Upstairs Bathroom Reno

The upstairs bathroom was definitely a project that gave us a run for our money.  Even though the hubs and I are VERY happy with how the project turned out, taking showers at my moms and baths in the downstairs tub for five months was not the easiest thing to do.  This project was definitely the most challenging, stressful but rewarding project we have done.  When we started the project all we wanted to do was caulk the shower walls and paint. Two. Simple. Things. Or so we thought. 

We started with this:

and this:

It stunk, it was old and definitely needed an update.




And ended with this!!!!!!

After the hubs was done caulking, I was sanding and sanding and sanding parts of the walls that the previous owners we think just threw plaster on the walls and left it there without smoothing it out.  Even though the walls were ridiculously not smooth at all, it was something we could fix with a little elbow grease.  The below picture was after I nearly sanded my hand raw and I still wasn't close to finishing...

We ran into a huge hurdle when we realized that the wall between the tub and the sink was rotted and molding (if you look at the picture below you can kind of see it between the sink and tub), so out came the sink and we were just going to rip out that section of the wall and patch it.  Simple, right? Not, and within a few hours we had most of the walls ripped down and flooring tore up.  And that began our five month adventure with renovating our bathroom.

Going into this project we had a plan, once the walls were ripped out that plan joined the walls in the trash.

All we knew was that we wanted to keep it fresh and updated so with a little new insulation, Durock cement board, and some drywall and the bathroom was starting to shape up and look like a bathroom again.   

We knew that we wanted to keep the tub and tile the walls and floors, but figuring out what kind of tile to use was difficult to say the least, especially since we were on a VERY tight budget.  A couple months prior the hubs and I were at Home Depot and found this tile on sale for around .50cents /sq ft and seemed to be a decent quality, so we jumped at the price and bought it thinking we were going to use it for our kitchen project that we had originally planned to do.  We figured out to save some money on the bathroom tile would be that we would use the tile we already bought knowing that we bought extra just in case.

So after months and months of late nights and help from our friend Josh and the hubs' dad we ended up with this:

We bought the mirror (Kingston Wall Mirror with Shelf) and floor cabinet (Stripe 2-door Floor Cabinet) from Overstock.com and we love them!