When I was about 3 months pregnant for Levi, we decided to tackle our Master Bedroom/ Bath. We wanted this space to be finished before the baby was born so we thought we'd play it safe and begin it 6 months ahead of time. After all, we only planned to do a little cosmetic update to this bathroom. We had ended up gutting and redoing the entire hall bath to the tune of about $2,500 and we did not want to spend that much on this bath. We wanted to keep it as cheap as possible.
We planned to replace the shower with the same type of set up that was in there. We would have just kept the existing one but our water heater had been corroding for a few years and dumping a ton of iron into our water resulting in anything that was subjected to hot water to take on an orange cast.
It was nothing to really get excited about but it worked and, like I said, I didn't want to spend much.
We also planned to paint / refinish our sink base, medicine cabinet. And put in new flooring.
But our friends Nick, Seth and Justin came over to help Dave one Friday night. And that's when we unearthed the nightmare....After they pulled up the bathroom linoleum we found this water damage.
The shower had been leaking. When we got into the crawlspace we saw why. When we had the home inspected before buying it, the inspector stated that the shower drain was leaking. We asked the previous owners to fix that before we bought it. They said they did. Apparently all they did was spray a GIANT puff of "Great Stuff Expanding Foam" all around the drain. Being naive 20 year olds who had no idea how to repair plumbing, we didn't even think to check their work. So 7 whole years later, there was some damage. The leaking drain had caused a bit of water damage on the surrounding floor joists and subfloor and had wicked up the walls and damaged the studs and drywall. We determined we would have to gut this entire area and start from scratch to be sure that we were eradicating all the water damage. So we tore out the walls and subfloor, sister up the damaged floor joists with new joists and then put in a new subfloor and walls.
So much for the budget friendly cosmetic upgrade!
Look at this bad boy surrounded by expanding foam.
And the wet floor joists.
In the photo below you can see the doubled up floor joists:
After a day of demolition, here's half of our house in a trailer in the driveway!
Since we basically had to rebuild this entire section of the house anyways, I set to work on determining a better layout for this area...
Here are some floorplans for you to see what I will attempt to describe.
We never liked how the bathroom was basically a hallway between the laundry room and master bedroom. Who likes bathrooms with more than 1 door anyways? Especially when they don't lock? It's always a bit nerve wracking to try to go to the bathroom in that scenario. So, we decided to close off the doorway to the laundry room and make this bath strictly a "master bath" off the "master bedroom" creating a lot more privacy.
We would eliminate the closet in the laundry room (on the right side) and use that space to make a larger Walk In Closet off the Master Bath. We considering creating access to the WIC from the bedroom but liked the idea of more wall space in the bedroom for furniture, etc.
We would then build a closet on the other end of the laundry room to enclose the water softener and put the plumbing that was coming out of the floor (the big black blob in the top left corner of the Before drawing) back inside the walls. This would also give us a place to tuck our coats, purses, etc.
We also wanted to determine a way to have a larger shower, possibly a shower/tub combination in this bathroom. We determined that a standard unit would be 60" long. And our bathroom was only 58" long. So we moved the wall between the bath and laundry room 1" into the laundry room (2" would have ran into the exterior doorway) and then framed the wall with 2 x 3's instead of 2 x 4's to get our extra 2" so we could fit a tub in.
This is what we ended up with in the bathroom after about 6 LOOOONG months of work (and I have no idea how much money....I stopped counting!):
It was finished about 1 week before the little guy in the picture above was born.
And please check back tomorrow morning for a step-by-step tutorial on how we heated our marble tile floor.
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