When we bought our house the master bathroom was on the top of my list for updating. I'm sure this bathroom was GLORIOUS in 1998 when our house was built with all the brass fixtures and big mirror, but not so much in 2015. I think Rich was fine with the way the bathroom looked and could have lived with it happily for the next 20 years (men!), but lucky for me the tub was leaking water and needed to be replaced. Once you replace the tub, then you have to replace all the tile around it and at that point you will want to replace the shower tile to match…. and if you are doing all that you might as well get new shower doors, counter tops and a light fixture :) I took this bathroom from BRASSY to CLASSY :)
We hired a contractor to handle the entire project because I couldn't imagine hiring all the different contractors to do all the different pieces. I didn't even know what order things had to be done in. The project took a little over 2 weeks, which was so fast! We are just waiting on the new frameless glass shower doors to be made and installed.
Here are some pictures of the bathroom pre-renovation:
As you can imagine… I spent an infinite number of hours looking on the Internet for inspiration. Especially when it came to picking tile. I knew I wanted a white/grey clean look. I really like white subway tile but I thought it was too much like what we already had… I kind of wanted to change it up. I needed to stay with a lighter colored tile because our floors are dark grey and we wanted to keep them to save money (and also because I like them). When I actually went to the tile store I was really drawn to the marble. It's just so beautiful! I decided I wanted an all marble design (to give it the clean look I was looking for) but to make it more "interesting"I wanted a band of mosaic in the same kind of marble going around the shower and tub and a penny mosaic in the same marble for the floor. For some reason penny mosaic screams FLOOR to me. With that design I get the clean look I want but it's not boring. Marble can be expensive, but I looked at several different marble colors and sizes and found the cheapest one. It was actually only 20 cents a square foot over my tile allowance, so for the whole project the main tile was only like $40 over budget. However, the mosaic tile and pencil tile to cap off the edges are a good bit over, but luckily we didn't need a whole lot of those.
Here are some inspirational pictures I "pinned" during the research process:
I'm not going to bore you with the faucets… let's just say I spent hundreds of hours looking at faucets and I'm not even completely sure why I picked the ones I did. I think I just got so frustrated looking at them and after a while they all start to look alike. We went with Moen and a brushed nickel finish to match the rest of the house.
For the countertops we went with granite instead of marble for budget purposes and because I do really like the look of granite. We actually found a level one (the cheapest level) of granite that we liked. We even got to go to the granite warehouse and pick our slab.
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| A sample of our granite (Dallas White) against the bathroom floor. |
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| Our slab with our cabinet door. |
The
light fixture was a splurge, but it was so worth it! I love the band of quatrefoil design.
Here are pictures of our new master bathroom (minus the shower doors):
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| The ledge on the left of the tub will be enclosed in the shower as a bench. |
I still want to frame the mirrors… that's a DIY project planned for the near future. Then the bathroom will be complete. I really love that I got to put my own stamp on this house and I think we will enjoy this bathroom for many years. After all, marble never goes out of style ;)
Tressa
