House Before & After Series: Bathroom

Our home was built in 1923 and still has a pretty original 1920s style bathroom. D and I knew the bathroom would need to be redone when we bought our home. For one, the tile is pink and black. Secondly, there was a huge crack in the tile floor.

See images here:

Some of the built in fixtures were missing or damaged like this towel bar:

Cracked tile:

Ugly pink and black tile:

We have some ideas of what we would like to do to the bathroom, starting with a new tile floor and removing the tile on the walls. We plan to keep the toilet since it's fairly new as well as the pedestal sink. It's a pretty small bathroom so the pedestal sink keeps it feeling open. I'd love to get a new whirlpool tub because since our home has only 1 tub I may as well right? I will likely refinish the existing original vanity cabinet and just replace the mirror. We will also be building a nice cover for the radiator.

Here's a good shot of the bathroom in it's current state:

Originally, D and I had discussed ripping out the tile, putting subway tile only in the shower, and patching up the wall then painting. I also wanted to install wood-look porcelain tile flooring. Well, after much thought we have decided we would like to keep the walls tiled and use a 1920s style flooring to retain the home's character. 

We have a couple options that I have mocked up in photoshop:

Subway tile in the shower and on the walls

Subway tile in the shower and breadboard on the walls:

What do you think? We are leaning towards all subway tile. What we are looking for is to keep the bathroom mostly white, but paint the upper half of the walls to bring in some color. We have new white towels from our wedding registry and I have some pretty shower curtains with a light aqua/teal paisley pattern I am saving for our new bathroom. We have picked out porcelain hex tile for the floors and traditional white subway tile for the shower and walls. That's how they did it in the 1920s! We are so excited to get started on this HUGE project and we know the bathroom will be stunning when finished!

UPDATE: So, I have found with my other projects that the best way to start off is with a plan. In this case that plan consists of a mood board and an excel document. What would I do without my vast toolbox of computer software? 

I updated my original bathroom mood board created back in April when we bought the house to reflect the changes we have made in our reno plans. I tried to include the exact items and finishes we would be selecting so we can see how they will all work together. I'm sure this document will be important motivation for us to keep going while we have no bathroom for a month. I centered around a mood image that best represented what the final result will (hopefully) look like. 

The second document I created is an excel document with a budget estimate and a step by step to do list with a timeline. We plan on running this by our architect brother in law to see if we missed anything and if he has any advice for us. I used the blog YoungHouseLove as a major source of information for estimating the budget and timeline. They did an entire post on their bathroom renovation that they did themselves. You can check out that post here. It was really helpful inspiration and motivation that we CAN do this! I am starting to contact plumbers now for estimates on removing and installing a new tub. We left a lot of room in the budget for unexpected expenses. I think it depends on how much we decide to do ourselves versus hire a professional. We estimated $10,000 to renovate the bathroom. If our actual total comes in close to $5,000, I will be one happy lady! Here's the timeline and budget breakdown (estimate):

 I'm estimating this to take a total of about 18 days, which I would spread out over about a month. So we will plan on not being able to use the bathroom for about a month. We have another toilet, but only 1 shower.  Good thing we have gym memberships :)

House Before & After Series: Exterior

We love the colonial style of our home. It has so much character with the original windows, columns, and stucco. It just needed a little mini-makeover to really sing.

Here is the house before we did anything to the exterior:

These pictures were taken in May and our house looks so different now! My first project was to paint the front door a bright red color. I love how inviting and bold red doors are. To compliment the red door, I wanted to paint the maroon shutters black. We also had some landscaping work to do.

Here are pictures with all of the updates!

The red and black is such a classic look. And our garden filled out really nicely! Can't wait to really start working on cleaning that up next spring. Altogether, we painted the door red, painted the shutters black, hung up the flag, got urn planters and plants for the porch, put mulch down, planted some hostas and hydrangeas and gave the yard a nice trim. The house could probably use a wash, but we will save that for the spring.

I love our red door! What do you think?

September is almost over and fall is here!

You know what that means?

Wedding is over and we will be focusing on some house projects. We had an amazing wedding and honeymoon! I will be sure to post about our wedding pictures when we get them back. I know they will be stunning!

Now that the wedding is behind us, we have a lot more free time so I will be able to update my blog more frequently as we continue to tackle some house projects. The big one for the winter will be (hopefully) renovating our bathroom. It needs a major overhaul. We're talking new floors, new tub, new tile- the works. I have also decided that while we are redoing the bathroom we might as well invest in a whirlpool tub, right? YOLO.

I will post soon to show our house exterior mini- makeover.