Downstairs Bath Renovation: Caulking, Vanity and Shower Faucets

Well, we haven't made much progress over the past month or so on our bathroom renovation, but we're getting so close to finally being done!

Our big goal for this past weekend was installing the vanity and faucets. But in order to put the vanity in place, we had to first caulk the baseboard, since it would be too hard to access it later. Same with the toilet, so we went ahead and caulked that as well.

I'm not really looking forward to caulking the rest of the bathroom, since it is kind of a pain. First, you have to tape off both sides of the line you want to caulk.

Then you have to caulk the lines, going slowly to make sure you get the caulk in the cracks.

Then, first dipping your finger in a cup of warm water, run your finger over the caulk, to press it into the crack and leave a nice smooth finish.

Pro tip that I read somewhere: leave about 1 inch not caulked at the back of your toilet, so if your wax ring ever fails, the water leak will come out the back of the toilet onto the tile and you'll see it and be able to replace it. Much better than caulking the entire toilet and having it leak down into your subfloor!

Be sure to remove the tape when the caulk is still wet, so it leaves a clean edge. It isn't as obvious in the photos, but the finishing touch of caulk really just makes everything look polished and finished.

We let the caulk dry overnight, and then we brought our new vanity in. Which meant we walked a couple of feet, rested, walked a couple more feet and rested some more. That thing was heavy!

And of course, since nothing in this whole renovation can be easy, I had to paint the vanity. It was more of a vanilla white than a bright white, and was just going to bug me forever. Sucks to spend that much money on something and then still have to tweak it, but it is what it is. Luckily one coat of primer and two coats of semi gloss got the job done though.

I only painted the outside of the vanity and the fronts and edges of the drawers and doors. Vanilla white on the inside won't bug me, especially if it meant less painting!

Once everything dried, it was just a matter of screwing the vanity to the wall through a few studs, and my husband had the plumbing done in about an hour. Later this week I'll put on the vanity doors, since I wanted to give them a couple of days to completely dry before I reinstall the hardware.

And while I had been painting the vanity the shower faucets were also installed. It's finally starting to look like a usable bathroom.

Putting the vanity in place also meant we could bring in the ceramic shades for our light fixtures, since we no longer had to worry about walking into them with our heads.

We still need to caulk the marble counter top to the beadboard...as well as caulk pretty much everything else in the bathroom. But it's getting there. And now we don't have to walk out to the kitchen to wash our hands anymore.

We could almost take a shower too, just as soon as we caulk all of the edges and put up a shower curtain (and wipe the finger prints off the shower fixtures).

Unfortunately I think this past weekend was the last weekend we'll have time to work on the bathroom this month, with the holidays just around the corner (and the fact that I want to spend this coming weekend picking our joint Christmas gift to ourselves--a new couch). But we're hopefully only another weekend or two of work away from being done with all of the finishing touches. And then all that will be left will be to decorate! And to finally move on with our lives, because I'm soooo tired of this project already.

What have you been working on lately? Are the holidays getting in the way of any of your projects this month. Sometimes a break is nice though!