Half Bathroom Facelift

The third important space on our second floor that desperately needed renovation was the half bathroom.  Of course if money and space was no issue, we would have loved to make it a full bathroom, but with the limitations of space (we tried and tried to figure out how to fit a shower stall in) and the changes that would have to be made in plumbing, we decided to do a "quick" facelift.  We adore the 1940s sink and medicine cabinet, so we kept that; and the toilet was fairly new and in good working order, so we kept that as well. 

After removing the awful pink plastic sheet of "tile," we discovered that the walls were pretty beat up and had some residual crusty 60 year old glue on them.  We had to make the decision whether to rip out the sheetrock (or at least he mid-century version of sheetrock) or to make do.

We also debated heavily whether or not to leave and refinish the rustic wood attic flooring or to cover with tile.  Since we wanted something classic and clean, we decided on this mosaic tile below.  It looks very impressive when installed, but it's much easier to lay out because it comes in sheets like these.

I've never tiled anything by myself, so I laid out all the sheets and marked where I had to trim the tiles around the toiled and sink.  Then I watch probably half a dozen YouTube videos about how to mix thinset properly.

Here you can see that we did NOT tile directly on the wood floor.  We put down a cement board sub-flooring.  To lay down all the tile it took about two and a half hours.  In hindsight, I shouldn't have started it at 9pm, but once you start tiling you cannot stop!

For the walls, considering all the glue damage, we decided to put up wainscoting and trim to achieve the classic look we wanted.  Mike is the carpenter, so he had the task of cutting all the trim to size and installing it with our finishing nail gun.  We originally bought the nail gun to make center piece planter boxes for our wedding, but it really came in handy for this project.  You can't use a finishing nail gun to put a roof on or frame a house, but for putting up trim it is perfect!

Next came paint and installing a toilet paper holder and towel rack.  The best part about the paint is that it was an "oops" can of paint heavily discounted from Home Depot -- we paid only $8 for an entire gallon.  Now to figure out what else to paint yellow with all the left over paint...

Below is a before and after picture of the project.  Total project cost for materials: $275.  Labor: free!

It should also be noted that we didn't have any of these skills starting out -- we really learned "on the job" and figured things out as we went.