Masterbath Renovation

Centsational Girl is having a link up party of bathrooms before and after.  She just re-vamped her friends bathroom, and what a difference it made.  And she did it in 8 hours…superwoman! It looks beautiful, you should go check it out.  When I saw her bathroom remodel, I  realized that I have never shown the before and after pictures of  Shannon and Nate’s master bathrooms that I renovated.

The master bath.  Oh me oh my.  This bathroom had some good qualities to it.   Two sinks, lots of counter space and storage underneath.  The size of the vanity area was perfect.  It had good bones but needed updating.  On the chopping block was the dated counter tops, the color of the honey oak cabinets, Hollywood bar light fixture, muddy brown looking floor tile and contractor faucets.   The one thing that needed addressing the most, was the shower toilet room.   When you opened the door it almost hit the shower and toilet.  Then once you got in the bathroom, you would have to close the door in order to use the toilet.  It was super squishy and poorly designed.  Once I got in there and accessed the situation, I noticed there was some wasted space in the vanity area next to the window.   Since the wall between the toilet and vanity wasn’t structural, I had the contractor move the wall out 16″, closer to the window and install a pocket door instead of a swing door which saved even more space.

This is the only picture I have to show you how it was before.  The toilet plumbing at this point has not been moved.  See how close it is to the shower? {the round hole in the ground, just in case you didn’t know what I was referring to}  Yeah it left you about 6″ of leg room when the actual toilet was in there to turn on the shower.  Not good. Then the dark line on the floor is where the old wall used to be.  The new wall that was going in is where the newer looking beam is, the recessed area.  The toilet plumbing got moved over into that new little recessed spot.  What a world of difference that made!

Lots more room to walk around in this shower area now.  New shower surround tile and glass doors were not in the budget, {can always be changed out later} but we did change out the shower head and scrubbed and scrubbed the white tiles clean and then re-grouted them after this picture was taken.  To show you how we encroached into the space in the vanity area, here is a picture of the space looking from the master bedroom before we moved the wall.  Look at the left side of the window in the picture

Here is how it looked after the wall was moved.  You can hardly tell the difference.  Now why wasn’t that done when they built this house is beyond me.

And here it is in it’s finished state before they moved in.

I have had a really hard time trying to get good pictures of the bathroom vanity area since it has been re-done.  So this is the best I got.

The flooring is crema marfil marble. They were 18″ x 18″ tiles left over from when we built our house, so that saved a lot of money.  I had the tile guy cut them down to 9″ x 9″ and put them on the diagonal to give the floor a little style.

We changed out the light fixtures to these pretties from lampsplus.com, aren’t they great? They give out an amazing amount of light too.

Here is a design tip: There are a ton of beautiful bathroom fixtures out there to choose from, but one of the things you have to keep in mind is the direction of the light and the projection of the fixture.  If the bulbs are turned up, the light is going to shine on the ceiling, which is good if you have other recessed lights in the room.  But if you don’t you will be lacking light and will hate your bathroom. So go with down lights if that will be your only source of light.  The other common mistake made in purchasing new bathroom light fixtures, is the distance of projection of the light fixture itself from the wall.   You want your light fixture to clear your mirror molding or medicine cabinet.  So make sure you measure how far out from the wall the mirror or cabinet is before you go shopping for a fixture. Most light fixtures will say what the projection is in the description or on the box.

The counter tops are a prefab quartz, which means you go to a prefab slab yard, and they have these already made ready to purchase with a finished edge in different lengths.  Once you purchase the prefab slab, then you have an installer cut your hole for your sinks and faucets.   It saves a lot of money this way, but you are limited on your choices for your edge detail.   The edge detail that came with this slab was just a straight edge.  More of a clean modern look which is what Shannon and Nate wanted.

Usually you can get a 4″ – 6″ high back splash that matches the slab from the slab yard, but this bathroom I opted to go with some 1″ x 1″ glass tiles instead that I got off of Craig’s list for cheap, $20!

The faucets were from overstock.com.  The cool thing about these faucets is that the water spout swivels, how cool is that?  The cabinets got a makeover and sanded down to bare wood and then stained with a dark walnut stain.  My plan was to just put a frame around the existing mirror, but the guys accidentally broke it when they shot their nail gun into the frame.  Oops.   We framed out the space above both sinks with wood molding and stained it to match the cabinets and the contractor paid and for and installed a new mirror.

Since this picture we have hung the towel bars that match the faucets.  On the list to do, is some type of drapery treatment on the window and add the knobs I bought months ago. I hate doing knobs and pulls.  It makes me nervous that I am going to mess up,  even with the cool tools out there to help you do it right.  I think that is why I am putting it off.

I think it turned into a very beautiful usable space for them don’t you?

{now I am going to go link up to Centsational Girls link party}