Our Freaking Awesome Bathroom!!!

Ok, this is the project I'm most proud of, not only because it looks so awesome, but because it forced me to do stuff that I didn't think I could do!

Meg has wanted to tile our bathroom floor since we moved in, and since we didn't do much in the house this summer, we decided to go ahead and do it. First, of course, we removed the old laminate floor, and we noticed that they had installed it on top of the old linoleum. Once I saw that, I was afraid to lift it because I didn't want to see what was underneath it. Sure enough, the floor had rotted and it came out in handfuls.





Once we finished lifting the old floor, I saw that the subfloor had also roted around the toilet, and that's when I freaked out. I didn't want to lift the whole thing and reinstall it, because I had no idea how to do it. I even thought of calling the bishop and assembling a group of construction expert brothers to help me out.



Once the panic passed, I went to Lowes and asked what the heck I could do. They explained that all I needed to do was to lay floor wood, which looks like plywood, but it's way stronger, and on top of that I could just lay the backer-board (which they call "hardy back") and then tile right on top of that. It really wasn't that hard. I even got the circle around the toilet flange perfect! (There in the top right, by the box of nails.)



Once we got the new subfloor down, we installed the backsplash. We started from the top with that accent-strip, so we had to tape the tile as it dried, so it wouldn't run down.



After a few rows, we nailed a 1x2 to the wall to hold the tiles in place as the mortar dried (I read this somewhere). After that, I realized that if I just put a nail under each tile as I installed them, I would get the same result and I could go much faster.





Next came the floor. The tile that we chose was beautiful, but really tricky to cut, since it is actually made up of tiny pieces of marble put together. After a couple of mess-ups I figured it out and the process went faster and cleaner. The toilet came next, as soon as the mortar dried. I mean, we didn't have a toilet for a day!! That was the worst part of the whole project. We actually had to use the church's bathroom the first morning we started working on ours, and that wasn't that much fun with a crying baby in the church as we took turns!





I really like our new sink. It's a regular pedestal sink, but it makes the bathroom look bigger and cleaner. The faucet is really nice, and it goes with our other brushed nickel fixtures, which look great and were very inexpensive (light, shower curtain rod, and switch and outlet boxes).



So... I loooove how our bathroom looks now, but I hated putting it together. It was a lot of work, it was messy, and even scary at times when I didn't know what I was going (I realized that if you go to Home Depot and tell the people at the customer service desk that you're not being help, you will get amazing service and personalized advice from an expert in a matter of seconds). But anyway, it's done, and I hope I never have to do another bathroom renovation like this again! At least not in a bathroom with a rotten floor and subfloor, that's for sure.