It’s been a while since I’ve done a post about our first home. The good news is that we are finally living in it! We moved in a day before we’d owned it for 6 months (not even kidding!). There was a lot of work to be done on the house and then once the work had been done on the house there was a shed to be built so that all the gym equipment and mats could get out of the house and we could start living there!
A while back I did a post on the 10 Things I learned while renovating and I’ve also leaked a few pictures here and there over on Instagram! I thought it was about time I started showing the transformation, today we’re going to start with the bathroom.
I always wanted to get a house that already had both the bathroom and the kitchen done as I’d heard that they were the most expensive parts of the house to do up. Turns out we did work to both of those rooms (including a complete gutting of the kitchen!)
Our bathroom and toilet are separate from each other and the bathroom was dreadful to begin with. I didn’t like anything about it at all, the walls were ugly, the shower screen was ugly, the tile floors were hideous and the vanity was potentially even uglier.
The first things to go were those hideous tiles and vanity, and oh boy part way through I wondered why on earth we had decided to get rid of the tiles and go back to natural wooden flooring because that is one tough b!tch of a job! The end result is amazing though and I still look at our wooden floors throughout the house and marvel at how beautiful they are!
Possibly the worst part about doing the bathroom was discovering that all behind the vanity and one other wall was completely mouldy and the gib had to be ripped out and replaced. It wasn’t something we had anticipated, but I guess things like that always seem to pop up when renovating and it could have been a whole lot worse!
The shower screen got ripped out pretty quickly and we made the decision that we wanted black walls around the shower, which was easier said than done. Getting black hardiglaze was going to be ridiculously expensive and if we wanted black paint it needed to be something which would survive the wet areas. After a lot of research we finally found a paint that would work (although it wasn’t easy to work with, nor was it particularly cheap).
Our replacement shower screen was under $200 from a store on trademe (brand new) and just that alone helped to transform the bathroom into this century. Our vanity is a dark wood grain and it goes really well with the dark black walls in the shower but I think is contrast with the light grey of the rest of the room and I really like the pairing with the red as well. The vanity was a cheapie from Mitre10 (I believe it was $129!). Red is a color we have tried to feature a little bit throughout the house (as you’ll discover when we get to the kitchen posts).
Overall I’m really happy with how the bathroom turned out! We have added a red mirror over the vanity and another full length red mirror as you enter the bathroom, the floors are beautiful if I do say so myself and the added addition of a heated towel rail and an overhead fan/heat/light system really helps to complete the bathroom and make it feel a lot more modern.
If you would change one thing about your bathroom what would it be??
Oh, my bathroom? I would have a glass shower screen instead of a curtain. And I would get the light fixture fixed! It’s supposed to have two light globes for better light (it’s a dark pocket of our house) but only one ever works at a time. A silly quirk we could have fixed ages ago but have never got around to. I imagine that by the time we do it, the next owners will enjoy it and not us haha.
It’s funny how little things like that can bug us so much yet we’re always so busy doing other things that we never get around to fixing them huh!
CONGRATS Amanda! What a beautiful new bathroom.
I would add a tub. But there’s no room for one (the bathroom is tiny), so we’d need to knock through the wall to the toilet and combine it all, and most likely through to the laundry as well to extend the bathroom.
Thanks so much 🙂 Yes a tub is such a big thing but it sucks when there isn’t enough room for one huh!