We have spent the past month getting ready for our master bathroom renovation to start! We decided to hire the whole bathroom renovation out – which is not something we’ve ever done. It feels strange to have someone else executing the plan we have so carefully put together.
The Before
Before I get to our plan for the renovated space I wanted to share the before pictures so you can see where we started!
Our bathroom currently doesn’t have a door and is just entered into through a doorway in our bedroom.
The bathroom itself is a large space, but the way it is laid out currently it doesn’t make the best use of the space for us. The vanity is extra long (a nice perk) and the tub is enormous and we currently only use it for dog baths.
The toilet and shower “closet” is a very tight room, much too small for both a shower and a toilet – you can barely open the door around the toilet.
The closet is also fairly small for a bathroom of this size. It’s currently a 6×6 walk in closet, which works fine for us, but we know it could be so much better! We had a simple closet system in here, but we removed it in anticipation of the renovation starting. You may have noticed there also isn’t flooring or baseboard in our closet, which is because when we moved in we ripped out the existing carpet that was in our closet since it had cat urine stains all over it. We just painted the subfloor as a temporary fix not wanting to put flooring down since we knew we’d be renovating the space someday.
I had to include a close-up of the tub. The tub used to have columns, but Nathan ripped those out a few years ago thinking we would start this renovation much sooner. Almost 4 years after we moved here we are!
And the wall we patched up very haphazardly. There was only a half wall with spindles here when we moved in, so we patched it up with leftover drywall – again, thinking we would get to this renovation much soon. Yes, this has been our bathroom for the past almost 4 years. Living in a fixer upper has its downsides.
The New Layout
When we first started thinking about the renovation our initial plan was to keep the layout pretty much the same – vanity in the same spot, replace the giant tub with a large shower, keeping the closet the exact same and keeping the toilet in the same “water closet” it’s in now, just moving the location and only have a toilet in the space vs. a shower and toilet. After thinking about it more, we decided that layout really didn’t optimize the space and still left a lot of unused space in the middle of the bathroom. Plus we would have had to move the window that was above the tub since we didn’t want a full sized window in our future shower. The window is on the front of our house and we weren’t keen on removing it.
Ultimately, we ended up designing a different layout on our own. We did not work with an interior architect, we just talked through the plans with the contractor we selected to make sure it was feasible. I share our struggle to select a layout because it really wasn’t easy! There are so many things to consider, like how wide doorways need to be, how much clearance the door needs around the vanity, where lights will be place, where plumbing can be moved, and what kind of closet system we would ultimately end up installing – and that is really just the tip of the iceberg.
Rather than try to explain the new layout, I’ve included a mock up I created in Excel for our contractor to reference. It’s not precisely to scale, but it gave us fairly close measurements for planning purposes. There are other tools you can use to create a floor plan layout, but Excel is what I am most comfortable with so it’s what I chose!
For reference, the door way from our bedroom to the “walk through” closet will have a double pocket door and the doorway from our closet to the bathroom will have a double pocket door as well. So someone can be in the closet, while someone else is in the bathroom. With this layout we move the doorway from our bedroom to the closet down about 2 feet, meaning we gained an additional 2 feet of closet space, plus the space on the left of the closet doorway walkway where we plan to add some shallow shelves for extra storage.
I’ve shared this layout on Instagram and received a number of the same questions so I figured I would answer them here!
- No, we will not have a tub in our new layout. This is a decision we are 100% okay with. We are not tub people (plus we have one in our upstairs bathroom) and would much rather have a larger closet and much larger shower.
- The toilet will no longer be in the “toilet room”. We did hem and haw over this decision. We like having a toilet closet for privacy purposes, but ultimately we decided we were alright not having one as long as we were able to access the closet without going into the bathroom, which we achieved in the layout we landed on.
I got major inspiration from two bathrooms two of my favorite bloggers renovated.
- Erin’s bathroom was a lightbulb moment for the layout of our bathroom. A walk through closet is such a great idea to get a bigger closet and works so well with the space we had to work with.
- Chris Loves Julia’s bathroom was a point of inspiration for the colors and materials in the bathroom.
The Mood Board
This is the initial mood board I put together for the overall vision we want for the space. The specific products are changing slightly, but overall it will feel similar to this mood board. The vanity won’t be white, we are planning to paint it a pretty shade of dark green! We are planning on marble tile both on the floor and in the shower, with chrome plumbing fixtures and antique gold light fixture finishes.
Our contractor has already started – demo is completed and start of the moving plumbing, electrical and walls has begun!! Things are moving so fast. We have a tentative completion date of March 13th, about 4-5 weeks after the project was started.
