Bathroom Reveal!

Yes folks, it's time for the goods...

About a week ago (or two? honestly time is flying and I'm pretty sure May only lasted a day or two, so you can't rely on me for accruate time estimates) - our bathroom became functional! If you follow on twitter / instagram you know that we were waiting for glass to be installed at the end of the shower. Sort of important for us to (a) have a shower curtain and (b) actually be able to use the shower!  Well, it got installed and my first shower in there was glorious (and continues to be).

Here's the final product:

If you remember (I don't want to remember), this is what it looked like before:

Lovely peach-brown floor tile, 5' wide in all its glory. Check out my previous posts for demo, and progress here and here.

Those 20" that we moved the wall into the guest room REALLY pay off, don't you think?

And now, more pretty...

The shower feels amazing - so big and light filled with the glass at one end, and the tile all the way to the ceiling (or maybe it was the fact that we were starting to get used to our basement bathroom...where the shower head is mounted only about 5'5" high!)

We still have some functional / style elements to add (like a towel rack - can someone please tell me where to get a chrome, multi-arm swiveling towel rack??), but overall the big work in the bathroom is over and we are back in business! 

Sources:

Tile (floor and wall tile): The Tile Store

Vanity, faucets, tub, tub fixtures (excluding shower head): Tubs

Mirrors, lighting: Lowes

Shower head, toilet paper holder: Home Depot

Shower curtain: Home Outfitters

Paint: Benjamin Moore PaperWhite (OC-55)

Sneak Peek - Bathroom

Ok, I know I've been a bit MIA...but for good reason! We spent the weekend in Ottawa for a friend's lovely wedding...it was a gorgeous weekend and tons of fun. Got the chance to catch up with family and friends, and stock up on some of our favourite goodies (namely bagels from Kettleman's!).

And today...today we had the plumber come back to hook things up in the bathroom. THIS is exciting primarily because it means we have a toilet again on the 2nd floor! Big coo for any middle of the night bathroom trips. I've taken some quick shots here and there...but you'll have to wait (so will we!) for the full reveal. We have some final details to tie up tomorrow, and then our electrician is set to come on Tuesday and hopefully a piece of glass will be installed at the end of the tub / shower sometime soon.

In the meantime here's what we're looking at:

Yes, our lovely dual flush toilet re-installed. hoorah!

There are a lot of new things in this photo...stay tuned for the details

And there are two other pics that I would love to share...but either my bandwidth or blogger is NOT happy about uploading my little iphone photos, so I'll take it as a sign that I should leave the sneak peek at this and make you all drool with anticipation until the real reveal.... :)

Until then, have a great rest of the week!

Shower curtains - bright and bold, or nice and neutral?

Hi all,

I shared my tile with you the other day (and I'm still just as excited about it), but onto the next thing. We have to find a shower curtain for the shower...this is no easy feat. There are a LOT of cheesey shower curtains out there. Seriously, google image "shower curtain" or even Pinterest it, and you get a lot of cheese factor.

The last shower curtain I had won't fly (it's brown), but I ended up buying fabric and having my mom sew it  to get the length we desired (I HATE short shower curtains). That's an option, but if we can find a pre-fab one out there it will speed up the big reveal to you guys :)

Here are some options I came across on Pinterest and in my searches.

Starting with the nice and neutral:

 (a) this is a gorgeous bathroom (b) I like the classic look of the black and white. We almost went with this floor, but once we chose a modern vanity I wanted a more linear floor...ok back to the shower curtain. The border could easily be a DIY, and having the 2 shower curtains (although I was doubtful at first) could be a great way to show off beautiful tile in the shower. Image via DesignManifest

 Another black and white option - this one from Target!

Gray Ikat Chevron - WestElm via DesignSerendipity

This one reminds me of turkish towels...via WestElm

Patterned, but neutral tie-dye vibe - Shibori via WestElm

 And now for the bright and bold:
 

 

 If I decide to go for colour in my bathroom - this is the print I want! Not sure if I would go for the coral or another colour, but I love the pattern. Diane Von Furstenburg (of course) via Refinery29

 Rainforest by West Elm

This one is funny, yet not kitchy via LivingExclusive

So, what do you think? Neutral or Colour?

1 curtain or 2?

Now we're talking...

Hi all!

If you follow me on instagram (interiorgroupie) or twitter (@interiorgroupie) you have seen that we had some exciting grout progress last week. This is uber exciting as it means the bathroom is kind of getting close...to looking like a bathroom again...

 

Loving the dark grout...

 Loving the floor...

Loving the future home of our double vanity...(which is proving to be a challenge since the vanity placement won't be lined up with the studs...right...)

 

And now the hard part - to choose the perfect paint colour. We have to do the painting before the plumber comes back so we have a chance to paint properly behind where the rad is going and where the toilet is going...but what colour? 

Currently Benjamin Moor Distant Gray (2124-70), American White (2112-70), and Paper White (OC-55) are in the mix. Bathrooms don't get a lot of light, so I'm thrown by how light / white to go, or if I should go with a touch of grey. I'm also a bit worried about the gray being too blue (I don't want that)...what do you think?

Bathroom progress {subfloor, drywall and tile oh my!}

Happy Monday!

How was your weekend? Ours was good - dinner with friends on Friday night, errands and some relaxing on a chilly Saturday, and then more relaxing and some clean up on a sunny Sunday. Overall, a pretty great weekend. Since the bathroom is now well under way there's not much for us to do on weekends - this is very "new" for us. We're used to being part of the progress instead of watching from afar. I have to say, it's pretty amazing to come home from work and see progress every day! If we were doing this on our own we would be nowhere close to where we are now, and we would have made more than a few rookie blunders along the way.

Before the drywall went up, the Mr. and I did some finishing touches on the framing, including framing out the spots for our recessed medicine cabinets:

Last week marked the subfloor being completed (the mr. did most of it, but our carpenter came in to finish off the tricky parts around the toilet), drywall going up, and tile going up! The ceiling also got fixed (from where we ripped out the wall), and some taping and mudding happened.

Well hello there, future home of the double vanity.

Sneak peak at my pretty new bathtub (we tried to protect it with plastic and tape...we'll see what happens :) ). We are going to have glass put as the third "wall" ontop of the pony wall (or knee wall) for a clean finish to the bathtub area.

On a non-construction note, I did some baking this weekend and tried a new muffin recipe for apple spice muffins from Smitten Kitchen.

They are delicious.

What did you get up to this weekend?

Bathroom mood board

I finally put together a mood board for my bathroom so you guys can have a peek into what I envision for the space. Well...at this point it's more than what I invision, it's basically what's happening!

Sort of different from my initial run at it, but I'm loving it all coming together. The white subway tile will be on the shower/tub alcove wall, and the marble herringbone will be the floor tile (I will have HERRINGBONE in my house!!).

The only things I have left to decide on are a shower head and paint colour. For the paint, I don't know whether to leave it all white and air-y, or to do something a bit darker on the wall (grey)? I'm leaing towards a very light gray so it isn't white on white on the tile. I am unsureof doing something dark because we don't have any tile on the walls to break it up. I also may re-think the lighting, but will keep the same style and will have the lights on top. I like the idea of lights on the side, but since we are doing 2 separate mirrors, we would have to have 3 lights and they're pretty bulky so we opted for top lighting. We will also have 2 potlights so the over-mirror lights won't be the only light sources in the bathroom.

So far the electrician and plumber have been in (and will be back to finazlie all the hook ups), and our drywall / tile installer started today! I know that finishing takes a while...so I'm not banking on it being doing very soon, but it's still some great progress.

Bathroom update - the demo!

Ok...first off, there is snow on the ground. In Toronto, in April. Less than a week from my birthday. Not cool Mama Nature, not cool. It felt like we skipped spring and fast forwarded to december. Without the Christmas pretty. Bleck....

Onto other things...things that will make my bathroom oh so pretty - DEMO.

This bathroom reno is the first real "reno" we are doing to our house. Don't get me wrong, we have done a lot (A LOT) of work to our house since moving in: painting top to bottom, re-wiring, new boiler, a/c, new closet, and a kitchen uplift.

But besides the closet, we haven't done any other demo. We certainly haven't done any demo that includes a bin.

We can now scratch that off the rookie list!

The bin arrived at 7:30am on Saturday and the Mr. spent a solid 10 hours on Saturday demo'ing the bathroom, while I ran around picking up our tub, vanity, mirrors, etc. We could have had delivery but it didn't work with our schedule so pick-up it was.

Plus, I got the surprise of the guy at the pick-up desk who said "Ok you're picking up a tub and vanity...{looks at me} Are you here on your own? Yes. {looks at me again} What kind of car do you drive???"  I wish I could have been swift enough to joke that I had a Honda Civic with me or something but I had to tell him the truth that I had a cargo van (thank god for Autoshare).

After all the Mr's hard work and some timely help from his cousin towards the end of the day, we had a lot of dust (and a lot of it contained within plastic!) and this:

Our new bathroom!!

OK, space for our new bathroom. I think it's all very exciting. The Mr is a little freaked out about how it is going to be put back together, but I just keep on reassuring him that's why we hired some folks to put it back together for us. (Easier to day since i didn't rip it apart. Let's hope i'm right on this one). In terms of our plan for the work, we have a plumber, electrician, and "finisher" coming in (tile, drywall, etc) so I think we will be in good shape. If the plumber can make everything happen with the radiator pipes and sink moving we should be good (fingers crossed).

 Oh yah...and as a tip...when demo'ing a tile floor on a floor above another one...it's probably best practice to remove light fixtures, or else this can happen:

woops.

Bathroom Update - We have a new (framed) wall!

A long overdue hello again!! We have been pouring our time into the bathroom reno and a couple of other projects we have on the go, so my at-home computer time has been taken up with research and ordering (online shopping with store returns makes my life sooooo easy).  Fortunately "research" tends to involve Pinterest so I've been getting my fix.

Ok now time for the real updates - a couple of weekends ago the Mr and his very handy friend framed the new wall for our bathroom. Our main change to the bathroom is moving the wall into our guest room by 20 inches. 20" is a lot of added space to our teeny tiny principal bathroom.

Exciting, right!??! As you can see, once the wall is down the bathroom will have a nice amount of space for a proper vanity and space for good old moving around. We aren't going to be able to tango in the bathroom but that's a good thing considering the maneuvers we have to pull right now if we are in there brushing our teeth at the same time.

The wall was framed in advance of demo so we could wrap it in plastic in hopes of containing SOME of the mess to come from demo (demo in a 90 year old house with plaster walls will always be messy).

Oh - and an update on the light fixtures - we ordered both the top and side fixtures to see what will work best in real life with all of the other finishes we have (and we can return the ones we don't use directly in store...so easy).

Hoping to put together a mood board soon so you can see where I am going with all of this!

On top, or on the side?

Happy (belated) Easter everyone! Hope the Easter bunny was good to you. My weekend was extra long since the Mr. and I took Monday off as well, and it felt relaxing yet full of family and friends. The Easter Bunny was exceptionally good to me, except I forgot my new pillow covers that my mom sewed for me! Sooo it will be a month or so until I see them in the living room...c'est la vie. We will be in a construction zone throughout our bathroom reno though, so maybe it's all for the best.

Speaking of reno...I've moved on to some light fixture choices (PS - we've ordered the vanity, tub, and fixtures / taps!). I need your help with this one - lighting on top or on the side?

Or

Mirrors (yep, I ordered those too), Top lighting, Side lighting all via lowes.ca

What do you think? We are also still debating whether we need 2 potlights - any thoughts? The bathroom will be approximately 50 sq ft when we're done with it.

Rethinking bathroom space

I hinted in my last post that some recent measurements may lead to my dream bathroom not coming true. We were looking at 60" vanities (which seems to be the smallest common size you can get for a double vanity), but we're a tad worried that if we go with 60" it will be too clunky and "there" in the bathroom. We have a radiator at the far end of our bathroom, beside the future vanity. The radiator currently takes up about 8" of precious space. We could look at slim rads (like StelRad) but we assume those would still need 4-6" to be hung on the wall and to allow some breathing room. All this adds up to our 90" long bathroom being just a tad short (for you know, things like the 26" door swing). We aren't changing where the door is so we can't do a pocket door to save on swing space (the only option would be put the pocket door behind the shower...which for obvious plumbing reasons is not an option).

We came to the conclusion that a smaller vanity was the answer and would make the bathroom look better in the end because it wouldn't be stuffed with furniture.I've contacted Lumsden Custom Cabinetry for a quote for a smaller vanity (check out the beautiful vanity they made for Janice at Life Begins at Thirty, Right).

We also did some shopping this weekend.  We came across a few wall-hung vanities that are still double vanities, but only 54" in length. They are also a bit more shallow than the other vanieites we were looking at, and being wall hung give the illusion of space (and provide enough room to propoerly clean underneath). They are very modern...which we're not against, just a different look than we were initially going for. Here are a couple of options:

(PS - check out those prices)

These vanities are 54" but I think they still allow for a lot of counter space while maintaining good sized sinks (19" wide). 

What do you think of wall hung vanities? Clean and sleek, or not your style? Do you think a large single mirror is better than 2 separate ones for a vanity of this size?

Update and my bathroom moodboard

Happy March!! I for one am happy that March is here...and just waiting for Spring to catch up :)

Sorry for being MIA last week...I have a feeling that is going to be common over the next little while. My day job (real life!) is cookoo right now and I'm putting most of my energy into that, which unfortunately leaves little time for blogging (and creative inspiration) on the side. So, I'll be here when I'm here, and look forward to catching up on your blogs whenever I can.

Thank you so much for all of your comments about the bathroom vanity options!! Based on some of the posts that I did on the vanities, here is my initial vision:

via my Olioboard (under InteriorGroupie)

A mix of marble, black and white to round it all out. Based on some recent measurements however this may be more of a dream bathroom scenario vs. reality...more on that later this week.

Until then...what do you think?

Bathroom vanity options

With our  bathroom reno, we are crossing our fingers and hoping that we can get a double vanity. Seriously, after a pedestal sink for 3 years in a tight space, any vanity would be great...a double vanity would be complete luxury. As you can tell from my last post, I'm thinking a black and white (and in between) colour scheme for the new bathroom.

I've started looking for vanities, mainly from big box stores. I know that we could get custom, but I figured we might as well see what we can find pre-made and then decide what to do.

Hutton Double Vanity via Restoration Hardware

Really nice right? Also really expensive (would go custom instead)

Pretty much an exact copy (with hardwood construction and soft close drawers and cabinets):

What about this one? looks pretty much exactly the same...and is litterally half the price.

Studio Bathe Kalize via costco.ca

Mirrors and shipping included, hardwood solid construction, $1599.99. I pretty much fell off my chair when I saw this was from Costco. And costco.CA at that! Unfortunately it measures 62.5" wide so it is sadly too big for our space...but if you're in the market it's a great option (worth the $50 Costco membership, that's for sure!)

Chesapeake via costco.ca

I am liking the idea of a black vanity...it could be solid in the space, and we'll likely be going with white tile for the bath so it could be a nice contrast. I am not crazy about the granite on this piece, but for the price it might be worth it to buy it and put a different slab on it.

 

Naples 60" vanity via Home Depot Canada

This one comes top-less, but I like the style of it. I think however I prefer the vanities with open space at the bottom (always important in a tiny space).

A small issue with all of these is that they are online...free returns, but would have to rent a truck to bring it back if we didn't like it. Most of the stores do not carry them in stock so it's hard to know what the quality will be until you see it. We stopped in at Lowes and Home Depot and both seem to offer fairly good quality. Rona on the other hand was a no - all the display models were chipping and/or not made well.

What do you think of these options? Any suggestions for where else we should check for vanities? What about other bathroom fixtures, like tubs, faucets, etc?