Bathroom Remodel: The Before {Part 1}

Note: The Home Depot partnered with bloggers such as me for their Building Better Baths program. As part of this program, I received compensation for my time. They did not tell me what to purchase or what to say about any product mentioned in these posts. The Home Depot believes that consumers and bloggers are free to form their own opinions and share them in their own words. The Home Depot’s policies align with WOMMA Ethics Code, FTC guidelines and social media engagement recommendations.

As you can see from the fancy note above, we partnered with Home Depot for a super awesome bathroom remodel project that is going down before baby D is born! Wha to the hoo! Seriously, I couldn’t be more excited about getting this done, not to mention scared and nervous about such permanent decisions in my home and the fact that this baby is expected to arrive in 8 weeks! This project has been on our to-do list since we moved in back in April of 2013, but the arrival of the bambino is making this a little more urgent…You’ll see what I mean shortly. I’m calling it the master bathroom, only because it’s the one that we use, but it is also the bathroom the baby will use, and it’s open to the hallway. We have one other full bathroom in our home, which is truly the master, but it’s on the other side of the house and has no bath tub. We use it as our guest suite. Behold, our crusty beige box, AKA our “master” bathroom.

• Part 2 (Choosing fixtures)
• Part 3 (Demolition tips)
• Part 4 (Embracing change)
• Part 5 (Tiling tips)
• Part 6 (The big reveal!)

Before we moved in, the entire house was given a nice coat of beige paint. I mean the whole stinkin’ house walls, ceilings, and even the tile. When we first moved in, I was excited about the thought of mint green hexagons in my bathroom (more on that here). I had day dreams of peeling the paint off of the tile (this was only going to take a couple of hours) and revitalizing our charming vintage 1946 ranch style bathroom. Long story short, Andy and I spent a solid couple of hours with razor blades one night chipping and pulling paint off of our tiles, and we got this far:

We also realized that not all of the tiles are mint green. In fact, we’re still not exactly sure of the pattern. We do know there is light mint, dark mint, and white tiles. But not a lot of white tile because after the 4 hours of tile exploration we decided to chip all of the tiles in an attempt to discover the pattern. We discovered the pattern is complicated, ha! This wall happens to be all light mint green, see:

So, spending hours upon hours chipping paint off of 50+ year old tile to not even be sure what colors are going to appear sounded risky and hard and full of chemicals that pregnant peeps should not inhale. On that subject, here’s an awesome article about safely DIY-ing while pregnant. Back to the the bathroom remodel… Let me show you around real quick. Here’s the space we’re working with, it’s not tiny, but it’s certainly smaller than an average master bathroom of today’s standards. It’s the biggest bathroom we’ve ever owned at almost 67 square feet! The one full bathroom in our first house (or condo to be exact) was half this size! Here’s the current bathroom floor plan. The actual layout will (probably) not change.

Opening the bathroom door, here’s the view…

And turn to your left, to check out the vanity area…

I did discover that the vanity counter is white tile…

And to your right, a lovely little sink with no storage and no counter space…

The bathtub shower combo…

And a close up of the crust…

The cast iron 50+ year old bathtub…

Oh and look out above, we’ve got some fancy, hard to reach storage that also allows us to easily touch the ceiling while showering because all ceilings need loofa scrubs, right? These top cabinets are where we discovered the WW2 memorabilia for the shadow box, remember?

Here’s the view with your back to the window, looking at the doorway…

And here’s the close up of those tiles… this is a nice big paint bubble waiting to be peeled and tasted by a crawling baby…

Operation bathroom remodel is in full swing! We’ve researched, pondered, and investigated all things bathroom. I’ve debated tile choices and colors like no other and still have not 100% decided on fixtures, counters, and cabinets! Bathroom remodels are expensive and kinda scary, y’all! But they are pretty dang exciting too. 10 years ago, I never would have thought that grey penny tile, drop in tubs, and sneaky towel storage would get me so excited, ha! I’ve been hoarding inspiration in a secret bathroom Pinterest board for oh, 3 months now! HERE SHE IS!  Our baby will not have to bathe in moldy, crusty tubs and eat paint chips… yay! Anyone else in the midst of a bathroom remodel? Or want to start one, but too scared? Don’t be, let’s do this!