Master Bath - The Finale

So, it has been ages since I've posted on my Blog. Honestly, by November we felt drained and overwhelmed with our master bath project, Christmas and a blizzard hit, and our winter here in Virginia continues to be crazy in case you don't watch weather news. We are currently shoveling out of blizzard #2. I was also uninspired due to our camera woes from 09 when two cameras died and the remaining ones were OK at best.

So here we are in February 2010, time to get my butt moving and get back, I hope, to posting with some regularity. Santa was nice enough to bring me a wonderful Cannon Rebel XSi for Christmas which has wiped away my photography depression. I've been playing a ton and have a lovely little macro lens on my birthday wish list this month.

So on to the Master Bath final reveal. This project seemed never ending and as almost all the work was done by my personal at-home contractor, well we can only move so fast or come up with so much funding all at once. We do have one more thing to complete and that is a backsplash, but we'll have more on that in a future post.

This bathroom remodel probably mixes my personal style the best of any room I've ever designed. If you've ever seen my home you'd know that I have a lot of vintage and traditional but I also love to pop in modern elements whenever I find something I like. This bathroom brings traditional (shower, floors), vintage (lights, shower, floor, accessories) and modern (vanity, storage, mirrors, rug) all together in I think a fairly cohesive design. It does not necessarily all go together when you look at the pieces individually, in fact before the vanity was in I was having serious misgivings that I picked correctly and perhaps it just would not work with the shower, but it flows so nicely with the modern and traditional and vintage elements that I really love it all together.

Master Bath Revisited:

Here are some pictures of what the master bath looked like when we first looked at our house - note all the interiors belong to the prior owners.

Looking into the bathroom from the bedroom, note a lack of door, wallpaper galore and carpet!! in the bathroom.

The double vanity with 80"s cabinet and hardware. The mirror is nice and large but no medicine cabinet. You can see the shower/toilet room from here.

Here is the smaller shower, toilet & linen closet room. We tore all of this out including the wall and closet.

The old double shower with a plastic base and ceramic tiles, the ones with disintegrating wallboard and mold hidden behind them.

As you can see the original bathroom had outdated 80's/90's wallpaper, vanity, etc. The sink and closet area was in one space and open to the bedroom while the shower, toilet and linen closet were in a small room in the back. We pretty much hated it and almost did not buy our house because of this space and the fact the basement was not finished.

The bathroom area is not large at all and is compounded by the fact that the closets share the space. We went through several sheets of graph paper modeling out different floor plans by moving the closets, sinks, shower & toilet in different configurations. We ideally wanted a walk-in closet separate from the bathroom, an overall bigger bathroom, and to make it separate from the bedroom space with a door. of all our scenarios several required permits due to moving all the plumbing and electrical, some required eating into our bedroom space which I wasn't crazy about and some would have used the existing washer/dryer space behind our bathroom requiring those to move inside the closet or down to the basement, again neither of which I was crazy about. Additionally the more full demo and moving of walls we would have to do required more $ and more time and potentially contractors and permits. So in the end after a ton of deliberation and input from others we decided to work with the existing footprint and to open up the space visually as much as possible.

The Reveal:

Here is our new bathroom! Even though we used the same footprint the space seems twice as big. We kept everything to their original placement but by removing the wall dividing the shower area , a large bulkhead over the sinks and the linen closet we were able to really open things up. Here is a play by play in pictures of what we did:

Long view in from the bedroom similar to the first picture in the post above. We added a door to the bedroom which makes the bathroom it's own enclosed space.

Looking back the other way towards the bedroom behind the new door. We added new pull out closet doors with iron hinges and handles - love those! The runner from Overstock.com is a pretty gray blue with bursts of texture, it coordinates with our shower mosaic. I believe this rug is sold out now. The lighting is reproduction vintage schoolhouse lights from rejuvenation.com. They are perfect in the space, clean lines using vintage shapes.

Here was the last wall standing in the shower demo.

My tile guy took the new bathroom approved cement-board to the ceiling and poured a concrete shower pan from scratch - he is pretty awesome. The tiles are all travertine from The Tile Shop, set in a subway pattern on the walls with a mosaic detail 3/4 way up and a contrasting floor. We salvaged the original shower doors by spray painting them to match the shower hardware.

After a lot of debate I took a cue from the 2009 HGTV Dream home and chose engineered hardwood flooring. If you research this there are differing opinions on putting any type of wood flooring in a bathroom but we really wanted a warm look for the floor and we felt continuing the travertine might look too cold and be too expensive. We chose an expensive sound proofing vapor barrier to go under the floor, you can see the blue edge of it peaking from under the floor. We are thrilled with how it looks and don't regret it at all. We chose Bruce Lock n' Fold in Brazilian Cherry.

Here is the floor all done, I was able to find a matching wood cover for our floor vent, you can just see it by the toilet. The long runner and a rubber backed rug in front of the shower protect the floor from getting much contact with water.

The area around the sinks had to be torn down and a bulk head with dropped lights removed so the ceiling would be flat throughout the space. My handy plumber/electrician moved the drains and electrical and added a second outlet so we both have one. New electrical for vanity lights was also added. The drywall presented a number of challenges when we found warped studs were used originally so it went up a bit wonky. At that point we hired some guys who did work on our house when we first moved in to do all the mudding, sanding and painting in the bathroom. That was a huge load off of us.

Here is the new vanity, it is quite modern. It is a floating vanity affixed to the wall and has no legs. It is longer than our old one by 12 inches with raised porcelain sinks. My live-in contractor is 6'4' and I am 5'8" and we always find normal sinks to be too low and troublesome for our backs. We chose this design so we could get the height where we wanted it and we love it - way less stress on the back. The vanity is all hardwood (we tested that by drilling holes through the insides for the pipes - serious hardwood!) and was purchased from Overstock.com as a set with the faucets, medicine cabinet mirrors and shelves all together. If we were purchasing these items separately we would have bought the hardware in an iron finish to be cohesive with the rest of the space but for now we are living with the polished chrome, secretly I kind of like them. The pretty blue jar is made of recycled glass from Spain.

2 of 3 closets. The first is my hubby's, mine looks pretty much the same except with an extra pullout basket, all 3 have a high shelf that is not visible in the pictures for extra storage. The second picture is the 3rd closet which is 60% clothes (long hanging and shelf items) with 40% for a linen closet. Having the 3 spaces in the end works much nicer than a walk-in closet. We each have our own space and the closets aren't even full yet so the organizer system worked wonders. I reviewed custom companies and came close to choosing easyclosets.com as their materials and designs were very nice. In the end we chose to save money and replicate our design done on the Easy Closet website by using the Lowe's line by Sauder. We did all 3 closets for less than the price of one closet through Easy Closets (California Closets would have been even more expensive). We are very happy with the look and organization and savings we got by doing it ourself via Lowe's. One last step will be changing over to all wood hangers this year, my plan is to get them from ikea. We did this for our daughter's closet and they look great and are very durable.

So this is the end of the review, lots of work done and now we have been decompressing and enjoying getting our bedroom back. Wonder what our poor bedroom looked like though all this mayhem? Here is an average day over a weekend when we were working on the remodel. Just keeping it real.

Closet Organizers

As we take the month of October to ponder how to finish the rest of our master bath and closets I am a bit overwhelmed at the closet organizer choices. We were initially leaning toward tearing everything out and adding an Ikea Pax system but the tear-out costs on top of the closet cost is making us think twice. So here is some closet eye candy (well maybe it just all looks sweet to me). Any loves?

California Closets

Closet Tailors

Elfa from The Container Store

Elfa from The Container Store

Easy Closets

Easy Closets as on livinginsmallsizes.com

Easy Closets from jeanette.blogspot.com

Space Masters

California Closets

Easy Closets Pantry

California Closets

Portland Closet

This last one is my personal eye candy, would I love to have that closet! Not to mention the shoes and purses it contains...yum.

Master Bath Mood Board

I've been playing around with the mood board concept for decisions on our master bath. Now that the shower is done we are trying to decide on how we want to finish the rest of the space so we can determine the costs and save up for what we really want. Of course what we really want is pricey so we are trying to balance quality finishes and be as cost effective as possible.

Our master bath is essentially a long hallway, the bath part is fairly small though we have opened it up as much as possible. The closet area is all part of the bathroom though we could have closed it off we decided it would make both spaces feel too small and want to keep it as open as we can. I am going for a mix of modern and traditional.

What do you think, I'd appreciate any suggestions!

From Master Bath Remodel

Except for the shower picture all of these come from websites where I sought inspiration. I think the more modern vanity is my favorite though it has less storage, I'm a bit on the fence about that. The closets are another area we are hotly debating. We want to tear them all out and use ikea pax similar to what you see above only with an opaque glass door. I love their floor to ceiling closets but between the cost and work of a tear-out and then the cost of the closets it is a lot. Our other option is to leave them as is (3 separate closets with traditional sliding doors) and just get new inserts. It would cost us a lot less but I don't think we'd be nearly as happy.

Quick Bathroom Cabinet Remodel

Before I attempted my kitchen cabinets using Caromal Colours paint I had done a test run on the vanity in my half bath. It was a pretty standard builder grade oak cabinet from the 80's, just like my kitchen. You can read here about how I discovered and became intrigued by Caromal Colours paint last year when shopping in Occoquan, VA. I picked up a jar of Peppercorn textured basecoat paint which is an almost black color.

Just like with my kitchen cabinets, I only washed the cabinet, I did not remove the door or hinges. I did tape off the inside so it would have a nice clean edge when opening the cabinet. I did this in one evening while watching TV in between the 2 coats I applied (this used roughly 1/3 jar paint). It was a super quick and easy renovation and I think it really transformed the cabinet.

The mirror above the cabinet was a bright gold color left by the prior owners. I hand painted this with a combination of pewter and black paint from Michael's to give it more of an antique look and to coordinate better with the cabinet. I then replaced the old brass cabinet handles with a chunky modern iron handle.

All in all a quick remodel for $35 in paint (well less really because I did not use the whole jar) and $20 for new hardware.

Here is the before (sorry for the bad shot, taken before we bought our house):

From Chancellor Old Photos

Here is the after:

From A Virginia Home Post

From Chancellor Dr

Shower Remodel Complete!

I've mentioned a few times the shower remodel we undertook 6 months ago. Yes 6 months is a long time, too long. If we were solely focused on the shower it would have been done much sooner, but work, kids, summer vacations and starting school in the fall all created a much slower pace than we would have wished for. All that said, it turned out just beautifully and my Tile Master (yup, I promoted him from just the The Tile Guy) should seriously take this up as a second job.

So here is what we started with when we bought our house a little over a year ago. Sorry they aren't better photos, but you get the picture. It wasn't a terrible shower, but not great either. It was 3/4 high cream ceramic tile with a molded plastic base. Our shower is a double, basically the size of a tub but without the tub. We debated quite a bit adding the tub but neither of us are big bathers and we enjoyed the large double shower more. The real issue was it was poorly constructed over regular sheetrock and when we bought the house we did not know of all the water damage behind the tiles.

From Chancellor Old Photos

From Chancellor Old Photos

And here is the new shower! It is all travertine marble with bronze hardware, the tiling goes up to the ceiling now and is laid in a subway tile fashion with the mosaic insert about 3/4 high on the wall. There is a small bench for sitting and 4 shelves for shampoos, etc. We decided to reuse the existing shower doors and spray painted them bronze, we were pretty psyched to see how well the final paint job matched. If you look closely you can see the recently promoted Tile Master showing off his handywork. Yes, that is the look of sheer relief on his face.

From Master Bath Remodel

From Master Bath Remodel

From Master Bath Remodel

So, did you notice all that happiness on the tile master's face? That picture was taken last night. I did not take a picture of his face when this happened this morning in the hallway shower we've all been using during the remodel...but I think you can imagine it...

From Chancellor Dr