So last I left off, I started a post about the bathroom remodel, but then the holidays ensued, Winter classes began, and as usual, one thing led to another, and I never got around to doing the next post. So as a refresher, the upstairs bathroom was the last room in the house that hadn't been remodeled.
When we first saw this bathroom prior to buying the house, we saw the relaxing brown and the huge jacuzzi tub, and thought, "awesome, we'll have our own spa." Nope. The tub was really hard to clean, it took an entire hot water heater to fill it, and was really impractical. It also didn't have a regular shower, just a hand held one. So M was really wanting a new bathroom, and she only had to wait 9 years to get it.
The demolition part went very quickly. Given our experience with other remodeling projects in the house, we chose to gut the entire bathroom down to the studs, including ripping out the ceiling and the floor.
We didn't want any surprises, wanted everything done right, up to code, new plumbing and wiring. It was a good thing we did, because the previous homeowner did some wonderful things like cutting into joists, and shoving random pieces of wood in huge gaps where the walls he built didn't meet the ceiling.
M knew the type of walk-in shower she wanted, which would require a bigger bathroom. So we expanded into the hall closet and took a corner out of B's bedroom.
It wasn't a problem taking the chunk out of the bedroom because it was a weird indent that didn't make sense anyway. When the previous homeowner put in the jacuzzi tub, he bumped out into the bedroom just where the tub was and left the weird corner in the bedroom.
M wanted a huge walk-in shower with no door, like ones she'd seen in fancy hotels when we traveled. The fancy showers had half walls with glass to the ceiling.
Another feature of the showers that she liked was a rain shower head coming out of the ceiling.
So the destruction part went quickly, then things bogged down while waiting for an electrician to come in, then cutting the knee wall shorter, then the drywall went up quickly.
It was finally looking big and bright. We had a short wait for the drywall taping and primer to be done, then we did the painting ourselves to save a bit of money.
As you can see, M picked a turquoise blue for the bathroom, very similar to the blue in the kitchen and the outside of the house. I told her this would be the last turquoise for the house. Next the orange underlay for the tile went in, then very quickly the gray subway tile and mosaic tile went in. I got M an early Christmas present, and had them install a towel warmer for her. She loves that thing.
So somewhere I have a picture of the finished bathroom with the glass installed. I'll have to go look for it.
I found it! Okay, one other thing about the bathroom, we have been trying to find things to hang towels on and to hold magazines. We didn't want what we had in there previously, because none of it went with the new style, but none of the new stuff appealed to us either.
So we found this old rack in a local junk store and thought it would be good to hold magazines, but not like this.
This is just the pop of color we needed against the turquoise and to liven up all the gray.
We're planning on using a wine bottle rack for towels, because they look more interesting than a regular towel rack, but we haven't found one we're completely sold on yet. Maybe something like this:
So we have the bathroom remodel out of the way. It took about a month, and now we're just doing finishing decorative touches. Now we're moving on to getting a new roof on the garage because it's leaking. I really wanted to start on the attic, but it will have to wait. It's always something with old houses.
