We like to renovate things - floors, cabinets, shelves, houses... In the spring we renovated our kitchen, powder room and front entrance. We gutted the kitchen entirely, leaving only a couple of walls (even the ceiling was removed) and rebuilt it from scratch. We put in Ikea cabinets, granite counters and tile floors. The bathroom was mostly updated and refreshed with fixtures and paint. Here are the "Before" pics - Keep in mind that in the first pic, we had already replaced the nasty appliances (they were original and very dirty and icky)
And here are the after pics. The lighting isn't great in the pics - the room isn't as dark as they look.
We are thrilled with the outcome and love our new spaces!
We have two other bathrooms upstairs that also need updating lest they remain in 1981 forever. After much deliberation we decided not to do them both at the same time (thank goodness!) and attack the main bath. unfortunately we both like to jump in head first sometimes with minimal planning, and we ripped apart our bathroom during the busiest month of the entire year. I was travelling for some events for work, our daughter and my son had birthdays, along with my mom's 60th bday and my 40th...both milestones which involved days away from home.
I was also wrapping up a course I had taken, and having paid for an extension already, I was NOT going to be getting another one...so I had to bust my butt for weeks. Throw a toddler in there and you have, well, chaos. And good old Murphy decided to make it interesting - the weekend that we took out our toilet, I accidentally dropped a stick of deodorant into the only other upstairs toilet, rendering it useless. Poor hubby had to replace that toilet before we could even get further on the torn up bathroom. We also found a pipe that had never been glued properly - we found it when some tap water ran through two floors of our house cascading into our basement laundry room. On the plus side, we found it before we put in our floor tile (small victories!).
Today we completed our bathroom - 12 weeks after starting it. Yes 12 weeks. We redid the entire kitchen, powder room and front hall in about 7 weeks.
Things we learned:
Anything that can go wrong, will. Anything that should not go wrong, will as well.
Piles of tools in the hallway may not be the safest place for a toddler to play.
Dust will settle into every crevice available - in your home and your body.
Dust does not taste good.
Measure twice, cut once, and have a back up for when you screw up the cut.
You will never like the new toilet as much as you did the old one...you must reacquaint your butt to the new seat gradually.
Drywall is hard to do.
Sharing a bathroom with an 18 year old boy is yucky.
But despite all of that - we love our new bathroom. We have a couple of minor paint touch ups to do and then I will share pics of the before and after.
For now I am off to wash some sheets for Little Miss, who is toilet training herself. This means that she runs around with no diaper and sometimes uses the potty. Hence the need for clean sheets...for the second time today.
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