Last year two crazy kids bought a house. They tore it open from the inside out. It did the same to them. Both the house and the people are more beautiful than they were before. This is the tour-de-blog through the before and the after, but perhaps most important: the during. 

Welcome, friend: Bathrooms.

For the first 9 years of our marriage, I never had more than one toilet to clean. It had its perks. But when we signed that Grant Deed, my toilet-bowl-cleaning-duty tripled.

Each bathroom needed some significant love. Tubs, toilets and floors all had various levels of rot, fungus, or rust to be dealt with. I’ll take you through each from the simplest to the greatest of transformations.

Bathroom 1 – we actually thought we’d get away with just some new fixtures and paint in this bathroom, but soon discovered that the tub was rusted through, and when that came out, so too all the tile had to come with it. Who knew?

I can’t say I was all that sad, though, because oh-my-gosh I’m in love with this subway tile that took its place. This bathroom is part of the back guest house so I actually rarely see it personally, but I love-love it nonetheless.

Some invisibles also had to be replaced, as it turns out the lower plumbing wasn’t even connected to the home’s piping. Seriously. So for who knows how long the water drained from that tub just went straight to the ground beneath the house. Thank God for a raised foundation. So, the invisibles were re-plumbed, and the visibles won my heart over when we put in a new vanity and some new paint.

Bathroom 2 – oh this room. There’s no color correction happening here – that was the real paint color. Still makes my eyes hurt even in the pictures.

But the transformation that was about to take place – well, I’ll let the pictures do the telling.

 

Except this – oh I must explain this. I knew I wanted to create a vanity from furniture and get the porcelain bowl to sit atop. I had a dresser in mind for it, but it was all-wrong. Wrong size, wrong style, wrong color. Just wrong. I was just about to set out to hunt local thrift stores when I remembered that I had picked up this random table at a yard sale just a few months prior with no particular reason. It was $15 and I liked it. Maybe, just maybe this would work, I thought. And really, could it be more perfect? I finished it with wipeable Minwax to waterproof it, and I really love my $15 bathroom vanity.

Voila:

Bathroom 3­ is part of the Master Suite, so I’ll save that for its post later.

These rooms were such fun. Hundreds of decisions between tiles and grouts and fixtures and $15 vanity tables, but I couldn’t be happier with the way each of them turned out, or with my bathtub samplers: