Renovation Wednesdays

Our bathroom renovation started in May of 2010, we had always wanted to redo our bathroom since it was all dated and some tiles were broken and needed a second paint job (it was originally pink, I like pink and all but not on my bathroom walls) What got us to really get going on starting this renovation was our faucet for our tub was leaking and it wasn't just dripping every hour, it would fill up my floor washing bucket in about 2 HOURS!!! That is a lot of water.

So that is my bucket getting full of water. How ever I didn't waste this water that I collected I brought it out side and watered my gardens with it. I think my flowers really liked it because they did well last year!

I know we could have probably just changed the faucet and called it quites but we made it into the perfect opportunity to get a new bathroom. We decided that if we are going to end up changing everything in this bathroom at some point it would be a lot easier to do it all at once rather then piece by piece because of the shape and size of the bathroom. Luckily for this bathroom reno we have people in our family that were able to help us. Like Matt's younger brother he is a plumber so he was able to get us our tub and faucets, toilet, sink and new new plumbing pipe for a really good deal and FREE LABOUR!!! Then Matt's older brother has laid out and put up tile in his washrooms at his house so he already had practice of what to do and was able to help us out with that as well. My dad also help with some of the structural stuff like our sub flooring and drywall and mudding and taping. We also have a friend that is a painter that was able to come visit us on a weekend and paint our washroom for us, walls and ceiling! So we were very fortunate to have these people help us out other wise it would have been way more expensive!

I will start off showing you the pictures of the "before" brace yourselves its not very pretty.

So this was our old bath tub / shower. The tub used to have the glass sliding doors on it which then left funny marks on the edges and broke some of the tiles. The shower head in this picture we kept though because my brother in law gave this to us a while back since it was just an extra (its an awesome shower head)

The cabinet above the toilet we did not keep or the medicine cabinet in a few pictures down, but we were able to give it to one of my friends so that worked out well.

So this was our gross toilet! Oh and you see the linoleum it has pink flowers and vines and the original paint color when we first moved in was that pink color. We couldn't stand having a pink bathroom so that we did a while back just so it would look slightly better.

So the mirror in the picture was actually a medicine cabinet too, great for storage but oh so ugly, that was taken out and was never stepping foot back in the bathroom EVER!

And our old school cabinet, it was able to be home for a lot of things (that I had to put in storage containers and stack them) but it needed to go. These cabinets are actually the kind of cabinets that are in our kitchen. I would love to get our kitchen done but first we need our basement done so we have more usable living space.

So that was the before, do I miss it you ask? Well.......... NO!!! Not at all, good riddance I say.
I did take a few pictures of the progress that we were making, which took a while to get finished, since there was a full month that Matt was working out of town :( that had sucked. Also during that time he was away we had no bathroom, AT ALL no working shower no nothing. So for about 2 weeks+ I stayed at my parents. Which was really great, home cooked meals and being able to spend more time with them otherwise I would be at home alone with a washroom that didn't work. I really didn't feel like trying to have a "shower" in my kitchen sink!

Here is Matt and His younger brother starting the demo of the tiles. Good-bye tile!

Nothing left

Ha! Sayonara medicine cabinet mirror!

Better already!

Ahh... New tub, its clean, its white and its deep enough to actually have a bubble bath!

Thanks dad for all the taping and mudding!

Our floor used to squeak when you walked on it, especially in front of the sink so it was really annoying every time you were there. So my dad came and screwed the sub flooring to the beams under it.

Now I was a bit rushed to pick out the tile because I didn't really know when we were going to be needing them since we didn't have a date set for Matt's older brother to come to town and help us do the tiles. Until about a week before he was coming I was told I need to pick out tiles this week and get the grout too. AHHH!! I was worried that I wouldn't be able to find a tile that I liked. I went to home depot and totem to see what they had, I liked a few of them but I thought the tile was a bit thin and I just didn't want it to break. So then my friend Janeen told me about a place that she had gotten her tiles from and they really liked them and they were great quality. So I went and checked it out and I took my mom with me (this is when I was staying over at their house during the renos) because I just wanted someone else with me so I wouldn't have to totally pick out a tile by my self. When we got to the shop we just started to look around in the show room, then I spotted this guy that I used to work with and he worked at this tile place now!!! So we caught up with each other for a bit since it was about 2 1/2 - 3 yrs since we worked together. He was really helpful and showed us some tiles that were discontinued that they had lots of which made the price of the tile that much better! For the big tile originally it was about $15 per tile but since it was discontinued it was about $2.50 per tile and then on top of that he gave me a discount too! It was so amazing of him to do that! I also wanted an accent tile for the shower but those ones weren't on sale but I did get a discount of a few dollars off which was wonderful too (we didn't need too much of this though so it wasn't too bad that it wasn't on sale). So here is the tile that we had picked out.

Don't mind the background (its the sub flooring)

Voila! the tile got put up in the shower!!! YAY!

Laying out some tiles on the floor so I can see the different lay out patterns I could choose from. Of course I chose the hard way with more angles eek :}

But it turned out really good besides all the cement mess (don't worry it was easy enough to clean off because we cleaned it shortly after so it wouldn't be too hard)

So this project was started in May of 2010 and we just finished putting up the back splash over the Christmas/ New Years break. But hey its done and I'm happy. (we only have to lacquer the base boards (which needs to be done in the spring/ summer) and put the transition in but we are working on it). Next week you get to see the finished product :) !!!