I’m so excited to be participating in my first ever One Room Challenge this year. This has been something that I have wanted to participate in for so long. In case you have no idea what the heck I’m talking about. The One Room Challenge is a six-week challenge to make over one room. It features 20 designers and many more guest participants. This season I’ve signed up as a guest participant and I’m super excited about it. So every Wednesday for the next six weeks, I’ll be updating you with all the lovely and not-so-lovely parts of renovating a 30+-year-old bathroom.
The Before
Before I start showing you all the wonderful designs I fell in love and the inspiration for this bathroom, I should probably show you what it looks. I warn you though, it’s not pretty.
And I mean, at all. It seemed like no matter what I did I couldn’t make this bathroom work in its current state. The baseboards were chipped and stained. The tile always looked dirty, and the grout, don’t even get me started on the grout.
This bathroom was doing no one any favours, and I think the previous owners actually renovated it. The real change Chris and I ever made to the bathroom was grey paint and a new toilet, because a few months before we got married, the old toilet leaked into our foyer. That was not a fun time.
Also sorry about the poor quality photos, I took these with my phone because I forgot to charge the batteries of my camera.
I would say that one of the worst features of this bathroom was the way you had to squeeze in between the toilet and the extended countertop in order to shut the door or straddle the toilet and shut the door. Either way, it wasn’t functional nor was it very forgiving.
The tub wasn’t the most comfortable either. Firstly, the bathroom’s back wall is an exterior wall and we realized quickly that it wasn’t properly insulated when the pipes froze. To make things worse, the tub was a metal tub, with no insulation. OH and I should mention that half of our bathroom was built over our porch. Which again, the previous owners never insulated properly. So whenever we’d fill in the tub for a hot bath, the minute our butts would touch the bottom, it was frozen and the water would be cool. Not to mention, the back wall of the shower was always cold to the touch in the winter. Add to that, the tub was rusted and stained and just disgusting. Not the kind of bathroom I could really relax in with a glass of wine and candles…mostly because a cold bath is not relaxing for me.
Lastly, the faucet and hardware were doing absolutely nothing for this space. As you can see, the hardware was kind of falling apart and rusted.
The Plan
So pretty much everything needs to be ripped out and built back up. This is not going to be a simple update job, we’re gutting the whole space and putting in insulations, new tub, hardware, vanity, flooring, walls, everything but a new toilet. We’re going to move the toilet, get a new vanity and tub and make this space a whole lot more functional. You can see how our layout is changing below.
The new layout will allow us and our guests more space to walk into the washroom and move around. We also won’t be losing any storage with a new vanity and medicine cabinet but I’ll be talking more about that next week when I dive into the products, brands and inspiration for this bathroom.
So if you want to see how I transform this bathroom from dreadful to spa-like, stay tuned for the next 6 weeks! And don’t forget to follow me on Instagram @withlovefrombex to check out my stories and giving you guys some small updates between posts each week.
Stay tuned until next week, when we talk inspiration!
Week One: Modern Bathroom Before
Week Four: The Week We Took A Vacation
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