Bathroom Remodel - Part 2 (90% there)

So I won't bore anyone with all the mid-way photos of the bathroom; I'll just skip to the good stuff. We're about 90% done with it now. R and I need to hang a mirror, buy and hang towel racks, a TP holder, change out the door hardware, and all that little stuff.

Oh and spend a billion dollars on a shower door. (For now we have a ghetto shower curtain, complete with wrapping paper ribbon holding it up to a tension rod. I refuse to spend one more stinking dollar on that shower than I have to so I wasn't going to be buying shower curtain rings or anything.) We're going to wait a month or two on the shower door, just because I can't bear to spend any more money on the room right now.

Our teeny-tiny bathroom:

Gonna put some glass shelves in that mosaic cut-out above the sink, for our toothbrushes and stuff. And add a mirror one of these days too. And that tangle of wires near the light switches has since been hooked up to our automatic floor-warmer. *grin*

Sink and vanity combo stolen 100% from Young House Love. I'm still not sure why theirs looks so much better than ours but I'm pretty happy with it. It's cleaner now too by the way.

 And this is an earlier photo but the view out to our bedroom hasn't changed. Yeesh.

Yep. That's our bedroom.

Today is our contractor's last day, so things are starting to get a little cleaner. Keep your fingers crossed that he can finish putting up the last of the trim so R and I can get started cleaning and painting this weekend. We're SO ready to be back in our bed and have full access to our closets and drawers again. This whole process has taken eight weeks (although our contractor doesn't really work full days or weeks so he hasn't been here all day every day for those two months), and we're really sick of sleeping on the guest trundle beds and grabbing our clothes out of the laundry room every morning. But, I'm really happy with the bathroom and the way things turned out (despite the shower door issue and a replacing-a-few-broken-tiles-in-another-bathroom disaster that happened along the way).

Was it worth it? Give us a few weeks back in our bedroom and bathroom to fully decide. :)

Shoes, swimming pools, and shower sticker shock.

First, the sticker shock. I hadn't really been worried about getting a door for our shower in the midst of all this bathroom remodel. I called a place awhile ago, and they said they'd come out for measurements after the walls were all set, so I put it on the back burner. And thought, "I just want two pieces of glass and some hinges, how much can it be?"

Wrong.

I got around to calling places yesterday for estimates. I want a frameless (the room is so small, any frame pieces are going to make it feel even smaller), pivot door with an in-line panel, and the opening is a little less than four feet across. I thought, "$200." Well, maybe that's a little low. "$500." Then I got three estimates, two from local glass shops and one from Lowes.

Here's a photo of our shower to look at while you scroll down.
Think how nice a frameless glass door would look on that!

$1500

*jaw drop*

I went to a store today to talk to someone in person, and yep, that's what we're looking at. Going with the cheapest hardware, and even installing it ourselves, we're only saving a fraction of that cost. The $500 range doors look incredibly cheap, plus they all have a bar right across the top - exactly what I don't want. I totally didn't budget for this, and I'm kind of stuck. I don't want to put something cheap in, but holy cow. I think for now I'm going to put up a shower rod and a curtain while I adjust to the price. Maybe in a few months (years?) I'll have the heart to shell out that money to finish the room.

On to swimming pools.

I bought a baby pool for Julia awhile ago, but we had a massive cicada infestation early this summer and only now did I feel safe bringing her out in our backyard for awhile. So I spent ten years this morning blowing up this stupid inflatable pool, but it looked pretty cool by the time I was done.

It looks so sad here, doesn't it?

Hooray! Ready to go! See how long it took me to blow up by comparing the sun line on the patio.

Filled it up with a margarita pitcher and the sink (yep, efficient is my middle name) and we were good to go! Julia seemed to like it alright, although she's a pretty tough crowd to please nowadays. If nothing else, it killed some time and made for cute photos! Unfortunately, she spent 99% of the time staring at her cups in the water and almost no time looking at the camera, but here's what I got.

"Argh. I'm Cup-Hand-Julia! Arghm arghm arghm."

And, just to let you guys know, this is what we were surrounded by:

Yep I'll make these photos extra-large for you.

Because we were surrounded by extra-large dead bugs. Catch that? LOTS AND LOTS OF EXTRA LARGE DEAD BUGS.

And finally, shoes! No Loubies, but baby shoes, which are almost as cute. Since Julia is a BABY, and she doesn't walk anywhere, and it's summer, I've been letting her go shoeless everywhere.

"What on earth are these things on my feet, Mom?"

"Must. Get. Them. Off."

"Hey Mom, I never wear 'em - how was I supposed to know they're not toys to bang together with my hands?"

But now she's itching to walk around wherever we go, and it's kind of embarrassing to have a baby walking around Starbucks or Home Depot in bare feet. And the shoes she does have now are either too big or really stiff, and I don't see how she's going to learn to walk in really stiff-soled shoes.

So off to Carter's we go in search of shoes. While I'm flabbergasted by their sizing (she's wearing 12-month clothing but the 3-6 month shoes fit her??), we picked up some white sandals that seem to be doing the trick. Obviously I don't have photos of her in Lowes or the glass shower door store, so you'll just have to imagine this cutie walking around in public in her cute little white shoes!

Now that I'm back in Good Mom territory, I'll go ahead and tell y'all that after we go walking around in public, she keeps pulling them off in the car and chewing on the soles.

Bathroom Remodel - Part 1 (Destruction)

So, as I've mentioned a few times, we're remodeling our master bathroom. We're in the middle of it now, but I thought I'd do a few posts covering this whole process, so here's part 1. 

Our bathroom, pre-destruction. It's about as small as a bathroom with a sink, toilet, and shower could be, including an inexplicably dropped ceiling.

I think they dropped the ceiling in this room so they could recess these lights. The rest of our house has 8-foot ceilings, and this bathroom's were 7 feet. So they could put... these... up there.

Love that tile up on the walls, huh?

The real reason I got R behind this project - I was terrified of what was happening behind that tile. A few squares at the bottom were starting to pull away. Plus, think how icky it was to get into this thing every morning to get clean.

We also hadn't noticed the crack in our shower pan, which ended up being the bigger issue once we got everything torn out.

And then tear-down started...

The floor of our bedroom mid-way through tear-down.

Hey look at that. No reason at all for that dropped ceiling. Huh. Oh, and our bathroom fan was just venting into that space between the studs right about it. How strange is that. All the time we were running the fan to clear the air of moisture, it was just getting sucked into the wall space. Thanks, Previous Homeowners!

Forgot to mention to our contractor that the insulation up in the attic was loose and not on rolls. Whoops.

Starting to feel nervous about this project...

Changed my mind... Let's just close things up. Oh, we can't?

Remember those recessed lights? Here they are.

Almost everything's out now...

That floor's not looking so hot, huh?

Finally we start to make positive progress. First thing on the list: electrical.

No more random naked lightbulbs!

But good thing we still have natural light...

At this point, this is what our bedroom looked like. Awesome, huh? Does the photo capture the quarter-inch thick layer of dust on everything? Glad I was warned to cover all our furniture!

And.... two weeks later we finally have a ceiling! It was a great day when the bathroom was no longer open to the attic. That square in the middle of the ceiling is our new fan/light combo, with an actual vent hose to the attic.

Floor's looking better too, huh? That's a new shower pan and a layer of floor-leveler over the crumbling concrete. And a new toilet drain. Inside that new shower pan is a new shower drain too.

The electrical looks real now too, doesn't it?

Keep an eye on that square framed out above the light switches. I have big plans for it.

More photos to come as more progress is made, but there's a sampling of what's been going on here lately. And keep your fingers crossed for a smooth week of tiling ahead of us!