Bathroom Overhaul - Pieces of Progress

Well, this is not how I planned to do today's post, but I think "this is not how I planned..." is the motto of life right now, isn't it?

I've been so excited to show you our bathroom overhaul, and my intention was to show you the before and after pictures first (so you could appreciate the full effect) but I am still missing a key decoration piece, so I can't show you just yet. I'm hopeful it will arrive yet this week, so I'll do that post the very MINUTE I can!

Hopefully it's okay to go ahead and show you some of the pieces of our progress as we went along.

First, the explanation behind the overhaul. When we bought this house almost exactly four years ago, everything about it was good, solid, cared for very well, and totally nondescript. It was a blank canvas of a house in all its builder grade glory. As you know, we have worked hard to add some character and personality to many of the rooms, but both our bathrooms have continued to be a bit on the plain side. (And we are not complaining. They work well and we are quite blessed to have two. Please don't misunderstand me!)

Eventually we hope to overhaul both of them, but changing up the master is going to be quite the undertaking. Overhauling the guest bathroom was going to be an easier task, so we decided to tackle it first, and then we'll have a delightful new bathroom to use when we eventually get around to updating the master.

Our guest bathroom is fairly big, as guest bathrooms go. It had a single sink vanity, quite a bit of floor space, a toilet (obviously), and a tub/shower combo.

Ryan did ALL the labor himself. (I did help with some things, but I don't want to lead you to believe in any way that I was essential as a worker.) He saved us so much money by doing the work, and I am SO THANKFUL for him and SO PROUD of him for all he knows how to do.

Demo day may have been his favorite!

 We took out everything but the tub. That got to stay.

It echoed so much without anything in there!

First up? Mudding and sanding. Ryan did all that in just a couple of days, and then we were ready to paint!

 I picked out our paint colors, and we ended up really loving them so much. We did one wall in Relaxed Navy (which is like a blue/green/gray color) and the rest of the walls and trim were Bistro White. (I felt that was appropriate for us.)

 We did the painting together, and it was fun!

One of the biggest changes in this overhaul was going from a single sink to a double. That meant we also needed more lighting than we had. We had purchased two lighting fixtures from IKEA, but we decided to return them and instead get one longer fixture. That saved Ryan a lot of wiring work. We found our plan B piece at Menards.

Once the painting was done, Ryan put in the floors. He found waterproof flooring at Sam's Club and we loved the color! We didn't realize how yellow looking the old linoleum piece was until we started putting down the gray flooring. He did a GREAT job with it!

I really wanted to do one fun thing on the far wall - to make it sort of a feature/accent wall. I proposed doing shiplap, and Ryan was on board (ha! See what I did there?) with it. We were able to get boards cut by one of our friend's dads - extremely affordably - and it took us a couple of days to get them painted. (Photo credit here to my friend Amber, who was visiting the night we painted. What kind of lousy hosts are we? Come on over! Watch us paint!)

And then Ryan cut them and we hung them. I tried the nail gun one time and it did NOT go well. (Funny! But not well.) OH how I loved the way it turned out, though!

Once the wall was done, vanity installation was next. This was the piece that inspired the wall and floor colors. Ryan found this online at IKEA and we were able to pick it up Valentine's Day weekend when we were in Indianapolis. We love it - and he said it was fairly easy to install, even with changing up the plumbing some. 

We hung up the mirrors we found on a REALLY good sale at Hobby Lobby. (We're going for rustic nautical as a decor theme, so we sort of had the porthole feeling going on here.)

Originally we planned to reinstall the old toilet, but in the middle of all this, Ryan installed some toilets for a friend and really liked how they worked (water saving features) so we ended up getting one to match. (It came from Sam's and was a great price!)

So there you have it! All this done in two weeks' worth of evenings/weekends. And now we have a really beautiful guest bathroom to share with our guests! So far, our small group has put its stamp of approval on it, and we hope whenever we have overnight guests again, they'll enjoy the extra sink space! 

As soon as I get the decorating finished, I'll show you the official before and after photos!