Big Plans

I promised to post about the living room, but the photos weren't quite right and now I can't get into that room for a while because of the work we are doing on the first floor. Instead I will share the plan for the master bathroom, one of the two big renovation projects that we queued up after we made some initial progress on the smaller projects--and got rid of all that pink paint.

Take a look at what we started with in the master bath, a disaster:

Only one sink and small vanity cabinet. The seated vanity is nice, but it is too high and there is no room to fit a stool in the room anyway.

All fixtures were gray and there was flowered wallpaper everywhere. This tub took up all the space in the room. And, the toilet was wedged in the corner. 

Shower was small and dark.

This is the master bedroom before we moved in. The bathroom door is behind the open door to the bedroom on the left. This configuration just didn't work. These doors were always in the way of each other. The other door goes to the walk-in closet.

Walk-in closet was decent size, but not configured to hold much.

I really couldn't wait to get rid of the wallpaper in the bathroom, so we removed it when we removed all the other wallpaper. The wallpaper removal revealed some ugly surprises:

Apparently that tight space for the toilet didn't work for the previous owners. It got wet--often--and we found all this mold under the wallpaper.

We also found mold under the wallpaper by the shower door.

Once we determined that we did not have any current water leakage we began planning for this space while we worked on public rooms downstairs. We would ultimately have to use this bathroom as is for 7 months before we were ready to start demolition.

Here is the plan we developed:

This plan includes placement of all plumbing fixtures, lighting, and cabinetry. Circles with crosshairs indicate ceiling lights; circles with double lines indicate outlets, S indicates switches.

Our plan addresses all the problems with the space. We eliminated the doors to the bathroom and closet and replaced them with a double door on the center of the bedroom wall. We removed part of the wall that separated the closet and the bathroom and put in a T wall that would create a hallway instead.

We also chose a larger shower and no tub so that we could get two separate sink vanities, a seated vanity, and tall cabinets, significantly improving the working space and storage space.

Another concession we made was to have the toilet out in the room. There was not enough square footage in the space to allow for a reasonably sized room for the toilet while meeting all of our other more important objectives.

This floorplan did require that we replace the perfectly good hardwood floor in the closet since the floor needed to continue seamlessly from one room into the other.

We also decided on water-based radiant heat in the entire space. You can't install radiant heat unless you remove existing flooring, so now would be the perfect time. Also, this allowed us to remove the baseboard heat units in the bathroom and closet, which gave us more room for cabinetry. This heating method keeps the otherwise very cold tile warm under foot. It is also a very efficient heating method, particularly in colder climates. It made the floor higher than the hardwood in the bedroom, but it is less than 1" and with the threshold at the doorway it feels perfectly natural. The fabulous heat is well worth it!

Our plan was also to create a spa feel in the space. So we chose travertine tile with glass and shell mosaics to create a neutral palette. We also chose brushed nickel fixtures. The only color in the room would be paint color, towels, and accessories.

Come back and see how this project unfolds.