Before and After: A One Bath Home Bathroom Remodel

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In a one bath home bathroom remodel, the final result counts more than and a house with multiple bathrooms. It must be functional, have a decent layout and look spectacular. After all, this is your master bathroom, shared bathroom, and powder room all rolled into one, right?

Well, that certainly wasn’t quite the case when my husband and I first laid eyes on the one and only bathroom in my first house. It had a decent layout. The only other thing it had going for it was location: it was in the house I wanted to buy.

After only a couple days of owning the house this was the new look:

Cue the scary music.

We took it apart only to find there were structural problems with the floor, the plumbing was done wrong, and the wet wall behind the sink and toilet needed to be replaced with actual framing.

We also made a couple improvements. First, we added in insulation between the bathroom and the adjacent bedrooms, making it quieter.

Second, we made the small entrance wider. If I recall we removed something like a 20 inch door and replaced it with a 24 inch door. No, it’s still not ADA compliant, but it is a whole heck of a lot easier to walk through than it was before.

In the end, it is now sufficiently fancified.

Lessons learned while completing a full on one bath home bathroom remodel.

On top of this being our first bathroom remodel and learning the normal plumbing, tiling, electrical, drywall and installation jobs, we encountered some extra newbie mistakes. It is surprising what you don’t notice before running your own remodel. So for your entertainment and possibly preventing you from making the same mistakes here you go.

There is a difference between bathroom vanity dimensions and kitchen cabinet dimensions.

We used kitchen cabinet bases in the bathroom. We didn’t think too much about it until it was time to install them and the cabinets just barely fit before the door swing! It was a good thing we did not widen the door that direction. We also did not take expanding the wet wall behind the sink and toilet into account. The previous bathroom vanity had normal dimensions. We found out the hard way (and thankfully got away with it) that bathroom vanity cabinets are thinner than kitchen base cabinets.

We also discovered bathroom vanities are also shorter than kitchen cabinets. The good thing about this mistake is now there is more storage under the countertop. However, it probably took an extra year for the kids to grow enough to reach the sink.

Not in stock? Ship-to-store!

Newbie mistake number two is we could have ordered the cabinets and used the ship to store option. We bought the cabinets off the shelf in the Phoenix metro area since they carried the desired color in stock at Home Depot. Then we drove them 1,200 miles cross country. We did not realize we could have bought them and shipped to store locally in Texas where they did not offer this color on the shelf.

To be fair, one of the reasons we did not go this route is I wanted to make sure we got the measurements for the countertop just right. I needed the cabinets to guarantee the actual measurement. This was especially important since we fabricated them ourselves at the convenience and slowly at home rather than quickly as we could onsite. I’d rather learn at a slower pace when there are smaller stakes.

Second, I couldn’t see myself unboxing cabinets, getting the measurements, packaging them back up, returning them, then turning around and ordering them online to pick them up once we got there. However, didn’t need to do that for the uppers. I could have at least bought them and picked them up instead of trekking cross country with a ridiculously loaded Toyota 4Runner (for those of you who remember and are saying “but what about…” we only had the lowers in the first trip with the poor Chevy S10 pulling the ridiculously loaded enclosed 6′ x12′ trailer)!

Write down all the necessary measurements for framing BEFORE you close up the wall.

We lost the location of framing behind the wall when we were finally ready to hang the mirrors. Figuring that out became much more memorable than expected!

Tilting mirrors are great for people of all heights.

The mirrors in the photos above pivot up and down. This helps with kiddos before they are able to see in a normal mirror. They look fabulous too!

Buy a house with more than one bathroom.

This is especially important if you plan on disconnecting the toilet for a long period of time during your one bath home bathroom remodel. More than one bathroom is one way to keep from going to the bathroom every time you go to Home Depot…years later.

Installing new drywall on a ceiling sucks.

What I just said.

It’s great for an arm workout about five minutes, but then you have to keep going.

Widening a door involves more than just framing.

Going from a 20 inch door to a 24 inch door was a huge improvement because you didn’t feel like you were squeezing into the bathroom. This nice-to-have brought on its own set of problems.

First, I had to figure out how to cover the exposed subfloor at the threshold. The difference in height between the tile and the original hardwood floors was already a known problem. The solution of fabricating matching granite interior door thresholds DIY style worked beautifully, solving both problems at the same time.

Exposed subfloor.

Widening the door also made trimming inside the door frame a huge challenge I was not anticipating. There certainly was not enough room for regular door trim on either side of the door between widening the door and the oversize cabinet.

Bullnose tile trim skills came to the rescue! I made a whole bunch of custom trim on the fly.

The bullnose trim along the brick was for both the door and the window. Since there was not enough room for traditional door trim I did not want the window to stand out.

The custom trim around the window.

Looking back now with a few more remodels under my belt, I would probably make a few different design choices:

• Normal size bathroom vanity cabinets.
• Dark Emperador marble really pops against the dark brown shades in the travertine. If I remodeled again, I would pair the travertine I used with a dark brown Dark Emperador marble countertop, white vanity cabinet, and dark brown paint. It is quite stunning, but as a newbie homeowner bold color choices are difficult.
  

  An example of Dark Emperador paired with the same travertine. This is a mosaic I created from leftovers in the bay window in my primary residence.

• Add a second sink with a long vanity. We did not have the plumbing knowledge we now have in our toolchest. Adding an additional sink with pex plumbing on a pier and beam house is a walk in the park now. From a functionality standpoint an additional sink in a one bathroom house is a huge benefit.

Our handiwork has held up well with a growing family. The only repairs in ten years have been a broken handle on the sink faucet and a new flapper on the toilet. Not bad at all!