I draped her Gryffindor scarf over the valance and added a couple of coffee pictures, an actual candle, and our son’s (version of) The Elder Wand to the top of the toilet tank.

A friend of mine sent me Harry’s wanted poster, which she graciously surrendered to the cause. It is now hanging on the inside of the door. Over on the countertop by the sink, I added a coffee pot, along with a couple of jars of ground coffee and sugar, and a bowl of her favorite flavor of creamer. Having her morning coffee is every bit as important as brushing her teeth or anything else one does in the bathroom in the morning, so it seemed a natural fit. Plus, she can brew up a cup whenever she wants to hide out and read undisturbed.

I still need to add a pair of Harry’s glasses somewhere in the room and, I think, a small Hedwig (if I can find one), and that should just about do it.

This was actually a very affordable project. Apart from the plumbing and restoration issues I had to contend with, the whole Harry Potter makeover aspect was done on the cheap. The books cost me about $25 at the used book store. The wallpaper paste was about $40 (which would’ve been cheaper, had I bought the big tub to begin with), the trim was around $6, the candles were $5 (as were the batteries to power them), and the string was another $5 or so. The towels, candles, canisters, etc… were all purchased at the dollar store. Where 100 pennies go a long way.

All in all, everything was done for less than $100.

Not charging for labor, of course. Which only Harry would be able to afford. With his bank vault full of gold.

Here’s a full gallery of more photos of the room, if you’re interested.

Now get out there and make something!

Want some books? 'Course ya do!

NOTE:  I know times are hard and yeah, I need to make a living too, but if you want to read any of my books but can't afford to buy them right now, hit me up.

I'll take care of it.

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