Guest Bathroom Renovation

My first blog post! I decided to start with our guest bathroom renovation, as it probably was more involved then some of our other home DIY projects and has the biggest WOW factor. In this post, I am going to walk you through our entire bathroom renovation and also provide a cost-break down with sources listed.

Our guest bathroom is a small, windowless bathroom with a tub/shower combo. When we purchased this home 5 years ago, it was clear no updating had been done. The bathroom was dated with original tile vanity, aged tile flooring, fixtures, a shallow steel tub, wallpapered walls, and ALL beige (like the rest of our house).

The bathroom was also not very functional. The toilet was in the middle of the room and the door nearly hit the toilet when it was opened. Just a very crammed space. As you will see in the photos below, we changed the layout so the toilet is against the wall opposite the tub. So, with that bit of background info, onto the step-by-step of how we went from....

THIS

TO THIS

STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE

1. DEMO & FIX

Demo day is the best day. Out with the old oak vanity and tile flooring. Also removed the wall mirror and mirrored medicine cabinet. Also removed wallpaper. Yes, the whole bathroom was wallpapered! Wallpaper works in a powder room, but not in a bathroom where it is exposed to moisture.

Cleaning up the walls some, the walls were untextured under the wall paper, unlike the rest of our home which is orange peel. So we decided to patch and skim coat all the walls and ceiling to keep it smooth.

Old steel Tub is out!

Moved the outlet which was on the opposite wall to this wall because we planned to move the toilet to the wall the outlet was adjacent to. No one needs an outlet above their toilet right?

Had to replace some of the subfloor here due to water damage

Prepping to move the toilet plumbing. We hired that part out since my husband didn’t want to mess with anything related to sewer! It cost about $1000 to have the plumbing and waterline moved as well as the HVAC vent that had to be moved because it was in the way. It was pretty pricey, but well worth the cost IMO to have the extra space in the room. Like I mentioned, the original toilet placement was terrible—in the center of the room and the door nearly hit the toilet when you opened it.

New toilet flange and HVAC locations. Unfortunately, the toilet had to go about two inches past standard 12” rough in due to the location of a floor joist, so the toilet is not flush with the wall. This ended up being fine since we added beadboard to the wall and the vanity partially covers the top of the toilet. It’s not very noticeable in the end.

Skim coating the walls. Removing the wallpaper made the walls a bit of a mess.

SO SMOOTH. I seriously wish we could do all our walls flat (Mark says no lol). I really dislike textured walls! Do you have textured walls? How do you feel about them?

So something we really messed up on fixing was the floor too late. Our house is old and the floor in this bathroom had a slight slope to it. We should have fixed this right away after we demoed but instead waited until after the tub was in. We probably could have saved hours of adjusting the tub (more on that below!) if we would have leveled the whole floor first. Oh well. DIY is always a learning process! We used self leveling cement to level the low spot and it worked out pretty well! We had to fix the low spot because once the tub was in one of the edges of the tub was 3/4” off the floor so we needed to cover that gap.

2. TUB & SHOWER INSTALL

The first item we installed is out new tub. It was the only flat apron alcove tub I could find under $500. This is by a company named Dyconn. It is the Apro model and we purchased it from Home Depot. It is a work of art and beautiful but was a huge pain in the arse to install.

Installing the tub took us so many hours. The tub has five adjustable metal legs but we had very little room to reach them and had to keep pulling it out and adjusting it over and over and over since our floor is not perfectly level. As mentioned above, we ended up leveling out the flooring anyway, so we should have done this under the tub as well before install. Would have saved us a lot of headache!

In order to finally get the tub leveled, we had to cut a hole in the wall so I could reach the legs to adjust them from the opposite side. We also ended up setting the legs in beds of mortar for additional stability.

After we got the tub in. And after we modified the plumbing, we updated our shower valve to a new Moen posi-temp valve and updated the copper pipes to PEX pipes and fittings. We installed the backerboard for the shower walls. We used durock cement board. We also built a niche for shampoo bottles and what not. We blocked the studs (non load bearing) surrounding the niche to create this opening in the wall.

Cemented the seams and screw holes.

Then added four layers of red guard to waterproof the cement backer. Did you know that grout is not waterproof? Water can seep through grout, so it is important to have the correct backer board and waterproofing materials (for example, you can't just install drywall in a shower area!)

Getting ready to tile. Love these 3x12' ceramic subway tiles from Daltile. They are affordable and good quality, we got them from Home Depot We used them in our other shower and they are really great for the price.

Mark is starting the tiling process now, we decided to do a vertical stacked pattern. He cut the first row of tile to be the same height as the bottom edge of the niche. We spaced the tile with 1/16" spacers. The tile already has a slight spacer built-in, I think 1/16", so our spacing ended up being closer to 1/8" spacing for the end result.

Tile work is complete and grouted. We used Polyblend unsanded grout in the color Bright White. For the niche, we decided to use a herringbone mosaic tile. The grout color is Delorean Gray.

The last step in the tiling process was cleaning the tile since grouting creates a haze on the tile. and caulking the corners and joints where the tub and shower wall meet. We used non-sanded caulk by the same brand, PolyBlend, and same color as the grout (Bright White). But we actually had to rip out the non-sanded caulk we used between the tile and tub because it dried yellowish instead of white. So we redid the caulk with just straight white silicone.

We also had to recolor the grout Delorean Gray (which is what it was supposed to be) in the niche because it dried hazy and discolored. We used a product called GroutRenew by Polyblend and it worked really well for this.

3. WALL & FLOOR TREATMENT

We painted the walls BLACK. Sherwin Williams Tricorn Black, to be exact (my favorite paint!). It was a pretty bold move, since this is a windowless bathroom, but we decided to embrace the darkness and create a cozy, moody vibe. We also added white beadboard on the lower third of the walls to help breakup the black some. One more note on the paint, we used semi-gloss which is pretty shiny, but pretty necessary for a bathroom to help with moisture.

We also ended up switching this LED light fixture out for the same light but a different color temperature (4000k instead of 3000k, as you can see it was showing too yellow), and we spray painted it black to match the walls (it is shown here in the original, which was a dark brown).

The beadboard we used was called House of Fara Basswood beadboard from Home Depot. It is solid wood and came as individual boards (not large panels, like the MDF versions of beadboard sold). We wanted solid wood since this is in a bathroom near our shower area and is a little more waterproof than MDF. We did not use the top rail that came with this beadboard set, instead we used 3.5" flat trim (the same baseboard trim we have throughout the house). We like the cleaner, simpler look of the flat boards instead of a more fanciful design.

We let the beadboard acclimate in the bathroom for a while and then primed both sides of the boards and painted one coat of white paint on the front prior to install. We painted the beadboard Sherwin Williams Alabaster.

The above photo shows the flooring installed already. We used luxury vinyl plank by the brand Flooret. It is the Signature Modin Rigid line in the color Arbor. We have this flooring throughout our entire home, with no transitions, so we placed it in the bathroom as well. It is a click-lock floating floor, and very easy to install. It is also waterproof! So perfect for bathrooms.

4. BATHROOM FIXTURES & ACCESSORIES

First up for the remaining items installed is the shower door. We went with a single glass door panel, by the company DreamLine (sold at Home Depot). We love the look and since we mostly use this bathroom for baths I wasn’t too concerned about a little water spray on the floor when we use the shower since it will be so infrequent. Also, we installed a rainfall type shower head that points straight down to avoid splashing. There is very minimal water spray outside the shower area which is great.

One other cool thing about this door it is not a fixed panel, it is hinged. So the door can be opened to access the faucets, etc. to turn them on easily.

Our cat helping install the toilet. We purchased this narrow, shorter style (only 25” long) toilet from Amazon since we had a 14 inch rough in from the wall we didn’t want the toilet sticking super far out into the room. This toilet worked out well for our purposes. It was really challenging to find a narrower toilet though. Spent a lot of time searching!

She is very helpful, as you can see!

Toilet and mirror installed. This mirror is pretty cool, it is LED backlit and can change from white to blue light. The blue light has been SO nice. At first I though it was odd, who needs a blue light? But taking a soak in the tub with the blue light on, it is like a chromotherapy spa!

Installing the tub hardware. The cats helping again, of course! We went with Moen hardware, in the Genta line. We really like Moen products.

Where there once was an old medicine cabinet, we decided to frame the hole and create two open shelves. Mark made this out of spare wood, and we painted it to match the walls. Love having the shelf for bathroom accessories!

5. VANITY BUILD

The vanity was built in the same style as the vanity in our master bathroom--but more simplified in its design. The vanity is a floating vanity to look like a single slab of knotty alder. As you will see, it is in fact not a solid piece.

The below image is the only photo we took in-progress, unfortunately (we are pretty bad about that!). In the photo, you can see the general layout of the vanity top and the cut out lines for the sink. We decided to extend the vanity out over the toilet, since had a rather large gap between the toilet and wall that needed to be covered. Also adds a little extra counter space, and visually works best with our mirror choice. The vanity top is made of knotty alder wood. Knotty alder is a small tree, so the planks sold are pretty small, these are 5" planks that Mark glued together to create a single surface. Knotty alder obviously has a lot of knots, hence the name! We did not want holes in the counter for water to escape, however, so Mark used epoxy that he dyed black to fill in the holes. You can see the epoxy spots in the photo below, these are sanded when dried and the end product looks like they were always there. The next step in the build was adding the front lip (this gives it the look of a solid slab!). Then the vanity top was sanded down really well and four coats of WATERLOX stain was added. WATERLOX is awesome btw! Adds a beautiful rich, golden color to the wood and makes the wood 100% waterproof.

So that is the top of the vanity, but that is not all that was installed. Mark first built a frame out of plywood and then glued the top to the frame. The frame was then attached to studs with metal brackets. A large 2x4 section was also screwed into the studs to brace the vanity where the sink is located, this was important to add because of the weight of the sink which is substantial. This is an undershot of the vanity, to get an idea of how it was all put together!

Did you notice the two brackets between the vanity sink area and area over the toilet? This is because the vanity is actually two separate pieces. SURPRISE! I keep a basket of hand towels over the gap so it is not noticeable, but we decided to separate the vanity in this way in case we ever need to work or change out the toilet for any reason we can detach the vanity section over the toilet for easier access!

6. COMPLETED PROJECT

And that's a wrap!

COST BREAKDOWN & SOURCES

Cost to move HVAC vent and toilet (contracted): $943
Flooret Modin Rigid LVP Flooring, color Arbor (Flooret.com): $120
Plywood subfloor replacement (Home depot): $50
House of Fara 8 lin ft. Basswood Beadboard (Home depot): $180
Sherwin Williams paint, Duration Tricorn Black semi-gloss and Alabaster satin (Sherwin Williams): $60
Horow HWMT-8733 25" Toilet (Amazon): $200
Toilet hardware (wax ring, etc) (Home Depot): $30
PEX pipes and fittings (Home Depot): $100
Redguard waterproofing (Home Depot): $50
Durock cement board (Home Depot): $60
Thin set mortar (Home Depot): $30
3x12 Daltile Restore Bright White subway tiles (Home Depot): $190
Polyblend unsanded grout, colors Bright White & Delorean Gray (Home Depot): $30
Schluter tile edging L-angle trim (Home Depot): $15
Plywood and Knotty Alder wood for vanity (Home Depot and local Lumber yard): $100
Waterlox stain for vanity (Amazon): $25
Kraus Elavo Series Square Ceramic Semi-Recessed sink (Home Depot) $110
Hansgrohe 74090 Logis Single hole bathroom faucet, brushed nickel (Target): $155
Moen posi-temp rough in valve and Genta bathtub faucet and shower trim, Brushed Nickel (Home Depot): $190
Moen Arris 14 in. Shower arm, Brushed Nickel (Wayfair): $100
DreamLine Aqua Uno 34 5/16" x 68 in Frameless Hinged Tub door (Home Depot): $230
Dyconn 60-in Acrylic Alcove Apro right hand drain tub model WTM02849R (Home Depot): $450
OVE Decors 43.3 in x 27.6 in frameless rectangular LED Mirror (Home Depot): $162
Lithonia Lighting 45in LED Vanity light (Home Depot): $100
HVAC cast iron vent cover (Signature Hardware): $39
Olive & Linen Cloud Soft turkish towels (Olive & Linen): $57
Gatco Latitude 22" free standing tissue holder, brushed nickel (Build.com): $35
Leaning Edge matte black wall hooks (CB2): $10
Sadie Black bath runner 24x708 (CB2): $50

TOTAL RENOVATION COST: $3,871