Before and After: The Bathroom

My husband and I moved into our house nearly 3 years ago.  It was a diamond in the rough, to say the least.  I've never seen so much wallpaper in my life.

Since I knew we'd be putting a lot of work into the place, I thought it would be fun to document the before, during and after, and make an album on Shutterfly or something, to document all the work we put into the place.  Well, I did a decent enough job of documenting before and during, but not so much the after.  I got as far as taking pictures of the bathroom and stopped.

I decided it might be fun to do a series of "Before and After" posts for each room of the house, but I won't lie, I have two ulterior motives:

1. This will force me to clean up each room, and put on the finishing touches that we never quite got to, like the baseboards (or lack thereof) in the kitchen.
2. I will have to take the rest of those photos, and maybe I'll finally make that album!

So without further ado:

Before 

I actually haven't looked at these photos in awhile.  This first one actually isn't as bad as I remember, it's just REALLY not our style.

Really, really not our style.  Also, that wallpaper?  It's not even on drywall, it was on these weird, plastic panels attached to the wall.  More on that later.

But this?  This is just scary:

During *

Want to know what was behind that weird plastic paneling?  THIS:

Nice, huh?  And what's even nicer?  When there's water damage behind the tub.  Thank goodness we decided to gut the bathroom, or we wouldn't have found it.

This meant we had to rip out the drywall on the other side of the tub.  Here's the view from Glen's office:

New drywall:

And in the spirit of today's post on Budgets Are Sexy, I opted to refurbish the vanity and cabinet, instead of replacing them:

 

After

Our color scheme was white with black trim and chrome hardware. Here's the new door and trim:

Clearly, the hardware in the tub had to be replaced, as did the tub surround:

Here's the refurbished vanity, with a coat of black paint, new hardware, and a new faucet:

 

 We replaced the mirror and lighting with a bit more stylish:

In the photos the difference in lighting isn't very dramatic, but the main difference is that the finish is much shiner on the metal and the shades are much sleeker.  The old shades we frilly and hideous.

Here's the view looking in from the hallway:

We still need to replace the floor.  The grout is in bad shape and tiles periodically pop up and stick to our feet.  Not cool.  The plan is to wait until we remodel the laundry room, which also needs a new floor, and hopefully get them both taken care of in one day.


*  This remodel would not have been possible without my extremely handy father-in-law, who was responsible for gutting the bathroom, putting up the new drywall and tub surround, and installing the new faucets.  He helped us out a lot with fixing up other areas of the house, too, but he is almost single-handedly responsible for the bathroom remodel!