After a few months of working on and off and on and off we have finally completed our Guest Bath renovation! I really expected to be done before Christmas but many unforseens made that impossible and a MAJOR oops made it even worse. (we'll get to that in a minute) It was worth it all in the end as we now have a beautiful completely functional bath.
Why we started: When we bought the house we knew we wanted to update the baths and kitchen but didn't have a plan for when. I was giving Zach his bath one night and decided I was done fighting the horrible handle that controlled the temperature of the water. It was almost impossible to adjust so it was a constant battle with too hot or too cold for him. Seeing that the builder did not provide any access to the plumbing so it was either bust a hole in the family room wall or start the renovation. I won't go into major details, basically we gutted it all(not actually the original plan) and everything is new. I wanted to keep the vanity and paint it but it was too big for the stock countertops so it was either a custom counter or new vanity/counter for the same price so we went with new.
Before:
The 'hotel' faucet. You spin the clear knob to turn it on and the turn the tab behind it to change the temp. The tab part stopped working and required Tim's muscles to move it!
After:
And now for the disaster story. See the beautiful white grout in the photo above? It is 'Grout: Round 2.' The first grout turned out so horrible that we scraped every single inch of it out and re-did the whole thing. Why? Well, I had gone to Home Depot to pick up the grout, knowing full well what to buy, but when I looked at the box I decided to explore other options as there was about 4 times the amount of grout I needed in the box. Fail. A tub of pre-mixed grout called out to me, it said it was for joints down to 1/16th of an inch, just what I needed! It didn't say anywhere that it was sanded, BUT it also didn't say that it was unsanded. It also said it was Bright White. I was sold. But once it went up it became clear that it was not only sanded, it was sanded with red and brown sand making it speckled, not white. I, for some reason, hoped it would dry looking better than it did but that was a ridiculous thing to expect. I hated it and it didn't take long to decide to scrape it out. It took 5 days, several of which I was up until 2am working since a certain 3 year old made it hard to work on when he was awake. My hands ached for days and many tears were shed. But, we knew that we had to, as Mike Holmes says, "make it right." There was no way we could have lived with the terrible decision to use that grout, and I am glad we replaced it with the original grout I had gone to purchase.
We learned a lot of new skills(thanks for all the help Dad!) with this project and have almost recovered enough to tackle our master bath now! =)
After looking at this over and over I felt like it needs once last before/after side by side so here it is:
