master bath renovation: week 2

What a week! We are still sleeping in the full-sized guest bed (rather than our own king bed) because the dust has been flying everywhere in the bedroom! They've laid 99% of the tile, all except for a couple of pieces at the entry threshold. They've grouted the main floor, and I think tomorrow/Tuesday we should have a fully tiled shower, too. They say they'll be done by the end of the week! We're also having them tile our kitchen backsplash (we just don't even have one!) when they finish the bath, but that should be pretty quick!

This is where the vanity and lights are going to go.
The below pendant light is across from this area in the
same room.

There will be a pendant light there, above an IKEA Isala
cabinet across from the vanity. They've primed this room
for paint.This corner is where a linen closet was, backing
up to the shower stall.

The toilet will go where the black thing is, so we'll have
added privacy along with a door to the restroom which
actually closes AND locks!

That's the travertine for the shower floor!

Here's a walk-through of the space:

I also took 8 hours to paint 12 doors and 2 shutters in our house. Whew! I am officially burnt out on painting... but I still have closet doors to paint in the guest bedroom. I'm tempted to just take them out :)

That weird shadow at the top is the pull-cord to pull down the attic stairs :)

One more week!!

xo,

master bath remodel madness

I think I've long since established that I sign myself up for crazy tasks, right?

We leave for Colorado soon (YAY! Vacation with a baby! Flying with a baby! Lugging around 1,000 baby things!), and while we're gone, we're having our master bath ripped out and starting the remodel. I figured this would be a nice way to avoid some of the mess, but it's making things complicated: pack and plan for traveling with Ethan + order and organize all the new things for the bathroom. We're entering into crunch time and I still don't know what I'm doing.

Sometimes the things we are blessed with (vacation, remodel) can be hard work, too!

Here's a re-post of some 'before' master bathroom pictures. We've got pink terrazzo from the '80s, a weird old jetted tub with cracks and a lovely mirror (enclosed by 3 walls), and a useless vanity space. Oh, and a moldy shower.

this will be double sinks, no toilet

double sinks, no toilet

totally removing the shower and the super narrow
linen closet behind it. new floor will flow into
carpeted closet

-the block window will be gone (!)
-will be a walk-in shower with Travertine mosaic floors

this will have a toilet instead of a random vanity

rough sketch with paint

fancy sketch made online of our to-be plabs

If you want to check out what it's going to look like, you can view the Haynes Heartbeat {master bathroom Pinterest page}!

We're also hoping to have a back splash put in the kitchen while we have our contractors in the house anyway, which would leave only a couple of projects:

-possible wood floors (seems more and more likely we will leave the carpet as-is, but changes by day)

-new siding (replace some)

-paint interior doors (I know... tisk tisk, I still need to do this!)

-fix railing outside (wobbles)

We also lost our A/C last week, but are happy to report that we survived 3 days of Texas heat, and now have a functioning air conditioner!

I think that's all I've got right now... Oh, and Ethan turns 10 months old this Thursday! Hopefully I'll remember to take pictures in the morning for a sweet post. I cannot believe we are so close to his birthday! Sheesh!

xo,

one year later

It's been one year since we moved into this house... and so much has happened!

We tore into it with a guest bath remodel:

We took a trip to Hawaii:

We announced our pregnancy to the world:

We (I) painted the door:

We (I) painted MANY walls:

We (I) decorated a nursery:

We (someone else) replaced the tile:

We welcomed our baby boy:

And because I need a legitimate list to make myself feel better about all of our hard work, here it is:

-removed wallpaper in two rooms

-remodeled the entire guest bath, including new sheetrock, vanity, raising the light fixture, removing the furdown, and replacing the tile (ourselves)

-painted wallpaper in one room

-changed 5 entry locks (that was not fun!)

-painted the front door

-replaced the door to the back yard in the bedroom

-re-stained the grout in the master bath

-painted the shower enclosure (metal part) bronze in master bath

-replaced light in master bath

-removed all kitchen cabinet hardware, re-hung and re-painted kitchen cabinet doors

-re-tiled kitchen and entryway

-painted dining room

-painted entryway

-gave Ethan an awesome nursery, complete with wallpaper and chair rail

-created a play room

-redecorated the guest bedroom

-replaced the trash compactor with the wine fridge

I feel like they could do that in a day on HGTV, but for an expecting couple (who now has a baby!) I think that is really darn good! There were a lot of moments when I cried and wondered what we'd gotten ourselves into, but we both agree that we are starting to love this house... home is what you make it, and we are literally making it our own!

Happy one-year anniversary, house!

{for more updates & photos, click here and here!}

xo,

the (mostly) finished entryway

This is what our living room looked like before our party:

Filing taxes after buying a house and having a baby = a huge mess! We managed to get that all cleaned up, just as we wrapped up the entryway. We do still need to paint the hall doors (one is on the right of this picture - still beige!) but I am waiting to borrow my dad's paint sprayer so it goes faster...

Without further ado, here is the finished product!

The shelf is Threshold by Target. The quality is terrible
(even for Target!) so it may be returned soon...

A shot of the door with the new taupe paint

The paint in the entryway looks more brown than in the office space, but it is exactly the same. I love it - I told Austin the other day that the entryway makes me feel like we have a model home - not something from the 1970's that we're struggling to bring into the 21st century! If you're wondering, two coats of Benjamin Moore paint in two rooms (just the lower half) went further than two coats of Valspar just in the entryway. We did not use primer on the lower half of the entryway, and the Benjamin Moore covered it well (it was beige). We then used primer + two coats of Valspar's Winter Dawn on the top (that's the same shade the trim is but in a different finish). We have more Benjamin Moore paint left over than Valspar, so though it was twice as expensive, it covers twice as well. We hope to use the remaining paint in the master bathroom remodel, and we also hope to buy more of that tile for the eventual master bathroom remodel, so the house feels cohesive (and because we love the tile & paint together!)

We could not be happier with the results. Our next big projects are:
-painting all of the trim in the entire house
-painting all of the doors in the entire house
-making a decomposed granite patio in the back yard
-remodeling the master bath
-installing engineered hardwood in the office and living areas (potentially the hallway as well)

Recap of the before & after:

For now, the painting will continue on. We're waiting a little while to start on the rest. It's still too chilly - even in Texas - to work in the back yard!

xo,

Master Bath Ideas

This project is daunting. We knew when we bought the house that it would have to be approached, but we didn't know how soon, how much it would cost, or what we would do with it.

The first option was to leave the layout as-is (the layout makes no sense, as you'll see below) and just do a facelift. We decided to be real with ourselves, though, and recognize that kitchens & baths sell houses, so we decided that doing it up big (a full remodel) was the only way to go.

If you come to our house, it's highly likely that I will avoid showing you the master bathroom. It is by all means, disgusting. It is old, and our house was a rent house, so it was not well-taken-care-of.

The shower is moldy (I'm sure we are killing ourselves a little each time we use it) and everything is covered in mauve terrazzo. I know every guy wakes up wanting to shower in a pink bathroom....

This is the tiny 24" doorway into our bathroom. It's like
that because the shower is immediately to the right of the
doorway.

It was also a DIY gone bad. There are gaps between the tile and the wall where they didn't cut the tile properly so they just filled it in with grout, and the tiles are uneven so you kick them just a little.

Gross, the drawer face fell off of the front of that cabinet.
Nevermind how messy we are.

It's hard to will yourself to take care of something that was so poorly taken care of before. Oh, and this sink is so low, Austin just about breaks his back every morning.

The stall looks somewhat updated but that's because we
spray-painted it. The glass is waterstained and that
seems irreversible.

That's right, just one sink in the master bath! Oh, and
trust me, that was not the best place to put a toilet....

Anyone want to take a jacuzzi bath with a giant mirror?
No? Okay, lets make this laundry storage.
(That is Austin's "don't dry" pile.)

Voila! This is where a toilet belongs...

The vanity and the tub were part of a remodel to the house in the 80's (it had to be the 80's, the choices were so bad). It used to be a dog run from the garage to the back yard right off the laundry room/kitchen. Because our house only has indirect back yard access (through our bedroom or the garage) we considered reinstating this, but we decided the bathroom really does need to meet today's standards, so we are keeping that square footage in the bathroom. Plus, we weren't sure it'd give us much of an advantage over the alternate routes to the back yard. That indirect access problem is probably the #1 reason we'd ever move out of this house. Most houses have access from the living room/kitchen... but not us!

So here's the current layout, and the proposed layout. Note that the triangle thing in the proposed layout was (what I imagined to be) built-in storage, but we decided we'd just put a dresser up against that wall for storage instead. We are ditching that shower space entirely to open up the bathroom. It's a pretty tight fit right now. I'm also hoping to put in a full-length mirror in there. We don't have one anywhere in the house, and Austin is always asking if he is too wrinkly. The man needs a mirror.

This is the fourth paint-drawing I made of this space before we decided we liked this option. And now we really, really like this option (as in, this is it!).

We'd take out the awkward linen closet (it's too deep and narrow to be beneficial), widen the doorway and either put in a pocket door or narrow double-doors, make the bathtub area into a walk-in shower (NO GLASS!) and move the toilet ($$$) so it's more like a water closet where the vanity is currently. That double-sink is going to be spectacular - I think that area is something like 80" wide! I'm hoping to not have to move the drain where the bath is so we can save some money, but we will see what the contractor says when they come for an estimate... hopefully this week.

We love this proposed layout right now, and we know it is going to cost a ton of money, but we also know it is the difference between selling this house in the future, and struggling to get it off the market.

With a new baby, this is not a project we are looking to do ourselves (though we will do some demo and install lights and bath fixtures ourselves to save a little bit of money). I'm excited for the possibilities, though - like soundproof green board (if they make that) that will let me sleep soundly when Austin goes to work before the sun rises.

These are the decorating ideas I have for this bathroom: {pinterest board}. I want it to feel like a spa, and I'm considering using the same tile from the kitchen in here to help tie the house together. Once we put in wood floors (down the line), I don't want to have a myriad of flooring types in the house, so I think this would make it cohesive and feel a little newer, since that's what most builders do now.

Any ideas or suggestions for our sufficiently awkward space, or for easy access to the back yard? Any remodeling on your horizon (with a new baby to boot)?

love,

UPDATE: This is as close to scale as I could get. This is a general idea of what we are planning to do.