Our bathroom renovation on a budget

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We moved to Valparaiso about 2 years ago. It’s easy to remember how long we’ve been here because I was about 8 months pregnant with our third baby. My husband just took a new job, so we were working through a new home, new town, new baby, and I was staying at home full-time for the first time ever! Needless to say, it was a nuts time in our lives.

Here we are two years later…with a 2 year old….and things have slowed down a bit.

Our house had been on the market for quite some time when we bought it. We had to purchase pretty quickly because our old house sold almost immediately (yay!). There was definitely a sense of urgency to finding a new place. We never expected to buy a fixer upper, but that’s definitely what we got! We bought a house with a lot of character, in town, built-in the 20s. It also had TONS of wallpaper to be scraped off (ooooh, the awful wallpaper).

Although we don’t have it in our budget to do major renovations, we have done a TON of painting and some easy updates that have made the house feel like home.One of the major problems with the house are the TINY bathrooms. We have one shared bathroom upstairs for all four of the bedrooms. Downstairs we have the TINIEST bathroom you’ve ever seen. We’re talking 3ft x 3ft. Maybe I’ll share photos of what we’ve done there later. Anyhow, they’re small, and they were both pretty gross, so fixing them up and making the most of the space we had was very important to us.

Now my husband is pretty handy. I mean, anyone can figure something out eventually by watching YouTube videos…and that’s pretty much what he did, and I’m so happy with how it turned out!

We did have some amazing friends from our church help us throughout the process. A friend laid the tile floor, and another helped with the plumbing. We wanted to raise the shower head to a level where we don’t need to duck to get under it, lol! We also ended up taking down all of the old plaster walls and dry walling everything, which wasn’t in the original plan. A friend helped us out with all of that as well. Oh, and my dad installed a new privacy window. Now that I think of it, we had a lot of help you guys!

You can see some of my inspiration for the bathroom renovation over on my Pinterest board.

Below you’ll see some of the before photos. There was some pretty awful, peeling linoleum on the floor. The tiles were plastic and had been painted over multiple times. The painted tiles in the shower were peeling, so the kids would get little pieces of paint in the bathtub during bath time. The tub was one of those extremely old, cast iron, tubs. It was a PAIN to get out and we debated doing it, BUT are SO glad we did! The tub looked like it had been “redone” or painted at some point. Not great.

Like I mentioned earlier, this is our only bathtub/shower in the house! We were living here trying to work around the renovation. Five of us used this bathroom throughout the whole process…which is why it took almost 9 months to complete, lol! Anyway, we made do. Vada was lucky because she was able to take baths in the sink throughout the process.

My husband did a whole lot of research and YouTube video watchin’ before tiling. He had never done it before, BUT he did such a great job! We were planning all along to do dark grout for that Fixer Upper look, but decided at the last-minute to keep it white. We thought it might hide any imperfections. Not that there were any, Jeff! 😉

After 7-8 months of using our construction zone bathroom, it is FINALLY finished! Well, 90% finished, lol! We plan to turn our beautiful mirror, that we purchased custom from Hurd and Honey, into a medicine cabinet because there is little to no storage space in this bathroom. We’re also going to add storage space to the left of the tub with some pretty open shelving that will match the other shelves and mirror. I’ll update this post when that’s finished. 🙂

I wanted to mention that I took the advice from Young House Love and hung an extra long shower curtain! The bathroom is tiny, but the extra length on the shower curtain gives the room a much larger feeling! Click here to see the one we bought on Amazon. It’s great quality and very soft. We’ve been happy with it! P.S. I LOVE Young House Love’s podcast and get so much inspiration listening to their DIY banter. Check it out. 😉

I linked to all of the items that we purchased for the reno below. If they weren’t available, I found something similar.

Glass pendants from Amazon

Glass pendants from Wayfair (These are the ones pictured!)

Tub and shower faucets by Kingston Brass

Showerhead

Hurd & Honey mirror

Faucet similar to ours from Amazon

Extra long shower curtain

Towel ring

Toilet paper holder