I really think the bathroom deserves its own little category. While it is the smallest room in our downstairs renovation, it was definitely the most work and ended up being half the budget for that side of the house. Who knew such a small space could hold so much. Just to give you a reminder, this is what the bathroom looked like before.
We didn't like a thing about this bathroom. The tile was busy and cracked, the sill of the window was missing so if you took a shower the water would just drain down the inside of the wall and there was so much stuff on the walls that it just felt so small.
So we decided that everything had to go (except the tub and toilet). Now this presented quite the pickle. This is the only bathroom in the house so if we need to take out the toilet how were we going to spend more than a few hours at the house at a time?? Well we decided that we were just going to be super speedy and get all the tile out and the new tile on the floor down in a week so that we could get the toilet back in.... About a month and a half later the toilet was finally back in and we had eaten a years worth of KFC in exchange for using their bathroom. The important lesson learned? No matter how long you think something will take, it will take longer especially if you are doing things yourself. Also, house sitting is amazing when you're renovating.
OK. So we got all the easily removable things out of the bathroom and so it was time to tackle the tile. It was everywhere but we didn't think it would be that hard to take down. I mean how hard can little tiles be right? Well this would be surprise #2. Apparently in older houses, the way they put up tile was to attach metal lathe to the studs, coat it in about an inch of cement and then put the tiles on the cement. So I get in the bathroom with a regular old hammer and hit a tile.... nothing happens.... so I hit it again.... still nothing. So I start going at this thing with all my might and tiles finally start coming down but leave a really ugly wall of crumbling cement behind. So Nate gets out a crowbar and starts trying to pry the lathe and cement off the studs. After about two days of work, this is how far we got.
That's right. Not even a half wall. Nate, however did get a very purple thumb out of this progress. This is how thrilled I was with our progress.
Since we were getting pretty much no where with our little vonderbar (how Nate pronounces it aka little crowbar) Nate got a three foot long crow bar. He demonstrated to me how to use it and it didn't look to bad and it definitely did the trick. Only problem was the thing weighed like 20 pounds! Once again I was frustrated by the fact that I used to throw 20 lbs no problem and now and can't even hold the crowbar up long enough to hit it with a hammer. Once again I needed help and Nate came in and actually made a lot of progress until he went to move some of the metal lathe out of the way and sliced his finger open... not good... After finally getting the bleeding under control we decided to take a little break on the tile.
Luckily my parents visited shortly after the finger incident and between Nate and my dad they gutted the bathroom. I unfortunately do not have any pictures of the gutted bathroom because the shower wall had A LOT of mold and being extremely allergic I decided to steer clear until Nate got rid of it.
In Massachusetts you are not allowed to do any plumbing. As in you can't replace your faucet without a plumber. So in order to continue and get the proper permits and inspections we finally had to break down and hire a professional. We ended up hiring a local guy to do the plumbing in the bathroom. We needed a new toilet flange and our tub wasn't vented (which I didn't know was needed) so he did that as well. He also saved our butts by suggesting that we replace the drain for the vanity. We were skeptical at first but then we saw the insides of the pipe and it was a good thing we replaced it. Below is the results of our plumbers hard work.
In a couple of these you can see the new floor tile. This was my job for awhile since it required little strength and Nate didn't want anything to do with it. Since I had never tiled before I had to figure out exactly how to do this. This involved watching a lot of HGTV and youtube videos. I first had to wait for the Durock to go up around the tub and then I was good to go. Since we had to make a trip to Lowe's every time we wanted a tile cut (Those cheap ones really don't work) I got creative and managed to tile the whole tub area with needing to cut only 8 tiles!
Here you can see the tile about half way done. You can kinda also see the built-ins that Nate and Adam made for the bathroom side of the thick wall. For the rest of the walls in the bathroom we used mold board. This is drywall that has a wax barrier that resists mold. We also put insulation between the bedroom wall and bathroom wall so that you can't hear the showere while you're sleeping!
Here you can see the built-ins all finished
Here the tile is all finished!
So in the last picture you can see our new light fixture and the new vent fan for the bathroom. Nate found and installed this really cool switch that when you turn on the over head light the fan comes on and when you turn off the light the fan stays on for a setable amount of time. This is helpful for people like me who never use the fan. It prevents mold and we got a super quiet fan so it's not super annoying.
Once all the wall board was up we could paint! We decided to do wainscoting for the bottom half and a blue for the top. Our first choice of blue was horrible so I didn't document it but we did learn that you can return paint! Here is what it looks like now:
There was still a couple of things left to do. The last big one was refinishing the tub. We had decided to go this direction simply because of costs. For a few hundred dollars you could refinish a tub or buy a new one. The real difference in cost is the installation of a new tub. Putting a tub in is one of those things you simply cannot do yourself. It runs closer to a few thousand dollars once you include labor and installation so we decided our tub was in good enough shape to keep it.
This is what it looked like after filling in all the divets
All prepped for the new paint Looks brand new!
Finally we just needed to put in the vanity and add all the accessories and we were done!
Side by side comparison
We have a few more details to throw in but it's really close to done! Sorry for this being so long but It's a good indicator of how long it really took to completely rework this bathroom
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