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Bathroom Remodel
Apr. 15th, 2011 09:46 pmMy house has three full bathrooms, one for each main floor (there's also a half-bath in the basement, but the basement is, well, best not thought of, it's rather tumbledown).
My living area is the third floor. My bathroom is probably the biggest in both area and volume ... the square footage is generous, perhaps about 100 square feet.
The volume, on the other hand, is ... odd.
See, the bathroom is built into a gabled dormer. The dormer itself is probably original to the house; the fitting out of the room, probably not. The tub (a standard five-foot US model) is built into a couple of "walls" that were pretty clearly added later; the pipes for the tub and shower faucets run up through one of those walls. You can see the shower head toward the rear right of the picture above.
That dormer roof angles into the space pretty far. The sink and toilet are tucked into corners on either side of the entry door.
For a tall guy like me, this presents some obvious drawbacks. It's easy to knock my head on the dormer ceiling if I step back from the sink too quickly, for example. (That's less of a problem on the toilet side, for two reasons: a) since one uses the toilet seated about 1/2 of the times one uses it, one has more headroom on those occasions ... and b) it's on a wall with more space because the wall to the side of the sink also contains a small access door to a "knee wall" under the eaves. Gotta love these turn-of-the-19th/20th-century houses with their nooks and crannies.
None of that is a big problem, however.
The BIG problem is that the place was probably last remodeled in the 1970s, and boy is it worn-out and hideous.
And we've let it stay that way for the eight years we've been here.
Well, no more. After the end of my other relationship last fall, I made a vow to myself that I was going to go ahead and take my living space and my quality of life more seriously. No sooner had the emotional wounds started to scab over, than I went to Ikea and started getting stuff to finally fix up my "den/library" space. I created a few new, simple "built-in" shelves in my bedroom. And now it's the bathroom's turn.
Vinyl tile on the floors is going to come up, to be replaced with something ceramic or stone. In a couple of places, subfloor is probably also going to be repaired. The plastic tub/shower enclosure is going to come down (I'm afraid to discover the condition of the walls behind it ... one is an *external* wall and I think I'm going to have some nasty surprises with it, but it's time to dare that.)
There will be a new sink and vanity, a new mirror cabinet, and a new toilet. Nothing terribly fancy, but *anything* in there is going to be a much-needed change, even if it were something horrible from the lowest-budget section of Home Depot ... which it won't be.
But first, the tub enclosure doors came down. If you've seen some of my self-pictures in the bathroom mirror before, it was the mirrored half of the tub doors. Those doors now await a trip to the dump, or appropriate curbside pickup (I have to look at the city ordinances to see what I'm allowed to do). In the first photo, you can see the temporary tension rod for the new shower curtains. The curtains are just cool enough that I *may* keep them ... but once the shower has been retiled, they will probably go on a permanent curtain bar.
The big white wire rack will be going away soon. Right now I'm using it to hold a lot of my painting and other supplies. For the last several years, that rack has rolled, on casters, into one of the cubbies on other side of the tub enclosure ... here's what the space looks like tonight:
That cubby will get some new shelves, more 'permanently' built in, probably hidden behind curtains or doors that will be more flush with the tub/shower front. That will be a kind of towel/linen closet. On the other side will be storage for taller items (brooms, mops, vacuum cleaner).
The room always looks very yellow in photographs; partly that's an effect of my tending to use default camera settings for "incandescent" lighting rather than proper white balancing, but the room *is*, in fact, painted a not-bad but rather-too-saturated yellow color. Right now, I'm cleaning, patching, and priming the walls, a bit at a time, to get them ready for a calmer, paler yellow.
I'm not a designer, though I've watched enough design shows to have a much better clue about proper design and planning than I used to. I *think* the elements I've chosen will go together decently; if not, the paint will be the obvious thing to change.
I'm happy so far, and somewhat excited. The amount of time I've put into planning and organizing this is much more than I've devoted before ... I've been slowing down and thinking things through to a greater degree, but also planning ahead with more ambition. I fully expect the results to bear the mark of the amateur home-repair enthusiast, but I'm starting from such outdated, cheap beginnings that it will be difficult NOT to transcend them ... and I may just come up with something good.
My living area is the third floor. My bathroom is probably the biggest in both area and volume ... the square footage is generous, perhaps about 100 square feet.
The volume, on the other hand, is ... odd.
See, the bathroom is built into a gabled dormer. The dormer itself is probably original to the house; the fitting out of the room, probably not. The tub (a standard five-foot US model) is built into a couple of "walls" that were pretty clearly added later; the pipes for the tub and shower faucets run up through one of those walls. You can see the shower head toward the rear right of the picture above.
That dormer roof angles into the space pretty far. The sink and toilet are tucked into corners on either side of the entry door.
For a tall guy like me, this presents some obvious drawbacks. It's easy to knock my head on the dormer ceiling if I step back from the sink too quickly, for example. (That's less of a problem on the toilet side, for two reasons: a) since one uses the toilet seated about 1/2 of the times one uses it, one has more headroom on those occasions ... and b) it's on a wall with more space because the wall to the side of the sink also contains a small access door to a "knee wall" under the eaves. Gotta love these turn-of-the-19th/20th-century houses with their nooks and crannies.
None of that is a big problem, however.
The BIG problem is that the place was probably last remodeled in the 1970s, and boy is it worn-out and hideous.
And we've let it stay that way for the eight years we've been here.
Well, no more. After the end of my other relationship last fall, I made a vow to myself that I was going to go ahead and take my living space and my quality of life more seriously. No sooner had the emotional wounds started to scab over, than I went to Ikea and started getting stuff to finally fix up my "den/library" space. I created a few new, simple "built-in" shelves in my bedroom. And now it's the bathroom's turn.
Vinyl tile on the floors is going to come up, to be replaced with something ceramic or stone. In a couple of places, subfloor is probably also going to be repaired. The plastic tub/shower enclosure is going to come down (I'm afraid to discover the condition of the walls behind it ... one is an *external* wall and I think I'm going to have some nasty surprises with it, but it's time to dare that.)
There will be a new sink and vanity, a new mirror cabinet, and a new toilet. Nothing terribly fancy, but *anything* in there is going to be a much-needed change, even if it were something horrible from the lowest-budget section of Home Depot ... which it won't be.
But first, the tub enclosure doors came down. If you've seen some of my self-pictures in the bathroom mirror before, it was the mirrored half of the tub doors. Those doors now await a trip to the dump, or appropriate curbside pickup (I have to look at the city ordinances to see what I'm allowed to do). In the first photo, you can see the temporary tension rod for the new shower curtains. The curtains are just cool enough that I *may* keep them ... but once the shower has been retiled, they will probably go on a permanent curtain bar.
The big white wire rack will be going away soon. Right now I'm using it to hold a lot of my painting and other supplies. For the last several years, that rack has rolled, on casters, into one of the cubbies on other side of the tub enclosure ... here's what the space looks like tonight:
That cubby will get some new shelves, more 'permanently' built in, probably hidden behind curtains or doors that will be more flush with the tub/shower front. That will be a kind of towel/linen closet. On the other side will be storage for taller items (brooms, mops, vacuum cleaner).
The room always looks very yellow in photographs; partly that's an effect of my tending to use default camera settings for "incandescent" lighting rather than proper white balancing, but the room *is*, in fact, painted a not-bad but rather-too-saturated yellow color. Right now, I'm cleaning, patching, and priming the walls, a bit at a time, to get them ready for a calmer, paler yellow.
I'm not a designer, though I've watched enough design shows to have a much better clue about proper design and planning than I used to. I *think* the elements I've chosen will go together decently; if not, the paint will be the obvious thing to change.
I'm happy so far, and somewhat excited. The amount of time I've put into planning and organizing this is much more than I've devoted before ... I've been slowing down and thinking things through to a greater degree, but also planning ahead with more ambition. I fully expect the results to bear the mark of the amateur home-repair enthusiast, but I'm starting from such outdated, cheap beginnings that it will be difficult NOT to transcend them ... and I may just come up with something good.
