The Bathroom

We are settling into our new house.  It.  Is.  AWESOME!

Before I move on to tell you about the new house and the upcoming new school year (and whatever else life has to offer these days), I want to finish up the tour of our old house.

We made it...this is the final room in the tour of our old house!  We'll be starting all over in a new house, which is amazing and sad at the same time.

This post is a fitting reminder of why we moved:  our old house only had one bathroom.

And that one bathroom didn't exactly sell us on this house:

Pause.

Before I show you the rest of the "before" pictures, I simply must point out some important features of the bathroom when we bought the house.

• The flooring was carpet.
• That's not a showerhead; it's a "hand shower."  This tub was built to be used as a bathtub only (hence the window above the tub), and the previous homeowners eventually added a sprayer to aid in bathing.  The widow who lived here before us used a chair to bathe as well.
• The tub had an accordion style door mounted in a brass frame.
• Wallpaper.  Oh, the wallpaper.  The bathroom wallpaper was peach and teal fish and seashells.  Outstanding.
• The vanity was an ugly stain color (in my opinion), and I wasn't crazy about the yellowy off-white vanity top.
• The lights were old fixtures hanging from chains attached to the ceiling.
• There's a laundry chute on the wall opposite the toilet, which I have always loved.
• There was a tissue holder built into one wall.  I thought it was so cute and charming.
• There was no vent/fan (because it was never intended to be used as a shower).
• There was one outlet with just one place to plug something in.  The one and only outlet was controlled by the light switch, meaning the switch had to be on for the outlet to work.  Every morning I would plug in my straightener or curling iron to heat up, and Jared would inevitably turn off the light at some point, which would turn off my hair straightener.

Okay, back to the tour.

Right away when we moved in, we ripped up the carpet.  We replaced it with a linoleum remnant that we got for cheap at Home Depot.

We pulled down the wallpaper and painted the exposed plaster walls ivory to match the ivory tiles that went fairly high up on the walls.

We removed the accordion tub door and brass frame.  We installed a simple tension rod and hung a basic shower curtain.  I found a garbage can and shower curtain hooks that were black leather with cream stitching, so I used those as our color palette for the bathroom.

We also spray painted the light fixtures and chains silver to make them slightly less outdated.

The bathroom was bearable like this for several years.

We replaced the hand shower with an actual shower head, but we both still had to squat to rinse our hair.  There was still just that one outlet, and there still was no vent for the shower steam.

When Griffin was a little baby and Nolan was a toddler, we decided to tackle remodeling our one and only bathroom.  I would say this room was our biggest project in the whole house.  Plus I had to periodically stop working so I could nurse Griffin, and we took our only bathroom out of commission to work on it.

It began with demolition.

We decided to leave the ceiling as it was, and my dad came and installed our vent/fan/light for us.

We chose a super quiet model that has a light as well as a softer "night light" option.

We discovered that the sprayer-turned-shower-head didn't have proper plumbing.  It was run with narrow PVC piping, so we had to address the plumbing for the shower head first.

I refinished the vanity cabinet myself.  I started sanding off the old finish while it was still in the bathroom:

Once we removed the vanity from the bathroom, I finished sanding it and stained it a darker color.  We also bought new doors (because we didn't like the style of the old), and I stained them to match the cabinet.  You'll see the finished vanity in a bit.

When we removed the tile from the tub area, we discovered some damage to the studs on the exterior wall.  We took care of the cause and then reinforced the old studs with new ones.

After we removed the vanity and pulled up the flooring:

Once all the old was cleared out, it was time to start putting up the new.  Jared and his dad put up green board in the areas that would be covered in tile (around the tub) and drywall in the rest of the bathroom.

Jared and I tackled the messy and seemingly endless job of mudding all the drywall seams while Jared's dad started installing the tiles in the shower.

More tile progress:

Next we primed the walls:

We hadn't finished the tile yet.

That's Nolan crawling down the hallway!

Then we painted the walls:

Once we finished painting, we installed the new toilet.  Now do you see why we paused the shower tile to finish the paint?  Getting our one and only toilet up and working was very important!

So elegant, right?

Here's all the tile installed (but not yet grouted):

After days of working on the bathroom, Nolan was really missing his daddy.  He wanted to be near him while he worked. :)

We brought in the newly restained vanity and installed a new seamless white vanity top, complete with a new faucet.

We finally grouted the tile.

We installed new light fixtures, towel hooks, and toilet paper holder.

We finally had a properly plumbed shower head that was tall enough for even Jared.

I put up a fun clear shower curtain so the sunlight from the window would still shine into the bathroom.

This was the last picture I could find from this renovation:

Jared had stopped laying the new flooring so he could give Nolan a bath.  The flooring is vinyl but looks like wood.  You can also see the new doors on the vanity.  After this picture was taken, we finished the flooring and put proper trim around the window.  We also installed that vent cover and the newly repainted laundry chute door.

A couple years ago, I found another shower curtain that I thought matched the wall color perfectly.  Here are some shots of the bathroom just before we sold the house:

All of these family photos were taken before Nora was born, but I just loved them so much.  Plus I don't have recent family photos!

We also painted the door and door frame white and replaced the old brass doorknob with a silver one.

We've reached the end of our house tour.  I can't believe that we actually moved out of that house.  I have to try not to think about all the changes the new homeowners are going to make to the house into which we poured our blood, sweat, and tears.

Now just give me another 9 years to get settled into the new house, and I'll show you pictures. :)

Jessica