house projects: downstairs bathroom

Taking another day off from blathering about running....you can check out my first and second house projects posts if you'd like, but essentially, my house is falling down around me and I am working hard to slow that process down.  As always, you can click on any of these pictures to see a much larger version of the mess.


The basement seems to be particularly bad, and it wasn't a priority when I first moved in for two reasons - it was being rented to a friend, and I wanted to get through some projects on the first floor before coming downstairs.  When we moved in, the basement bathroom looked like this:

Yeah.  A good scrubbing took care of most of it, and it got painted the same brown (NOT a good idea, but we had extra paint) as the living room on one of our painting spree weekends, so it was fully functional for a while.  Then, one evening last fall, I smelled mold and this happened.

What we kind of figured out happened was two things - first, the tub needed to be recaulked because water had been seeping into the walls.  But the tub itself was cracked and leaking, and that made the bathroom pretty much unusable.  So I ripped out all the drywall that had been affected with mold, sprayed all the studs with a water/bleach mix (and then was surprised when this ruined the carpet, sigh) and set up a dehumidifier to dry everything out.  And it stayed like that for about 8 months until I could put together the money to have it worked on.  We decided that since we needed to replace the tub and the wall tile, to go ahead and replace the floor tile at the same time since that was in really bad condition as well.  And we decided to rip out some of the carpet by the basement entrance that had been ruined by a water leak and tile that entryway as well.  Here's that entryway when we moved in.

After doing a lot of research, we decided to NOT try and DIY the tub and tile job.  I did take some shots as they worked, though.  Here's the bathroom all ripped out (sorry about the bad pictures, it's pretty tough to take good shots of a small space).

And here's the new wall tile:

The new floor tile:

And the new entryway tile:

(Thanks to Elizabeth for the awesome recommendation, by the way!)  We decided that since we were going to have to paint to touch up the bathroom anyway, to go ahead and repaint the same color as the rest of the basement (lots of leftover paint from that project).  I did several rounds of spackle-wait-sand-spackle-wait-sand before painting - our walls are all in awful shape and I could probably spend a solid month doing nothing but repairing them.

We (and by "we" I mean the poet) replaced the light fixture, the TP holder and the door knob.

The last thing we did was hang up a large picture to cover some of the wall that we couldn't repair (without replacing drywall, anyway) and a new shower curtain. I spent about three days buying and returning mirrors before finally finding one I loved at Home Goods.


So here's the before again...

And the after (yes, I did eventually clean that big smudge off the mirror).

I love how great it looks, but it's made the rest of the basement look completely awful, so that's up next...


Happy Tuesday, everyone!  I'm obsessed with home renovation, so drop me some links if you'd like!