Downstairs Bath Renovation: Drywall, Lighting and Some Tiling

Time for an update! And this is going to be one long, photo-heavy post. Because quite frankly, I'm not working on anything else at the moment, and since I've been up working on the bathroom until 11pm the last two nights, I haven't had much time for lots of little updates.

So you're getting it all in one shot. :)

But first, to remind you/catch you up, since it's been a couple of weeks since I posted about our bathroom renovation, this is where we started, back when we were just going to take down the wallpaper and paint the walls, and do a full renovation sometime in the future.

But then we found moldy drywall under the wallpaper, which prompted us to just move forward with the full gut and bathroom updating plans now. So we ripped out pretty much everything but the tub, and had to remove some subfloor when we found it was rotting too. Things got messy.

So we started rebuilding. We put in new sub floors in the bathroom and laundry room next door. We picked out new shower and sink faucets and redid a ton of the plumbing, including raising the shower head about a half of a foot. But we still had an annoying gap next to the tub to deal with. And it took forever for our lighting, tile and premium thinset to arrive, causing a couple of weeks of delays.

Kitty Approved Bathroom Lighting

Hooray, our bathroom lighting finally arrived! It took over three weeks for the build time (build-o-order) and a week in transit to get to us, but this weekend we can finally do the lighting installation.

In fact, we will be doing a whole lot of installation in our bathroom this weekend, so I will have lots to share next week. I haven't posted much about our downstairs bathroom renovation lately, mainly because there hasn't been much going on, because we were out of town, and because we were having difficulties getting our supplies. Tile that we were told we could always have by a Friday if we ordered by Tuesday? Yeah, that took until the following Thursday to arrive. Ship-to-store special order through Lowes that was supposed to take a week? Uh, yeah, that stuff never arrived after three weeks, after Lowes supposedly called three different vendors. I ended up going to a contractor supply shop and they let me buy from them, for WAY less than through Lowes.

So next week, expect a lot of bathroom updates. We've figured out our weird tub-gap situation, we've got some walls up, and we finally have all of the supplies we could possibly need (including some fun new tools, like a laser level and a tile cutter) to move forward with the next phases.

And we should also have lighting in place by the end of the weekend too. I can't wait to see how it looks installed, but the kitties are already enjoying the lighting. Err, the packaging the lighting came in!

It was comical, pulling out foot after foot of packing paper--it just kept coming out of the box! But the kitties are really enjoying their ugly pile of trash new toy. Why do I spend money on cat toys from Petco, when I can just spend a couple hundred dollars on new bathroom lighting, wait four weeks for it to arrive, and then unpack it?

Ah, well, the rest of our downstairs looks like a whirlwind, ever since we started our bathroom project, I might as well let the kitties have their fun until I'm ready to pick up my own messes! But I really feel like we've been on a rollercoaster with this bath project, and we're now finally at the top of the highest peak, about to speed down the other side. At least, fingers crossed that it will all be downhill from now!

What are your weekend plans? Hope you all have a great one!