Christina’s “Fun and Light” DIY Bathroom Makeover

Project by: Christina
Location: Jackson, Mississippi

We had a small leak in our guest bathroom that required a hole to be knocked in the wall in order to access the pipe. I had (at that time) a wonderful idea to just go ahead and redo the entire bathroom to something a little more fun and light. Little did I know, life isn’t like a 30 minute HGTV renovation and it would end up taking us over 2 months, around $2,500 and lot of help from my father-in-law to complete our “little” project.

We ripped out the old vanity, shower doors, and old wall paper with no problems. When we started on the tiles we realized they were laid in a mortar bed that ended at the vanity leaving the vanity area about two inches lower than the rest of the room. After chipping away for hours with little progress we rented a demolition hammer from Home Depot and quickly got the job done. You can see in a picture how much mortar was under the tiles.

We ran out of tile once we got to the edges and had to order more – that delayed us a couple weeks. We hadn’t taken into account the pattern of the tile which left a lot of waste once the pieces were cut to size. It was like a giant puzzle.

Finally, we had the holes patched and painted and the end was near – so we thought! There was a rim of the mortar bed still around the edges of the floor and the baseboards were not wanting to be installed evenly. After a lot of sawing, gluing and caulking we finally had them in, and they look pretty good!

We are really proud of our first DIY renovation, but for our sanity not doing any more for quite some time!

Thanks, Christina!

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