The Careys: Bathroom Remodel 2010

Our house was built in 1984. We’ve done quite a bit of work to update our house, slowly but surely. Before Ava was born, we remodeled the entire kitchen. We’ve painted our “master bath” numerous times, which also serves as the first floor main bathroom.

Since living here, we have done the following to this bathroom:
-taken out the door between the bath side and bathroom side (too many doors)
-painted it an off-white color
-painted it green
-painted it brown
-replaced the faucet fixtures
-pulled-out the carpet on the shower side (triple, quadruple eww?)
-pulled-out the tile on the bathroom side
-Tiled the floor and closet ourselves
-used olive green Venetian plaster

Here are a few "before" pictures. Honestly, they don't do the "before" aspect justice...The countertops were seriously scratched up, the walls needed major TLC. The new fixtures definitely dress it up more than the previous fixtures (faucets). We did keep the vanity light, as we had already replaced it some time back. The original vanity light was a gold bar with globe-shaped lights.

A few years ago, we added a Venetian plaster technique to the walls, as there were already some flaws that could be concealed (to make it look nicer). The Venetian plaster was a darker olive green color…Doug and I got tired of the color, so we decided we wanted to paint the room (actually two rooms attached to each other). Easier said than done! We had to use an orbital sander to sand off the Venetian plaster to get the walls smooth. It took approximately 12 days (5 hours a day) to get the walls smooth enough to paint. I’m very familiar with how an orbital sander works now! :-) We also had to do some patching to make the walls as smooth as possible.

We ended-up painting the walls twice…. Long story, but we wanted a blue-gray. The first blue ended-up being more purple than blue. The blue we ended-up going with is a Pottery Barn color called “Wedgewood Gray”. In some lights, it looks a little more green than I would like, but it is a world of improvement from our Venetian plaster. I’m happy with it.

We got a steal on some bathroom cabinets from a builder’s surplus warehouse in Atlanta, off of South Cobb Drive. Doug installed the cabinets himself. We bought some Silestone countertops from a local wholesale cabinet dealer. When Doug saw the Silestone, he was salivating. ;-) He toured a local “green” house with Silestone kitchen countertops and has liked them ever since. We picked out some nice ceramic under-mount bowls that were installed with the countertops. We picked out new fixtures (8-inch wide faucet handles) from Home Depot, which Doug installed.

The mirrors were also original to the house and were the entire width of the bathroom. We’ve always appreciated framed mirrors. So, Doug was hoping we could reuse the mirrors and frame them. Fortunately he was able to remove them (they were directly glued to the sheet rock), make some frames and glue them into the painted frames. What an improvement in the bathroom! Our friends have mentioned that they actually notice the tile floor now (the bathroom was much darker with the Venetian plaster).

Altogether, the entire bathroom rehab probably cost less than $2,000. I’m hoping that it will help us fetch a higher price whenever we do go to sell the house in the future. It certainly won't DETRACT from the potential sale price, unlike the previous bathroom,which showed some wear. So, we did our part helping the economy with this bathroom rehab.

See for yourself…

Peace, love and new loos,

Shelly, Doug, Ava and Liam

Our helper!