Our Very Small Bathroom Demo

The last few years Caleb and I have stopped renting our basement apartment and have been slowly converting it into a guest suite and family room area.

We've really enjoyed being able to host people (even large families) down there.

There is a full size kitchen, full bathroom, living room, dining room, and bed room. 

We recently finished building a faux fireplace with built in bookcases (I need to post about that soon!). It came out beautifully. Caleb did a fantastic job on the whole unit.

So long story short last month we had visitors who discovered that the guest room bathroom had water leaking underneath the flooring. It must have been leaking for some time as there was extensive water damage all over the basement when we ripped up all the flooring.

It is a drain issue and insurance refuses to cover it. The water damaged our laminate flooring (it's total trash), the bathroom flooring, shower unit, baseboards, etc etc etc.

It is a MESS down there. We decided to go ahead and gut the entire bathroom. It needed it anyways as it is old (1950's) and not very well put together to begin with.

I'll try and document our progress as we go. We are hoping to finish it before Fall.

Above is a listing picture from when we bought the house. The bathroom is so very small that it is difficult to photograph. Sadly, because of the way the home is constructed there isn't a way to affordably make the bathroom any larger. 

So much water damage.

Yucky old tiles we found behind the circa 1980's plastic shower surround that had to be removed to fix the drain.

ThOneo 

One good thing about removing the plastic surround (besides removing it's hideous tan self) is that we can gain almost a foot in each direction in the shower. Before the shower was a SUPER small tight space and the ceiling was so low. 

Caleb found all kinds of issues in when he opened up the walls.

Caleb removed all the old tiles and the old sink that was in really bad condition. 

So we can do most reno stuff ourselves, but fixing the drain and replumbing everything is something we weren't comfortable with undertaking and so we called the plumber for all that part. 

Caleb has been working on building a new shower stall that will be tiled with white subway tiles (!) and even have a light in it (it was super dark before). We've added recessed lights in the ceiling and rewired all electrical. New drywall has been hung and primed. We got rid of the old tiled drop ceiling and put up a nice smooth ceiling (yay!). 

And this week's project, so far has been to tile and grout the new bathroom floor. I used the same faux stone tiles from Lowe's (they look and feel just like real stone) that I used on the guest suite fireplace surround. I'm so happy with how they turned out! 

Tonight will be putting insulation and tile backerboard stuff up in preparation for tiling the walls soon.