Half Bathroom Remodel

This is definitely not a new bathroom remodel in the Sloan household. It’s actually been completed for over two years but it was pre-blog and I finally found some time this weekend to get it cleaned up and snap some pictures. And by “cleaned up” I mean it took a whole roll of Clorox wipes to get my makeup off of everything.

Please keep in mind this is in no means a tutorial. I know we did a lot of things wrong but hopefully you will learn from some of the mistakes {or at least get a giggle or two out of them} we made while transforming our half bathroom.

The day we moved into our house the half bathroom looked like this…

but there is only so much of that awful wallpaper and this light fixture a girl can take.

The summer after we moved in, a lady I worked with offered us a pedestal sink for free and I jumped on it like white on rice. Since we already had the sink, we decided to do a little work on the bathroom. We weren’t at the point where we were able to remove the dinosaur egg tile but we pulled down the wall paper {which was the original wallpaper. I kid you not, it was at least a quarter of an inch thick}, painted, changed the light fixture, the cabinet over the toilet and the sink.

This helped tremendously but we still wanted to get rid of the purple tile. Almost a year later, we decided to tackle the rest of the bathroom transformation.

Cory always said that the tile reminded him of a dinosaur egg because of the purple speckles.

I promise we aren’t nasty people who never clean the floors. The grout was so stained from the past 40 years.

We started demolition on a Thursday night and thought we would certainly be done over the weekend. Let me just say that we were not prepared for this project and the mess it would make. We needed a better way to dispose of the tile, we really should have taped off our bedroom from the dust and should have had a working shop vac.

The mess that was our bedroom. Remember when I said we should have had a better way to dispose of the tile? Well, you see that big trash can… it was full of the tile we had removed. What didn’t occur to us was how heavy that trash can was and how we were going to get it out of the house. We tried moving it and it. wouldn’t. budge. We ended up emptying half of it out the window in the bathroom into another trash can outside and than we had to shovel the tile out of the trash cans into the back of Cory’s truck because we broke both cans trying to move them and get them into the truck. This seriously has me laughing out loud just remembering it. We had no idea what we were doing.

Hampton was over all the remodeling.

Yes, it was dark outside on Saturday when we started cutting tile for the floor. Progress was obviously going slower than anticipated.

It was after midnight before we got the tile down but then it had to dry and be grouted before we could move on to the walls. So here is where things got really difficult and I don’t have any pictures because it was a long, frustrating WEEK. First, let me say that we messed up by not putting sheet rock up. Since we were adding bead board, we didn’t think we needed it and Cory didn’t feel like dealing with the mess of it. It didn’t occur to us until afterwards that there wouldn’t have been a mess because we didn’t have to mud and sand it if we were covering it up. It would have made our lives so much easier! On top of that, I ended up getting really sick Sunday afternoon and Cory had to go back to work on Monday. Plus, we didn’t really do any research on how to hang the bead board and molding so there were a lot of places that didn’t line up and we weren’t exactly sure what to do with the seams of the bead board.

Obviously, we kind of jumped into this project before we were ready which is how 99% of my projects go but Cory made it work.

I feel like we learned a lot that we could use if we ever decided to remove the tile in our full bath but I’m not sure we are ready to take on a project that big. And obviously it took way longer than anticipated. It was frustrating living with the mess for a full week and I’m pretty sure Cory hated me that entire time because while he was working on finishing it every evening, I was laid up on the couch sick as a dog. Even with the frustrations we faced, I still {two years later, remember?} love the results! It’s so light and airy and perfect place for me to get ready in the mornings.

I’m linking this post up with Jenni  for Tuesday Tea and Kayla for DIY’ERS Link Party