So I did some digging on how to remove paint from a brick fireplace. Some options sounded pretty scary and extremely messy: sand blasting, lye, etc.

Then I found a forum where a few people recommended Peel Away so I did a little research and found tons of info on their website. Dumont Chemicals sells paint stripping products for various uses, and all of them are environmentally friendly.

So far, we’ve used Peel Away 7 for the wood mantel, since this product is gentler on wood surfaces. We followed up the application by cleaning with denatured alcohol, which worked way better than mineral spirits.

The Mantel – Before & After

We’ll try removing the paint from the brick next, using Peel Away 1. This product is more heavy duty. Pictures will follow!

By the way, Peel Away 1, Peel Away 7 and denatured alcohol are all available at Home Depot.

To maximize the space we decided on a very minimal and clean design, so the first thing that popped into our minds were wall hung fixtures. If we could get the toilet and sink off the floor it would be awesome. Also, wall hung toilets have their tank in the wall, instead of in your face, which creates a bigger space visually.

A wall hung toilet quickly became a no-no because of the wall component. Two pieces make this design work – the toilet itself and the wall carrier.

It turns out, we have a pipe running horizontally across our wall, which makes it impossible to get a wall carrier in there. Pretty instantly, our dreams were shattered.

Next, we tried to find a tankless toilet but even floor mounted toilets need a wall carrier. This one got cut too.

So we went right back to a regular toilet. This sucks but there’s not much we can do about it on our budget. Now we just need to find a small, sleek toilet. Think this is easy? Why would it be? It seems like all space saving items are either nonexistent in the U.S. or just really expensive.

For example, this awesome Kohler toilet costs $3,500. Not sure why they feel the need to charge so much, but needless to say, this fell off the list too.

Part of the reason we can’t find what we’re looking for is because most American homes are an average size of 3,000 sq. ft. and no one else cares about the size of their toilet tanks.

Who knew it would be so hard to pick a toilet? Anyway, we found a few that we like:

Stay tuned for the winner!

What comes next is way more information about toilets than you’d ever think you need. But if you’re remodeling, this is a must know.

Regular toilets come three ways now: round (sticks out the least), elongated (sticks out a lot but is the most comfy), and square (neither comfy nor small but the most modern).

But that’s not all. Toilets come in different sizes depending on how far from the wall your sewer line is installed in the floor (referred to as the rough-in). We found out our rough-in is 14″ while the standard is 12″. What’s the significance of 2 inches? Turns out it’s pretty drastic when your bathroom door barely clears the toilet bowl. And 10″ rough-in exists too although it’s as rare as the 14″.

Our options to fix the 2″ gap are as follows: rip up the floor and adjust the sewer line (our choice), buy an adjustable toilet (expensive) or live with it (no way).

In the meantime, we’re still trying to find a plumber so we can figure out what this will cost us.

So we went to Home Depot, and bought two different wallpaper removers and a bunch of crappy tools that should have helped. Nothing worked…probably because of the paint, so Mr.Toolbelt came up with his own recipe that worked wonders:

1/4 pine sol

1/4 dawn soap

1/2 hot water

Spray it on until it’s evenly wet, wait two minutes for it to soak up and then scrape! The after shot is coming up soon.