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Powder Room Refresh
Last month we had guests from out of town coming to stay at our house for a friends wedding. It was the first time any of our college friends were seeing our home & I was so excited! However, we had one glaring issue...our guest bathroom was horrendous.
See? I wasn't joking. One note, it did have a toilet before we started remodeling but it was small, the lid was broken & it was cocked to the right. When you sat on the toilet, your knees would literally hit the sink; I am only 5' 4" so imagine an even slightly bigger person having to use it! So a month away from our guests' arrival I couldn't bear the thought of them using that bathroom any more & we decided to start the reno.
The process
Obviously, the first thing we started to do was take everything out. Starting with the bane of my existence, the toilet.
Once the toilet was out, I decided to start on the floors. Instead of retiling, I thought of the idea to do cement floors. I found a few tutorials for countertops & thought, "how hard could it be!" Surprisingly, it went almost exactly as planned & was really fairly simple to do. I used Ardex Feather Finish in grey which was a dream to work with! I just added water until I got the right consistency (a bit thinner than cookie dough batter but thicker than cake batter) & used a medium sized putty knife to lay it because the area was so small. We are doing the same flooring in our kitchen so I will most likely us a larger tool for that.
Before I began laying the cement, I glued down a piece of burlap to hide the lines from our stick-on lament tiles underneath. Then I began putting layer after layer of cement down. I waited about 8 hours between each layer & would sand in between to make sure I ended up with a smooth finish.
After the last layer (I did about 6), I finished it off with a layer of Miracle Sealants 511 PT SG 511 Impregnator Penetrating Sealer & a couple of layers of Miracle Sealants SHINE QT SG Mira Shine High Gloss Sealer to get a slightly glossy finish.
**For everything cement floors, check out this post I wrote just for that!
After I did the floors, we went on to finishing demolition. I will say, as excites as I was to have the floors finished & out of the way, I wish I would have waited until after we ripped out the surround tile. I kept worrying about damaging the floors & ended up having to do an extra layer to cover up some of the spots that got ruined.
To take out the surround, I just took a crow bar to it. It was surprisingly easy to do & fun! I felt so accomplished! Then we of course removed the sink, but left the piping until we were ready to change that out.
Here is what it looked like after demo day!
Next we moved on to retiling the surround. After patching up a few holes that were left from demo & sanding down the walls to help remove the leftover glue, we were ready to begin the tile work! This is where it all started coming together for me.
I was able to do all of the tiling by myself (except for cutting them) after looking up a few tutorials. It was my first time so I was so excited & proud!
The tile we ended up with was a white glossy subway tile from Floor & Decor. If you are looking for tile, you have to check them out! They have a ton of options & are so much more economical than other places!
For subway tile, they say the lines on every other row aren't supposed to line up, but I was not sure how to do that so I just went with the simple staggered look & I think it looks great! We finished it off with an un-sanded white grout.
The worst part of this whole project was the plumbing. It was the one piece that I needed my husband to do & of course it was the worst. Poor guy. We did not want to end up with the same issue of hitting your knees on the sink when you sat down on the toilet so we decided to shift the plumbing over about 4-6 inches. No big deal right? Easy peasy. Wrong...
I got 99 problem...
Problem 1. There just so happened to be a support beam right where the plumbing was supposed to come up.
Problem 2. Our house is really old. Which is part of the reason I am totally in love with it, but also the main reason I want to rip my hair out when doing projects. You just never know what you will find. So for this project, the issue with an old house is that the piping was all rusted together & nearly impossible to get apart.
Okay so maybe I don't have 99 problems but these were enough for us to feel like we were in trouble. At this point, we had about 2 weeks until our guests were arriving. One of those weekends we were going to be out of town & we both work full time during the week. So we were hitting crunch time. After spending all Saturday struggling to get the piping out, hope was running out. Sunday morning came, with no showers or teeth brushing, we rushed to Lowe's & got a saw to just cut the darn stuff out. We should have started here but hey, hind sight is 2020 right?
Once the old piping was gone, we reinstalled Pex Tubing which is sooo much easier! You don't have to be a perfectionist to get it to go where you want because it flexes unlike metal. It was pretty simple to put together & we had water running by late Sunday evening!
During the week we were able to install our sink & finish tiling around it. Because of how small the bathroom is, I had to find a really small sink. It's perfect for our size space & was from Overstock.com so didn't break the bank! Win Win.
It wasn't part of my original plan, but the piping sticking out under the sink didn't look as pleasing to the eye as I had originally thought it would so I came up with plan B. We took a wooden crate, cut it in half, stacked the pieces on top of each other & stained it all to create a little rustic covering to hide the piping. It's now one of my favorite pieces in the room & we get so many questions & compliments on it! Yay for plan B!
We only tiled halfway up the wall & the plan was to cover the rest in a marble looking wallpaper. I measured wrong when ordering the wallpaper & only had enough to cover one wall. Plan B again. We covered the one wall with wallpaper & I found a very dark tealish blueish color that I have had my eye on! It was a perfect place to use it & finish off the space!
I was definitely weary about the wallpaper at first because it's really outside my comfort zone, but I pushed myself to step outside my style box & I am so happy I did because I love the results! It's such a small space that I wanted it to feel upscale to make up for it's size. I think the wallpaper added to it's appeal & is a statement piece to our home.
Finishing touches
From the beginning I knew I wanted a large round mirror, but was not wanting to spend a ton because we had a really tight budget for this project. I did some searching & found this perfect mirror at Target for $50! Amazingggg. It's my absolute favorite thing. I asked my husband if we can take it with us when we move, he said no. We will see about that. The towel we chose was also from Target. I really like to mix patterns & I have had my eye on this towel for awhile so I knew it was the exact one I wanted!
I am somewhat shy to say this but I found this cute soap dispenser that is now in both our bathrooms at Meijer for $15. I guess you never know what little beauts you'll find during your weekly shopping trip!
So that's it! Our powder room/guest bath remodel! It was a whirlwind but we are so pleased with how it turned out & I feel like I learned so much! P.S. We finished hanging the mirror the day before our guests arrived. Talk about pushing it to the last minute!!
If you have any questions about what we did or how we did it, comment below!
BONUS: If you get a Target REDcard, you get FREE SHIPPING on all of your orders! I hate paying for shipping so this is huge for me!
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