House Series: Bathroom Part 1

Well, it has been god knows how long since I have last posted. In September/October I was in the middle of writing a post when I saw a mouse out of the corner of my eye, freaked out (as I am deathly afraid of them), started crying and needless to say, I lost my writing juices for that day.

I really have no excuse for not updating the blog other than the fact that I have not been in the mood to do crafts lately. The sewing bug has completely left me for now...but not forever. :) So the big news is that this girl is about to move in with her boyfriend (in 7 weeks). The boy (Ben) owns a house that is a fixer upper so I am going to try to blog about our experiences in renovation and as usual there are disasters.

A week and a half ago we decided it was finally time to gut the bathroom and start from scratch. Ben and I have been discussing, debating (arguing-ha), planning, re-planning the bathroom remodel for the past 3 months. Finally with a absolute deadline ahead of us (May 1) we decided it was time to start the demolition. There is only 1 bathroom in his house and we wanted to get this done while we still had my apartment to shower at. :)

Ben had recently returned home from a business trip and I had Monday off so he decided to take it off so we could spend it together. This instead turned into demoing the bathroom, going to the dump and home depot. Not quite the date day we had in mind but it was productive.

Here are the before pictures (they are cell phone pics, not the best quality)... while they may not look that bad, here are the problems with the space:
1. The 'tile' in the bathroom is actually vinyl tile on cardboard backing, not meant for showers and it is showing signs of water damage.
2. The tub is stained from being 50+ years old, I promise I have bleached that thing within an inch of it's life and it still looks that gross.
3. No counter space/storage space.

Here is our only storage a dinky little cabinet above the toilet.......

Our awesome tile and dirty tub, if you look close you can see the water damage......

We were originally going to only demo the shower first and then continue with the bathroom "section by section", but then we decided to just demo the whole thing.


In progress pictures.....

Then we insulated, and put up cement board. Installing cement board was a process in itself. We discovered one of the walls was not even close to straight and had to deal with that mess.  We taped and put thinset on the the seems of the cement board. At this point in the process the house was a mess and  we had worked on the bathroom all day Monday, and after work  Tuesday- Friday but were really not even close to being done.

Check back for bathroom part 2 soon....

Cheers,

Ali