Everything but the Bathtub

Our bathroom remodel started a week ago. We had a long Sunday, and then at around 2:30pm decided to just go for it. Before I get into the details of what is going on in our reno, let me just talk about our house and this bathroom.

Our house was built in 1956, and was, according to our neighbor, one of the model homes for the neighborhood housing development. As Lansing began to grow in the 1950s, the neighborhoods crept north, and the Groesbeck neighborhood was developed just past the main arterial of Grand River. We live in the southern-centralish part of the neighborhood, and many of the houses around us are of the sprawling-low mid-century ranch variety. Just up the street is another house with our exact floor plan, and another one of our houses is a block and a half away. It's a nice neighborhood, with a little bit of an Edward Scissorhands vibe. Now, bathrooms.

Am I not the most adorable
sink you've ever seen?

I've learned that most of the bathrooms in the houses are one of three colors: green, beige, and blue. Our color is blue. This means everything - EVERYTHING - is blue. And I'm not totally against this. We have two bathrooms, a full and a half. The half bath is still all completely blue. Blue sink, blue toilet, blue wall tile, blue floor tile, everything. And the sink is in perfect condition, and it's adorable. The toilet in the half bath is in medium condition, the wall tile is still mostly working like a champ. Unfortunately the floor tile has seen better days. My dream is to just restore this entire bathroom, although I'm not sure it's in the cards. If we do go for a remodel of the half bath, we will be taking the adorable blue sink and keeping it for ourselves. Because I LOVE it.

The before shot

So back to the main bath remodel. The main bath had been redone around 2001, and I can't say it was redone very well or with much taste. The only original parts of the main bath that were left were the tile (blue) and the tub (yep, still blue). We decided to, obviously, redo the floor, vanity, and toilet, and preserve some of the blue tile while adding a white border. We decided this for a couple of reasons: to save on waste by not just ditching all of that tile, and to save on $. We also planned to keep the tub because the contours of it are quite nice. The plan is to just have it reglazed to white. This might be a more expensive route, but we're very much interested in not producing a ton of waste. Throwing out a bathtub to replace it with some weird plastic tub makes my heart hurt.

Demo begins

Now, I've watched a lot of HGTV and home remodeling shows. You might say I'm somewhat addicted to them. And I should know that any renovation does not go as planned. I guess I wasn't expecting ours to be as big as it turned out to be. First, we had to remove all of the tile. Back in the day, houses like ours used concrete as a backer for tile. This makes it nearly impossible to add any new tiling because it's a challenge to remove tile and going back and adding concrete is just not the way it's done anymore. So we took out all of the blue tile, and ripped out all of the concrete backer where the tile was. Fortunately, we were able to save quite a bit of this blue tile, and their future use has yet to be determined but I'm excited about finding a place for it. This all means we took 3/4 of the walls all the way down to the studs. We had to. Next, the floor. Remove tile, and alas, looks like we also need to replace the sub floor. Remember the 2001 bathroom redo I mentioned above? Well, they were too lazy or something to repair/replace any subfloor that was obviously damaged during that time from water. So now we get to do it. In the end, our bathroom will be super tight, super tidy, and up to date. And while I would have loved to make this bathroom period appropriate, it is kind of fun to design a bathroom in a way that will appeal to all. Generic, yet stylish. I'm just thankful we have a second bathroom, and have rigged a way to use our shower during the reno. Whew!

And.... just our lovely tub is left.