ForEver Changing: Bathroom Makeover

The guest bathroom got a whole new face! We replaced the toilet, vanity, lights and floor in the bathroom. Because of the small space only one of us could do the work at a time so most of it was accomplished by Alex. We ran into a lot of problems on this simple renovation, but we pressed through them to finish up in less than a week because we had to have it ready in time to host a guest.

The most amazing deal was the floor. We bought the boxes of tile from a flea market for $5 a box. The originally sold for $35/ box. We used 2 boxes of the tile on the floor. While perusing our local Habitat for Humanity resale store we were able to score a $26 bucket of grout for $1. I couldn’t believe it! Excluding the price of the glue for the tile – we bought a large bucket we plan to use on our master bathroom and hopefully part of our kitchen – our bathroom floor cost us all of $11!!

In went the tile.

Alex did an amazing job of cutting the tile to fit the circular part of the toilet opening.

Tile Dance. I was instructed to walk on the tile in order to apply the needed pressure. Naturally I turned on the music and instead danced on my tile.

The toilet was the next thing to be installed and it had some minor complications. Being environmentally conscious I was excited to purchase a toilet that used less water in each flush. So we purchased a dual flush toilet! After putting it together we turned it on and found we had a leak at the old shutoff valve so we quickly learned via YouTube how to replace the shutoff valve and how to find and turn off the main water supply to the house.

Excited to buy my dual flush toilet

New shutoff valve

Lastly we installed the vanity. The vanity, bowl, and faucet were sold as one complete set from Lowes. Our first issue was the baseboards. Because you can see under the vanity we had to put in the baseboards. The vanity needed to be bolted to the wall but the baseboard prevented a snug fit. Alex fixed this by attaching a strip of extra baseboard to the wall where the vanity was to be bolted. The screws then went through the vanity and the “spacer” into the wall for to secure the vanity.

Baseboard spacer

A perfect and secure fit!

Our next issue was the faucet. The one that was supplied leaked from the base no matter what we did. We went to Lowes to see if it could be fixed. It couldn’t so Lowes switched it with their display model from the same vanity set. When we got home Alex discovered that this one had been manufactured incorrectly and could not be installed. So we went back to Lowes where they tried again to fix it before giving up and allowing me to select a faucet of my choosing to replace the broken ones. I selected a $140 Delta faucet – a nice upgrade for free!

Last but not least the before and after pictures

"Before"