Guest Bathroom Remodel Part 1: The What and Why?

It’s been quite some time since I’ve posted anything on this blog, but I decided that it would be a good idea to document the progress of our first major remodel attempt. Not sure how many posts this will be, but I plan to break them up into pages with a specific set of info, so they don’t just ramble. So let’s start with the current state, and why I’m doing this.

This lovely hole has been in this shower nearly 4 years! Also note my measurement on the wall.

About 4 years ago, I had a plumber come out and replace the garden tub rough, and mixing valve in the shower in our master bathroom. For the shower, I had him cut through the guest bathroom shower wall since we weren’t using it, and I thought it would be easy to just patch back up. Well, clearly it wasn’t, and it never happened. The boys shower/bathe in our bathroom, and we haven’t had a guest stay with us needing to shower, so it just kept getting pushed to the back of the list of things to do.

As mentioned above, I also had the garden tub roughs replaced, and that also required cutting a big ass hole in the tile on the tub base. It looks terrible, and we’ve been wanting to do a remodel in the master bath anyway. The house is 23 years old, and it really shows in the bathrooms and kitchen. Every year, something else has come up requiring me to spend money that was earmarked for the master bath. I’m finally going to just do it. However, we can’t take our shower out of commission until we have a usable guest bath. So this bathroom comes first.

The builder grade mid 1990’s bathroom, gross caulk and grout stains and all.

My original plan was to have the contractors re-tile the shower as part of the estimate for the master bathroom work. The cost to do so, was kind of expensive, and it really didn’t make sense to do just that. The floor tile in there, as in the other two tiled bathrooms is terrible. There are cracks in some of the tiles. This bathroom in particular also has a boy who can’t seem to aim, nor clean up the mess he makes, so the floor tile really needs to be ripped up.

Paying the labor for this amount of work would really eat into the budget for the other bathroom, so I decided that ain’t happening. I’ve done a good bit of DIY work over the years, so I figured this would be a good project to tackle on my own (probably with the help of some friends at times). I’ve never done tile before, other than minor patch jobs, but I’ll have a week off to take the time to do it. I’ve been reading up a lot, and have found some great resources. One of which being DIY Tile Guy. If this one goes well, then I may just take on the master bath myself.

Aside from the tile, I’ve decided to replace the shower/tub mixing valve and trim since I’ll have it all exposed. Additionally, I’ll do the faucet and a more efficient toilet. I might have my plumber come in to do the mixing valve, depending on if it’s gonna require cutting/sweating copper. 

In the next post I’ll go over my product selection, and the plethora of choices available.