Hi Y’all! I’m back for another Throwback Thursday and this week I’m sharing our bathroom renovations. This will be a two-part post; the first part will be the bathroom as we originally renovated it in 2012/2013 and the second part will be the updates we made to it in 2018. But let’s start with the OG bathroom. Now, this wasn’t the original original bathroom that was built with the house – that was replaced with what you see below, probably in the ’80s (I’m convinced this is worse than what it would have looked like in the ’50s). Here’s what the bathroom looked like when we bought the house:
As I’m sure you can imagine, having your feet in the shower while you sit on a toilet is not the most ideal setting for a bathroom. Not to mention the only storage in the bathroom was a tiny medicine cabinet behind the mirror. When standing in front of the pedestal sink, there wasn’t even enough room to bring your arm up to brush your teeth. This room lacked any functionality, and like an estate sale, everything had to go.
When we bought our house, the bathroom was THE priority. We knew we couldn’t live without a bathroom and since our house only has one, we knew it had to be finished before anything else so we could move in. I’m pretty sure the toilet and pedestal sink were on the curb mere hours after we signed on the dotted line. Neither the toilet, shower or sink were ever used by us. Then, the real demo started.
This room was a total gut. Once we started to remove the shower tile, we found the subfloor rotten from years of water damage. Upon further inspection, we realized the shower drain wasn’t even connected to the waste water pipe below it. The drain was just hovering above the pipe so *some* of the water could trickle down into it while the rest of the water was dripping on the outside of the pipe, moistening the subfloor and floor joists. We also discovered an old window opening that had been framed into the original house. Remember, the bathroom sat along the original back wall of the house, that window would have looked out over the back porch (now the mudroom/bedroom 3).
Once we removed everything down to the studs, ripped up the rotted subfloor and removed all of the old plumbing and electrical, we were able to reinforce/replace the floor joists and install new plumbing and electrical.
Oh, and clearly, we changed the layout also. No more feet in the shower while you do your business. This room is about 6 feet wide and 8 feet deep, so we had enough room to place a sink/vanity, toilet, and tub/shower combo all along the 8 foot wall. We installed part of the new subfloor and then it was time to bring in our new cast iron tub. Luckily, we still had the wheelchair ramp out front so we were able to wheel it into the house on a dolly; man-handling it into place was a whole other story.
We installed the subfloor in two parts because it was easier to connect the tub plumbing with access under the floor.
Andrew earned a much needed break after the tub was in. I just want to point out, he didn’t accidentally get sprayed with water or perform a gatorade shower like a coach who just won the super bowl, that’s sweat soaked through his shirt from wrangling that 316 pound cast iron beauty. Once the tub was in, we built a wall along the open end of the tub to enclose the shower. Then, we added tile backer board to the three walls around the shower.
As soon as the tile backer board was up, the floor tiling started. A lot of the decisions we made in the bathroom in regards to finishes and fixtures were based on choosing items that *could have* been in this house when it was built in 1950 (think the white/black octagon/diamond tile, Carrara marble, white subway tile, etc)
Then the shower was tiled and we were able to install the toilet! I can’t tell you how exciting it was to have a working toilet. When you only have one bathroom, this was a momentous occasion.
Next, we focused our attention on the vanity. We wanted to install the largest vanity we could based on the clearance you need from the toilet, but it wasn’t a standard size. So, I bought a Kohler sink from Home Depot and found a remnant of Carrara marble at a granite fabricator. The fabricator cut the piece to size, cut the holes in the marble, and mounted my sink, then Andrew made the base of the vanity to be the perfect size. After the vanity was installed, we installed the sink and shower fixtures and tiled a backsplash around the sink area.
We installed wainscoting to the lower portion of the walls, painted it white and painted the rest of the walls a light blue. We also added a tin ceiling and crown moulding. Next to the tub, we built a storage nook with pullouts and cubbies that houses extra toiletries, hair tools such as my hairdryer and straigtener, and the trash can.
The wall opposite the vanity/toilet is about 6 inches thick because it houses the main plumbing stack, or vent. Since the wall is extra thick, we added a built-in with 5 shelves for extra storage.
We installed a new bathroom door, built a mirrored medicine cabinet above the sink (are you catching on to the theme of extra storage?!), and finally got a real shower curtain (that wasn’t just a liner). And this is how our bathroom looked until the beginning of 2018.
This bathroom came a long way from how it looked the day we bought it. Just to recap:
This is the first room we completed in our house, it is essentially my first design project and to this day, I still love the floor tile, the shower and sink fixtures, and the amount of storage we managed to put into this tiny bathroom. But my style and aesthetic has definitely changed in the past 8 years. There are things that I would do differently now (take the shower tile all the way up people!), but it would take more time and money than it’s really worth to change at this point.
Don’t get me wrong, we had reasons for making the choices we did back then. Take the shower wall tile for example. This house is 70 years old, the ceilings were not level, so taking the wall tile all the way up to the ceiling would have exposed how out of level they really were. At the time, we were renovating our entire house, so fixing this issue was outside of our timeline and budget. So we left some wall space above the tile and cheated the crown moulding, so to your eye, they look level compared to each other. But the next time I renovate a bathroom, I’m taking the tile all the way to the ceiling.
However, there are changes one can make that don’t take a lot of time or money, so in early 2018, we completed a bathroom makeover. Next week I’ll share what we did to update our space and how it looks now. Until then, you can connect with me on instagram @elleandjaydesign.
