This one has been a long time coming. To say we underestimated the amount of time we’d need for this bathroom is, well, an understatement. I’ve been waiting to post on it until it was finished, because it’s been “almost finished” for weeks now. It’s a long story but needless to say with Paul’s tenacity and sometimes I think our sheer will, it’s finished!

I’m referring to the bathroom downstairs off the drawing room. It was a small and obviously an add on some years ago but oh so tiny and with plywood floors. With the space already there, and conveniently enough a closet line up next to it, it made logical sense to merely open up the wall between the bathroom and the closet, expand the bathroom with a small walk in shower and voila! Easy, right? Well, not quite so as it turns out. 🙂 But all is good in that it’s done now and beautiful!

This was the bathroom as it began…

Nothing glamorous, but we cleaned it and it was functional. But we needed a place for guests to use that “felt” clean as well and had a shower. And so the process began and we estimated a month, maybe 6 weeks. ha! The bathroom had other plans…

We had never tiled before so this was its own learning curve but as with so much about old houses, you find that the walls aren’t square, not plumb and nothing is level. And so it began.

The first fun fact we discovered was that when we pulled out the wall between this bathroom and the closet next to it, the floors were two different levels. So we had to first build up the floor level of the closet to match that of the bathroom. Next, there was a sewer pipe running just inside the wall between the bathroom and the closet, which we obviously had to keep hidden inside the wall. So how to incorporate that into a bathroom, a very tiny bathroom(and getting smaller as we go)?

A few pics of the tear out

The next fun item we discovered was that the studs of the bathroom wall we layed flat, vs perpendicular to the wall. See the image below…they are FLAT against the wall. This was done to gain as much space as possible in that bathroom. But this means the depth of the wall is too thin for outlets. So…Paul’s solution? Build a soffett where the outlets were to be.

The next fun item: the ceilings of the two rooms were different heights. So build a lower ceiling on one side. This bathroom was a challenge in that it really required an almost redo of our plan every step of the way. Between where to run the exhaust fan, how to wire the in floor heating, how to lay the build up the wall thickness without moving the sewer drain and on and on. As well as an odd configuration of the final space we were left with for a shower. Not quite an out of the box bathroom, by any stretch. LOL. It really made us think outside of the box.

Oh and when we opened the wall, we were able to see the mechanism for the pocket doors. Check out the date on it. 1889! How cool!

But, he build the shower pan, layed the cement, applied the liner top coat, thin set and tiled the whole place.

Added trim works and my vanity and aside from a couple of towel racks, it’s finally done and I think it’s stunning and deserving of this house.

A HUGE shout out to Paul for staying with this one. I helped along the way with tiles, grout, painting and plumbing but he definitely did the heavy lifting on this one. Look at this beautiful crown molding he made. And the vanity was an old piece I found in an antique store here and I stripped down and refinished, and added a sink on top. What a beautiful showpiece and any home would be proud to have this little gem in it (and especially deserving of this house)!

A few pics of the final version. I love it! Enjoy (and after month of having only one bathroom upstairs, we ARE, lol)!