Finished bathroom

Not that it has actually taken this long to complete the project, but more that growing a baby has put my mind on other things! Sorry :( BUT nonetheless, here we are with our final bathroom photos, and they are totally beautiful.

Our shower turned out lovely, with the solid glass panel and the marble subway tile. The art is a photo from our honeymoon in Tahiti, so, naturally, it makes the room super happy!

Our little shower nook and towel hooks keep everything organized and nearby so we don't really have to think about anything. Adam wishes that we had made 2 nooks for more bottle storage, but honestly who needs that much stuff in their shower? Not us.

We also love our his and hers sinks, vanity, and medicine cabinets, so all of our stuff stays out of the way. We can really keep everything clean and neat with all of our storage, despite this still being a teeny little bathroom!

And finally, out the door is our bedroom, which I'm not totally sure that I ever showed off after we finished reconstructing the upper walls. We are so pleased with how everything turned out! So are our cats, as you can see Zoe here happily watching from up above.

Up the stairs, we have our finished loft/craft room, which will likely be our kid's playroom eventually. The bookshelf has stuff on it now, but otherwise the room is pretty empty. Not for long, though!

Overall, clean, simple, and effective was what we were going for with this huge reno, and I think we succeeded! Next up -I hope within the next 6 months since I'm turning out to be a terrible blogger- I will show you the nursery, which we have feverishly been working on before baby arrives in February! Yikes!

Time for a shower

The shower was our biggest unknown in this equation. Going from a bathtub to a shower is a little dangerous, only because you have to make sure everything is completely 100% waterproof, otherwise you'll have nice puddles all over your whole house. No, thank you.

So after framing out what we wanted, we hired a guy. This is not something we do often! We left him with our subfloor, wall studs, and some verbal plans.

 
Our guy came in, installed a curb and some concrete mini-walls, gave us a nice rubber membrane barrier, poured the concrete slope for our shower pan (not shown here), and gave us a solid drain. Worth the outsourcing to know that there was a lot of waterproofing done by a professional before we got our rookie hands on it!

My handy hubs then worked up the rest of our pipes, and we were ready for backerboard. This is the concrete board that goes behind tile.

We then sealed up the joint and nail holes, and coated the whole thing with this horrible red paint membrane that makes the walls bulletproof. It also starts out a lovely shade of pepto-bismol pink.

This then turned to a blood red when dry, which clashed marvelously with our freshly painted royal blue walls. I got dizzy just peering in the room. Needless to say, I didn't capture that clash in a photo.

We were then ready to tile our floor. There is a lot of professional talk about whether to tile the floor or walls first. After reading more than I should've and stressing about it, I decided I don't think it ultimately matters. We thought it would be easier to get the floor under the walls, so we did the floor first. At the same time, we did the rest of the bathroom floor.

We then did our little shower nook. This was a challenge! However, nothing some tape, a cat scratching post, a baseboard, and creativity couldn't handle.

Tile walls were next on the agenda:

Buh-bye and good riddance, red! After mortaring the tile to the surfaces, the next step was to seal it all and then grout it. When all the tiling was done, we added a lovely granite countertop, a glass shower wall, and some pretty art and fixtures. Good to go! The next post will show you the finished product. About time, right?

The guts

I last left you with something like this:

Not much! Here I'll give you the very abbreviated version of how we carried out our plans to put in recessed lights, his and hers medicine cabinets with outlets, and a pretty pocket door, all to prepare us for putting up our walls.

First in the doorway, we needed to make sure our 3rd floor was supported. Our best friend Home Depot sells these metal half-studs made for pocket doors, and we also placed a cross beam to keep elevated all that was supposed to be. Some extra vertical studs further back in the wall reinforced everything. We could then slide the track in and hang the door.

So pretty! Plus, it would make this mini master seem much larger.

We then moved on to our recessed lights, which pretty much just required precise measurements, hole-drilling for the wires, and some forethought. We knew we'd need wires for our medicine cabinets, so we worked that in at the same time. 

We did these medicine cabinets totally "Harry homeowner" style, but don't laugh. It wasn't worth it to spend $400 each on two new ones with outlets, so we made it work with what we had. With it all done now, you can't even tell that we just sawed a hole in the top and shoved an outlet in!

This bathroom backs up directly to what will soon be our kids' bathroom. They were complete mirror images of each other, meaning that the toilet backs right up to toilet, and the shower backs right up to shower. We really wanted to avoid being able to hear someone else pee, so we added some insulation between the walls to give us a bit of soundproofing.

So now we are ready for drywall! We first worked our way down the walls, excluding the shower, and then popped up the ceiling. More on the shower later. Then, we mudded the millions of screws and seams, which is honestly my least favorite part of all. And just like that, we were ready for some finishing touches.

The cabinet transport only gave me a few panic attacks, which you may find understandable when seeing how our incredibly expensive cabinets were strapped to the back of Adam's truck and then driven the 15 minutes at 60 mph on the highway to get them to our parking spot. SO SCARY, but everybody and thing made it safely.

 

We brought those bad boys upstairs, installed them, and then promptly covered them so as not to mess them up. Aren't they pretty?? 

We primed the walls and ceiling to give the illusion of a nice bathroom, even though there was still a LOT of work to do. At this point, we are ignoring the big hole where the shower should be.

 

Which brings us to a pretty solid stopping place. Next time, I'll tell you all about the whole shower process. It's a doozy!

Master Bathroom

This post has been a long time coming! When looking back, we officially started this renovation on December 27, 2015 and finished on September 3rd, 2016. Of course, we were also in the process of renovating our whole master bedroom and loft, which was an enormous undertaking, so we didn't actually start to focus on the bathroom until March. With that said, here's our Master Bathroom Renovation!!

Our before photos are pretty weak, but you'll get the idea: all beige with a shower/tub combo, pink curtain rod, and a door taking up the majority. Not well pictured are the beat up cabinets and the two 6 inch bump outs that were built to make the cabinet and tub standard sized. Not super disgusting, but an overall blah.

We knew when we started renovating the house that this bathroom would happen at some point. Our grand plan was to extend the square footage by removing those wasteful bump outs, put in a pocket door to make the space seem bigger, and convert the tub into a standing shower. Since there were already his and hers sinks, we wanted to add an additional medicine cabinet for some extra storage. Finally, on top of all that, we wanted to put in recessed lights to again give the illusion of space.

So since the bathroom was definitely in the plans, while we were ripping out things in our loft, we just went ahead and tore out all this, too. Evvvverything about it.

We started with the wasteful bump-outs, hoping to gain a few inches in space by ripping them out. Then we checked behind the mirror to figure out where electric was and see if we needed to totally demolish all walls to get our lights in place. The answer was yes. Womp womp.

 Next came tile demolition, with assistance from the always-helpful Sara (hi and thank you, Sara!!).

Good lookin stuff right here.

Adam and I then pulled out the rest of the walls, the tile floor, and the bathtub to see what remained.  

 

After a significant amount of cleanup, here's what we had:

 This hole would be our new standing shower, minus the space of the framed bump-out, though a very long time from now. Keep in mind, it is still December here. 

Our next task was the door frame and adjacent wall, so as to make room for our pocket door. The key was to carefully yank out studs without ripping out the drywall in our closet (much). Success!

And with that, we were left with no walls, no floor, a bedroom full of trash, and one crappy light. Honorable mention to that glorious $10 light fixture though...

 

Next time, on to the electric and reconstruction!