Splish Splash, I was taking a bath- bathroom renovation v.1.0

If you've ever come over to our house, most likely you will need to use the bathroom at one point or another.  The main floor bathroom is incredibly tiny, so it's crazy to think that it's actually a four piece bathroom.  Let me introduce you to...Big Woody.  (insert dirty joke here.)

Who wouldn't want to sit on that lovely wooden throne, am I right? To the left of the doorway is a floor to ceiling cabinet, that we assume the previous owners installed.

(You can't get a very good picture of the cabinet, so I had to climb into the tub to get this shot.)  To the right of the doorway is the world's tiniest sink, which also appears to be built into the walls. 

And to top off all of Big Woody's decor, let's take a moment to appreciate the light pink tile with coordinating paint color:

Whoo! She is a beaut!  First things first (I'm the realest), we wanted to open up the space above the toilet and get rid of the clunky cabinet. A few jerks of the pry bar later...

So.Much.Better. We think we are going to put some open shelving above the toilet so we can still have some storage.  But, that's for another day.  Preferably when Jeff is home, and he can attend to the saw and I can keep all of my fingers intact.  

Our next item on the agenda was to tear down the other clunky cabinet to the left of the door.  Seriously, if you are over 125 pounds, don't bother using this bathroom, it is so narrow!  (Which may explain why I never used that bathroom.)  This cabinet looked to be a little more difficult to remove, so I focused on paint colors while Jeff figured out how to pull out the cabinet.  

Life got in the way for a few weeks, but the itch to start painting was getting to me. I so sweetly asked Jeff to remove the cabinet so I could paint. What we didn't know is this was going to extend our quick bathroom project into a week-long debacle.  It appears that the previous owners actually built the cabinet first before putting in the dry wall.  Once we removed the cabinet, we were left with large holes in the wall, the ceiling, and the floor.  Terrific. All I wanted to do was paint.  Now we have to make another trip to the hardware store.  

Behind the cabinet.

Our solution was instead of using drywall (drywall was too big of a challenge for us), we chose bead board instead.  We chose this because Jeff could just make one cut (**I mean, the hardware store could), shoot some nails into it, done!  That solved the problem with the wall, but we still had to figure out the ceiling.  Jeff bought a small drywall sheet and cut to fit, added some spacing around the ceiling joists and up it went to seal the giant hole where the cabinet was.

That still left us with the hole in the floor.  We had no extra tile lying around in the house, so we had to come up with Plan B.  Our initial thought was to try and find a tile similar at the store.  In a brief moment of brilliance, I noticed that our floor tile was also used as a border around the bottom of the bathroom wall. You can see it if you squint reallllly hard.

What if I just chiseled it off and reused those old tiles in the hole?  Even Jeff agreed with my idea (way to think on my feet!) and I chiseled away.

I may have left some holes in the drywall. Whoops.

I remembered from one of the many HGTV shows I've watched that you can take all of the gunk and glue off of tiles by heating them in a crockpot.  We decided to give it a go.  

Getting ready for their bath!

It totally worked!  I had to pick off some of the leftover goo, but they were still good to use!  Jeff got to work laying the tile, and we had almost enough to cover the whole area.  We had some extra subway tile lying around and we used those to make a makeshift border.  Not a perfect solution, but it doesn't bother us at all.  

 Let's do a little before and after to appreciate Big Woody's transformation:

Bye, bye Woody!

Corner cabinet before and after

We still have a few more updates we'd like to do to this bathroom (add corner shelves, wallpaper behind the toilet, shelves behind the toilet, new light above the vanity) but at least we can now walk into the bathroom. Feel free to come over and use our bathroom!