So last night Husband scolded me for not keeping the blog updated!!!  I didn’t even realize he regularly read it!  Apparently when he was back in DC at his main office and wanted to show people our renovation progress, he kept having to explain how much farther along we were when showing them my blog!  Which is true.  I’ve been holding out.

We’re really truly almost done.  Almost.  Except the painting (oh, the painting…)…the hot water heater…counter top installation (and sink and faucet, obv)…two more fans (it is so hot here!)…and waiting for our appliances to arrive.  Did I mention we have to be out of our apartment the end of the month?  Begin panic mode.

Anyway, in an attempt to catch up, here are some pics of the master bathroom progress – not done or in its current state, but a little taste of where we were as of last week!  But first, the obligatory before pics:

eww

If you remember, the master bathroom used to be a little (and disgusting) 6′x6′ room that was the only full bathroom in the house.  We knocked down the wall separating it from the random hot water heater/pantry, making a spacious 12′x6′ dedicated master bathroom.

We reused the toilet and pedestal in the second bathroom; we wanted to reuse the cast iron tub as well by getting it resurfaced (several chips), but we discovered it was cheaper to just get a new tub (after donating the old one of course).

The same water and termite damage we saw in other parts of the house was also found once they ripped up the tile.  More eww…

yeah so there was a little work to be done

They replaced a few joists and ripped out old icky plumbing, and in no time we had new subflooring…

a nice, level, clean floor

Then the plumbing was roughed in, the drywall, cement board and hardibacker went up, and they started on the shower pan…

i see the start of a shower!

This will be quite a bit more spacious than our old bathroom in DC, a little 4′x5′ blue-tiled thing…

look how big the bathroom is!

We searched long and hard for a 6′ double vanity, but couldn’t find a thing we (I) liked that didn’t cost an arm and a leg.  So we actually had our carpenter build a vanity, which ended up costing about a third of anything we had found.  More on that later.

After we had the vanity made, I had to find a counter.  Again, everything was just insanely expensive, so we had our carpenters use some old 1-1/2″ cypress flooring they had and make it into a counter.  It’s a little unusual, but I think the end product turned out really cool and different.

yay vanity!

We definitely went the budget route with the shower surround and used a classic subway tile with white grout.  I added  little bead detail about 3/4 of the way up the shower, which dresses it up.

classic subway!

Our contractor suggested putting in a little corner bench to break up the 4′x6′ shower and give me a place to shave my legs.  Husband wasn’t wild about a bench (or niches), but he really likes how it turned out!  They put a piece of the floor tile on top of the bench to tie it together.   The floor of the shower is a 2″x2″ matte white mosaic (it looks kind of yellow in the pic but that’s just because it’s covered in sawdust!).

a little corner bench

Here you can see a better shot of the floor of the bathroom.  It’s a 12″x12″ marble tile I found at Lowes as the weekly special for a killer $1.88/sq ft (yay!).  It’s hard to see in the pics, but it’s kind of a gray brown marble with white (and some coral/pink) veining.  It’s probably not the first thing I would choose, but it looks really nice and was definitely the right price.   You can also see the cypress counter…they put a coat of poly on it without staining it first, but I hated it (so yellow! – looked like pine to me), so I had them sand it down and stain it.

a view of the whole bathroom

Whew, this post is getting long…so check back in later this week for more pics!

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