Often times it can appear that home renovation projects happen quickly, but a majority of time that is the farthest from the truth. Especially if you are doing the work yourself or if work on the project is not your full time job. Since we do a majority of our renovation work ourselves, Nathan and I like to balance project time with what I’ll call “life” time. We both enjoy working on projects, but since we have full-time jobs outside of renovating our home we try to not let renovation projects become another full time job. We haven’t always been good at this, honestly it’s always a work in progress, but we try our very best to balance renovation time with time spent with our love ones (including the dogs) and friends, time for hobbies, time for exercise, time for relaxing, and time for travel. Meaning our projects don’t always happen quickly and that is a-okay.
A prime example of this is our upstairs bathroom. We started planning our bathroom at the end of January. In February we demoed the bathroom and started prepping for tile. Then we took a hiatus because we went to Dallas to visit our good friends the first weekend of March and the next two weekends we watched my parent’s two dogs while they were on vacation. We are hoping to start back up on making progress in the bathroom this weekend! In the mean time I thought it would be helpful to share with you the details of what we have done so far.
This post contains affiliate links for your convenience. For more information, see my disclosures here.
We removed the toilet and vanity. Then we replaced the pipes coming out of the wall for good measure (they were leaking a bit).
Helpful tip: always plug open drain pipes (i.e. from a vanity or toilet) with a cloth so the sewer gas and smell does not leak into your house!
Next Nathan removed existing linoleum flooring with a prybar and rubber mallet while I stripped the wallpaper, using a putty knife and a diluted vinegar mixture in a spray bottle, and patched the walls where necessary with joint compound. The wall patching was quite the time consuming job because whoever initially installed this wallpaper never primed the drywall first, so it resulted in a lot of drywall paper being ripped off. We chose to patch the drywall instead of install new drywall. I like to use premixed joint compound (watered down a bit to a pancake batter consistency), with a taping knife and trusty trough.
While I worked on patching the walls (we have vaulted ceilings in this bathroom so a ladder was necessary!) Nathan started removing the tile in the shower using a prybar and rubber mallet.
After the tile and the drywall behind the tile was removed we started planning where the shower niche we go. We lucked out because behind the drywall were “built-in” shelves that we decided to use as a template – the middle “shelf” was almost the perfect size and location we wanted, plus it was not on an exterior wall. We only wanted 1 niche, versus the 3 existing shelves, so we decided to cover up the top and bottom shelves with cement board.
Nathan started installed most of the cement wallboard on the shower walls and framed out the niche as well. He used his impact driver and these star drive screws to install the cement wallboard. He took care to make sure all sides of the niche were perfectly leveland that the bottom shelf of the niche was slopped toward the shower at about and 1/8 of an inch so water doesn’t pool on the shelf.
Currently, we have the left side of the niche completely butted up against the back wall of the shower, but we may bring this inward to closer match the right side. Note: We plan to continue the tile all the way up to the ceiling and the angled portion of the ceiling, but since these areas won’t be wet we decided to leave the drywall as is rather than replacing with cement wallboard.
This is where we are today! We still need to remove the plumbing fixtures on the tub so we can install the cement wallboard and install new plumbing fixtures – that is next on our agenda along with waterproofing the cement board before we can start tiling!
As a reminder this is the mood board I designed for the bathroom. The overall plan has stayed the same, but a few of the details are changing – stay tuned!
