Master Bath Renovation

The master bathroom was anything but “Master” when we bought our home, so as you suspected, it became project #2 after the wall tear down between the two bedrooms.  The original master bath (our house was built in 1964) only contained one toilet and a very small vanity and that was unacceptable to us modern folk.  The vinyl flooring was yellow (i think).  I really don’t remember much of that bathroom because we gutted it so fast.  I told you we bought our home in January 2006 but we didn’t actually move into it until April 2006 due to the major master bedroom/bathroom renovations.  When we moved into the house our “Master Project” wasn’t actually finished.  We  were forced to set up our bedroom in our basement family room.  So there we slept for several weeks and used our 1960’s pepto-pink basement bathroom…it was almost as bad as camping!!

When we bought this home the master (half ) bath wasn’t much to look at.  It’s a good thing Ryan and I have vision.

We removed the ugly vanity and the laminate flooring before we delved into the shower project.

We ended up taking the walk-in-closet, which was directly to the right of the bathroom and made that our new shower.  Our course we hired a plumber to run the water lines, etc…one of the few things we actually hired out.

We studded out the frame and dura-rocked it in.

Who knew picking out tile would be such a hard task?  not us…  Of course  every tile we like was ridiculously expensive.  We finally settled on a really cool dark grey 16×16 tile for the floor and a subway tile for the 6×8 walk in shower.  We spent bit more than we had budgeted, but because the space was small we didn’t need too much so we gave it the green light.  The people at the local tile store told us (at the time) that we would be the only house in Charleston with that really cool grey tile!

Lucky for us, Ryan’s dad has a woodworking hobby.  He very graciously built this extra tall vanity that I designed.  We stained it black and added some hardware and granite countertop.  We love the design of the vessel sink (although not very kid friendly, if you have them) so after the vanity and tile were set I set out to research them online.  I was able to find a good deal so I had the sink and faucet shipped.

It took considerably longer to complete this bath than we anticipated, but we are thrilled with the results.  Here are the “afters”…what a big difference compared to what we started with!

If you look carefully in the above picture you can also see a second built-in that Ryan’s dad made for us to match the vanity.  That closet stores our linens, etc and houses the TV so we can catch up on some GMA in the shower every morning (Ryan’s idea, of course)!

We learned SO much on this project.  Michelle learned how to use a tile saw and grout and Ryan learned the ins and outs of durarock.  That knowledge became very useful later when we completely renovated the hallway bath.  More on that to come….