Renovation :: Guest Bathroom v.3

October 19 2015,

When we moved in, in 2010, the guest bathroom looked like this. The house was built in the late 1950's. Most of our neighbor's bathroom who have not renovated their bathroom, their bathroom still has the retro look.

So when we moved in, we had the bathroom renovated. No pictures came from this renovation, because it looked horrible.

The contractors who did it, did such a bad job that after we fired them, we didn't trust their work and had to redo it. So fast forward to May 2015. We had friends over for a graduation and they were using the sink. All of a sudden, the pipe for the sink starts leaking.

It was a good time to demo everything anyway, so that's what we do. Hubby had wanted to keep the existing floors - but I convinced him to take everything out because we did not know the quality of the work. It turned out that the plumber did not glue one of the pipe, which led to the leaking. It leaked all the way to the basement bathroom - but luckily that was already gutted and down to the bare studs.

The culprit

Hubby + I (mainly hubby) did most of the renovation and supervision. We hired a plasterer, a tiler, and a plumber. This is the plumber that couldn't rough our original Kohler Escale sink (even after we gave numerous warnings that the first plumber had not done it right either).

So after at least 6 trips to the tile store, and a minimum of 30 trips to the local box store (no exaggeration), we have a finish bathroom.

The concept of the bathroom was based on the bathtub itself. The bathtub is the Kohler Expanse Curve tub. I like the curve look and carried it throughout the bathroom. The light has a light curve, the shower curtain rod has a curve, and the vanity handles. It is the attention to detail.

The floor tile is a dark bluish gray with light gray lines. I went for a darker tile color so the floor will hide the dirt well. The bathtub tile on the left and right is ceramic white matte and in the middle is glass. I've realized that glass tile was expensive, but I liked the look of it, so we minimized the cost by doing the ceramic white matte. On the sink wall, we tied in the area with the white glass tile.

Originally, we had wanted to tile the walls where the toilet nook was, with ceramic gray matte tiles. Unfortunately it was back ordered and would not be available for another month. We ended up painting it with Sherwin Williams "Lazy Gray". The "Lazy Gray" was not too dark and not too light.

The vanity piece came from Home Depot. We had wanted to use another vanity and something smaller, but they had a blow out sale, we couldn't resist not buying it. It does feel a little bit cramp because of that 48" big vanity. But it does provide a lot of space.

The blinds came from Levelor. We decided to use top down bottom up so that we can always have it half open to bring light into the room without compromising a compromising situation (does that make sense?).

After everything is said and done, I'm happy with the bathroom.

Renovating a bathroom is similar to making a quilt. Carefully choosing every single piece that goes into the room to make sure it is in unison.

What I learned from this was to take pictures. Take pictures of everything during the process. Every little corner, every little thing. From the beginning while we were demoing, and when the plumbing was redone, and when the plasterer was in, I took pictures. This helped hubby a few times, because when the tiler had already tiled the wall with the shower bar and the shower diverter, he had to reference back what was behind the tiled wall. This way when there was a question about something, all I had to do was show them the pictures.

One down, two to go.

Quilt & Bitch