Story of an ugly bathroom

This room was scoring the ugliest in the house award, so we decided to do something about it!

In August, one weekend, we decided it was time. We started pulling it apart, taking everything out and breaking down the walls. We knew that if it was going to happen, it had to get done outside of heating season - spray foam insulation and radiator moving really can't be done when it's nasty cold outside.

It was yuck, gross, disgusting (Noah's recent phrase) behind the walls - at some point in the past, there had been a fire up there somewhere, therefore, in addition to 100 years of dust, there was nasty soot inside the walls.

The demolition seemed like it took forever! We just kept working and taking things out and working some more. How could such a little space have so much packed into it?? We took something like 6 carloads over to the dump, in addition to filling our weekly garbage for all of August and September.

This room was one of the first that we changed up when we moved in, we painted it to go with our towels and bathroom accessories. Unfortunately, we used Behr paint, more appropriately referred to as glue paint. Any place where the shower curtain touched the paint, it peeled off and looked nasty. The room is so small, that I don't have any

really good "pre" photos, we just couldn't get in there to take pics, not to mention that the bathroom isn't really a place where a lot of great photo-ops take place! The whole room was on an outside wall when the house was built, and had the gabled ceiling thing going on. There was only one sink on that 5 foot wall because the gabled ceiling would take up the headspace for the other sink (if there had been one). 50 or 60 years ago, another bedroom was added making the gable by the sink useless - it sloped only because nobody bothered to raise it up when the new roof went past it. The biggest motivation to tearing everything out was to get more headroom in this space, so we hired ourselves a competent framer (and we interviewed a few that left us wondering) and raised the roof!

You can see in the picture here the new studs heading straight up from where the angle started. The shower is still an exterior wall, so it gets to keep its unique angled ceiling.

We got spray foam insulation on the exterior wall, always a must when you only have 2x4 walls

and live in a drafty old place like this! Most of our projects start because we want to make our house more efficient (aka - reduce the heat bills), or at least include an insulation component.

With this small of space, we couldn't find a sheetrock crew that would meet our $$ expectations. They would have to come back to our house 5 times, but not for long enough to make it count for them. So, we ended up installing that ourselves. Good thing Brian is getting good at taping and mudding drywall. And, look at how patient he is... He welcomes a little learner in to "help" him with the work!