The New Bathrooms, Part 1

For the past two weeks, Vicki, Emma and I (and even Tammy, during her Thanksgiving weekend visit) were under siege from a father-son pair of contractors who were completely renovating our two main bathrooms, literally from floor to ceiling.  This is the project Vicki worked her last contract for, as we set aside most of the after-tax money she made specifically for this purpose.  All of our bathrooms have been looking tired and dated for years now, and so Vicki took on the challenge of addressing that situation for the two main ones.

I may get her to do a guest blog post (haven't had one of those in ages!) to really do the subject justice, but I thought I'd at least put up some before-and-after pictures to get a certain relentlessly-persistent sister-in-law off my back.

I'm starting with the en suite that's situated off the master bedroom, as it's the one I always use (and this blog is all about me, remember).  It's hard to convey the look and feel of the room in photos, but here's what we got rid of:

Quite boring looking, with ugly vertical striped wallpaper that was peeling off and tile grout that was impossible to get clean (believe me, I tried!).  The tub had long since lost any luster and the toilet had some sort of design flaw in how the water needed to circulate in order to go down, the end result of which was that it clogged very easily and required me to plunge it about twice a week.  No, I'm not kidding!

After Mark and Jordan of Cornerstone Construction worked their magic, though, the room was transformed into this:

Beautiful colours all around, and everything's state of the art now: toilet seat and vanity drawers are all self-closing, the ceiling fan has its own humidistat for automatic on/off functionality, and best of all, there's a rain head at the top of the shower, which I've already fallen in love with and use in place of the actual shower head.  And the toilet flushes reliably and with a lovely whooshing sound!

We do have a slight problem with space, as you might be able to see from the pictures: the longer-than-usual toilet and the fairly wide vanity don't have a lot of room between them near the tub, making the access to the tub a bit tight.  So we may end up swapping one or the other out for smaller pieces if we find that it continues to feel cramped in there.  The plan right now is to get Cornerstone back in over the next several months to do the basement bathroom, and that would be the perfect time to tweak the en suite's layout, if necessary.  As it is, though, I can't believe what a great job Vicki did in all of her choices, as it really does feel like an executive bathroom in some swanky hotel.  And yet it's right off our bedroom!  How awesome is that?

Still to come: the upstairs bathroom, which is equally impressive.