Category Archives: Bathroom

Bathroom by the Numbers

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Now that we’re finished with the bathroom — well, finished with everything except finding a curtain/shade option for the window in there — we figured it was time to give you the nitty gritty details on what we spent, so you can ooh and aah over how much money a little DIYing can save you. Just for a quick recap though, a few before and after shots for good measure.

Shower area before and after.

 

  Toilet area before and after.

 

  Built-in cabinets turned built-in shelves before and after.

 

Sink and vanity area before and after.

Pretty amazing huh? So, now, here’s the cost breakdown of the project.

  • Floor tiles……………………………………..322.80
  • Beadboard…………………………………171.50
  • Shower tiles………………………………155.53
  • Shower fixtures, caddy, rod and rings…………246.97
  • Sink and faucet…………………….231.03
  • Vanity, mirror, and light fixture………….164.32
  • Bath mat, soap dish, towel bars, hooks, and basket………135.91
  • Paint, primer, polyurethane……………….66.49
  • Caulk, mortar, and grout…………………….158.64
  • Various supplies and tools…………………………232.82
  • Crown molding, baseboards, and quarter round……………88.45
  • Cement board…………………………………….69.30
  • Plumber…………………………………………385.00
  • Tax………………………………………………102.20

TOTAL………………………………………………$2,530.96

That’s right, folks. We did a complete renovation for $2,500 and some change. And about $300 worth was on stuff we can use again, like grout floaters, extra screws, extra tile, various tools, and so forth. Considering the average cost of a complete bathroom remodel ranges from $10,000-15,000 if you hire out the work, I’d say we got some serious bang for our buck.

By putting in some elbow grease, we saved major cash. We felt comfortable learning to do most everything ourselves, but we did leave one task to the professionals. We had our plumber come in and replace the pipes in the shower and convert the two-lever system to a single lever. It is the biggest line in the budget above, but we think it was worth it to make sure the job was done right. Possible leaks leading to mold = not something we want to worry about.

$2,500 is certainly nothing to sneeze at in this household, but we saved up for the project for a long time and were able to do it all without charging a thing. Did we have to compromise on some things? Well, sure. I didn’t get the sconces I wanted, and we had to hunt around for deals, like our $90 vanity and consignment shop mirror. We think it was all worth it though. The room looks great, and we don’t owe a dime to a credit card company. And we’ll leave you with one last before and after.

 

 

Anyone else out there done a bathroom remodel on the cheap? If so, please accept our cyper pat on the back and put a link in the comment section, so we can see what you’ve done.

If you want to see our bathroom project from the beginning, check out demo, cement board installation, beadboard installation and painting, subway tile in the shower, honeycomb tile on the floor, flea market vanity and finishing touches.

Or you can read Ed’s tutorials on these tasks: hanging cement board, tiling and grouting, installing a sink and faucet, installing crown molding and baseboards.

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Bathroom How-To: Crown Moulding and Baseboards

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One of the last big jobs for our bathroom remodel was putting in the crown moulding and baseboards, and while I have a little experience cutting and putting in baseboards, I had none with the type of crown moulding we picked for the bathroom. When we painted our addition a while back, we put in baseboards (similar to what we put in the bathroom) and moulding (just not the crown type), so I’d at least used a miter saw once before. At first, I just assumed cutting all moulding was the same. Silly me. I quickly realized there are different ways to cut different types of moulding so the joints fit (and luckily I didn’t cut everything at once, so I only wasted a couple of small pieces. In this post, I’ll cover the crown moulding first, then I’ll explain the baseboards.

The Crown Moulding (CM):

First, in case you’re not familiar with difference between moulding and CM, CM is the type that doesn’t sit flat against the wall. When it’s installed, it connects to the ceiling and wall at a 45 degree angle–so there’s actually open space behind the CM. This difference in how it is installed translates to a difference in how it’s cut on the miter saw. (Normally, with regular moulding and baseboards, the wood is held flat against the miter saw and cut at a 45 degree angle, but with the CM, the wood has to be set against the miter saw just as it will be installed in the room except upside down.)

Before starting to cut pieces of the CM, the best thing to do is create a few short test pieces. These pieces will be cut so that they can be held up against the ceiling and wall to mimic how the real CM will be installed. This might seem like a step to skip, but, trust me, it is not. Using these test pieces saved me from haphazardly cutting pieces that would turn out not to fit. On each of the test pieces, I labeled the edges (inside or outside joint). Also, I made sure to have enough pieces to mimic and inside or outside joint piece coming from the left and right directions.

After getting my test pieces ready, all I had to do was measure the pieces I would actually install, then match the test pieces up with the CM and cut. The other important trick to cutting CM is that when you put it against the fence and table of the miter saw (fence is the vertical backing, table is the horizontal base), you have the CM upside down. So imagine the fence is the wall and the table is the ceiling (I even labeled mine the fence ‘wall’ and the table ‘ceiling’ just to remind myself). Now when the pieces are cut, the joints will match up seamlessly (or mostly seamlessly in my case).

Installing the cut pieces of CM is sometimes a two person job: one person holds up the sometimes long pieces of CM while the other person uses a nail gun to nail the pieces up. (I’m sure CM can be nailed up with just a hammer and nails, but if you’ve got access to a nail gun, the process will go much faster and the CM won’t be damaged by flailing hammer hits.)

After all the CM was up, we filled in any gaps (and since my measuring skills leave something to be desired, we sometimes have gaps) with wood filler, let it dry, then covered it with some paint touch-ups. Pow. Crown moulding demystified.

In full disclosure, I watched several videos about cutting CM before I was confident I really understood what I was doing. This helped a good bit.

The Baseboards:

Cutting the baseboards (especially after cutting CM) is fairly simple. I didn’t even use test pieces for the baseboards, although if you haven’t cut baseboards before, the test pieces will probably help. Basically, I set the baseboard pieces against the fence (see above if you’ve already forgotten (I’m sure you haven’t forgotten though)) and cut at a 45 degree angle to make the inside or outside joints. My miter saw doesn’t bevel–it only swivels left and right to make angled cuts, so that’s why I set the pieces against the fence instead of the table. When cutting the baseboards (and CM, for that matter), measuring the pieces is the most important part. My new adopted rule of thumb: measure everything twice (or even three times).

Installing the baseboards is the same as the CM. One person holds the baseboards against the wall, the other person nails the pieces to the wall. Easy.

We filled any gaps in the baseboard joints with wood filler and then touched up with paint. Just in case you’re interested, the paint we used for the CM and baseboards was Homestead Resort Jefferson White 7006-1. We used this paint for all the trim around the window, door, and shelves as well.

Things to keep in mind:

1. Make test pieces to be sure the joints are cut correctly.

2. Always set the CM upside down on the miter saw when you cut it.

3. Measure everything twice (or if you’re especially bad at measuring, like me, just go ahead and measure it three times).

Installing the CM and baseboards makes a huge difference in how the room looks, so whether the room lacked them before or just during the remodeling, the end result can still be pretty impressive.

If you want to see the bathroom remodel from the beginning, check out demo, cement board installation, hanging and painting beadboard, tiling the shower, and tiling the floor. You might also want to take a look at my How-To’s: cement board, tiling and grouting, and sink/faucet installation.

 

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Bathroom How-To: Sink and Faucet

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After we’d finished with the tiling the floor, one of the last things we had to do in the bathroom was install our new sink and faucet and the sewing table we’d use as the vanity. Both the sink and vanity came with all the parts we needed to install them and directions that were easy to follow (a rare case). The installation was only slightly problematic because of our existing plumbing. The first thing we did was deal with the waste drain and water lines.

With the old sink and cabinet removed, we realized that the two water lines didn’t have shut-off valves. So I picked a couple up at the hardware store. These first two valves didn’t fit. So I went back to the store, returned them, and got two more. These also did not work (I can’t actually remember why now–probably a mix up with inner diameter vs. outer diameter measurements, which I’m not so good at). My third trip to the store got me two shut-off valves that fit just fine. These valves allowed us to turn the water back on at the meter without water making a mess in the bathroom. (If you don’t have shut-off valves on your sinks, I highly recommend putting some in. As long as you get the size that fits, all you have to do is screw them on the water line.)

When we were ready to put in the vanity and sink, we had to decide where the vanity would be and where the sink and faucet would be in relation to the water lines. The faucet ended up offset so it sits about 2 o’clock on the sink. The water supply lines that came with the faucet were just long enough to reach from the lines to the faucet.

After we knew where the sink and faucet would go, I had to drill holes in the sewing table for the plumbing. I used a 1/2″ speedbore drill bit and had a hole for the faucet and a hole for the sink drain in about 15 minutes. Drilling through the solid pine boards went somewhat slowly but without major issues.

With the holes drilled, installing the faucet consisted of basically (1) screwing in the water supply lines in the bottom, (2) threading those lines through the hole in the table, and (3) connecting them to the shut-off valves I’d installed earlier. The supply lines that came with the faucet were helpfully color-coded blue and red for cold and hot water, respectively.

Installing the sink was arguably the easiest part of all of this. The sink just sits on top of the hole in the table, and the 6″ waste drain that came with the sink screws in through the bottom of the table. To be honest, the sink rocks a little bit, but it doesn’t leak. (We’re thinking of either installing a sink washer or drilling a bigger hole to stop the movement.)

Then came the fun amateur plumbing part. The waste drain that came with the sink was too short to reach the P-trap I got at the store. And the P-trap wasn’t long enough to reach the waste drain hole in the wall. So I had to get creative. For some reason, I couldn’t find P-traps that had longer waste pipes–I’m not sure whether these exist or not. To make the sink drain reach the P-trap, and to make the P-trap waste pipe reach the wall, I bought two 6″ extension pipes. These pipes come with slip nuts that allow them to be attached to the P-trap itself.

In order for the extensions to fit, I had to cut them to the size I needed. I used a bi-metal blade on my hacksaw (that I used for this threshold job), and cut the pipes to the lengths I needed them. When I cut the pipes, I got the cut started, and after I was through the metal, I’d turn the pipe itself and keep in line with the initial cut. So I didn’t cut straight through the entire pipe the whole time. I only cut through about a centimeter of it at a time.

With the pieces cut, I attached them to the P-trap using the slip nuts and plastic gaskets that came with the extensions. (*I’m sure that the way I fixed this problem is not exactly up to the plumbers’ code. So I’m certainly not suggesting that this is the best way to make a P-trap reach your plumbing, but it’s working for us so far.) After a few tests to find any leaks and disassemblies to get the gaskets in the right places, I had a sink drain system that was leak-free.

Before:

And after:

 

If you want to see the bathroom remodel from the beginning, check out demo, cement board installation, hanging and painting beadboard, tiling the shower, and tiling the floor. You might also want to take a look at my How-To’s: cement board and tiling and grouting.

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Bathroom How-To: Tiling and Grouting

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Kristen has already given you a general idea (here and here) of how the tiling and grouting went, so in this post I’ll cover the step-by-step process, I hope, succinctly. The processes themselves involved more steps than I realized, and as seems to be the case with everything else, the preparation for tiling was the most time consuming part. We’ve already covered the cement board installation, so the next step is to get out the tiles.

The Shower

1. To get an idea of which tiles need to be cut, and what sizes they need to be cut in, we first did a dry-run of the bottom row. This showed us two things. First, the size of the cut tile that would go in the corner, and second, that our tub was not level. So we started out the first tile of the bottom row as close to the tub as possible and kept all the other tiles level with that. We ended up with a growing gap between the bottom row and the tub, but we eventually filled it in with caulk.

2. After we got the size of the corner tile (which translated to the edge tile on every other row), I cut tiles of that size (I think the first wall’s short pieces were 4″) for every row. I used a basic tile cutter that I got from our local hardware store–it works pretty well.

3. With all of the tiles cut, we started to stick them on the wall with the thin set mortar. This part is somewhat messy, but fairly easy once you get started. Using the trowel (with 1/4″ square groves) we spread the thin set on the cement board then scored it with the grooved side. The trick is to get enough mortar on so the tile doesn’t slip, but not so much that it pushes up through the gaps. The conventional wisdom seems to be that if you put a tile up, then take it down, the back of the tile should just be covered with mortar–that’s the ideal amount.

3.2 (Actually, kind of 2.2) Before we took off tiling the whole wall, we made sure to get at least two level rows, on the bottom, set. We let this dry overnight, and the next day we had a set base of tiles that we could tile on top of and not worry about getting the tiles crooked. We did this for all three walls in the shower. We didn’t use spacers between our tiles because they had built-in 1/16″ spaces.

4. After all the tile was set, it was time to grout. Grouting is time consuming but not all that hard. We bought the kind of grout that has to be mixed, but there are premixed grouts as well. After following the mixing directions on the bag, the grout was ready to be put on the walls. The process here is pretty similar to applying the mortar. Using the grout floater, we spread on grout (at a 45 degree angle) and made sure it got in all the spaces.

5. After we’d covered a small area, we let the grout sit for about 30 minutes before wiping off the excess. After we wiped off the excess, we wiped the tile down again with a damp cloth. That’s all there is to it. Overnight, the grout dried.

Some things to keep in mind:

–Grout dries quickly, so we did small areas instead of trying to grout the entire shower at once. Scraping dried grout off of tiles is no fun.

–If the grout in your bucket starts to become hard to work with, mix it up again. I used a mixer attachment and a drill, which is much easier than trying to stir it by hand. After mixing it for a few minutes, the grout will loosen up and be easier to work with.

The Floor

1. Tiling the floor was super easy except for getting the tiles straight (as Kristen explains here). So since we’ve already covered our problem with the spaces, I’ll skip the dry-run process. After I had the entire floor covered in tiles for the dry-run, I started at one end of the room and picked up a couple of rows of tile at a time.

2. I used the same thin set mortar for the floors as I did in the shower, and spreading the mortar on was the same. The only difference is that for the floor, I used a trowel with 1/8″ V-shaped grooves (because the floor tiles were smaller than the shower tiles, this smaller groove set kept me from putting on too thick a layer of mortar).

3. After I covered a small section in mortar, I set out the hexagon tiles. These tiles came in sheets, so I really only had to get the pattern and the spaces right (I used 1/16″ spacers between the sheets of tiles).

4. After tiling in small sections, the floor was finished. I let it set overnight and grouted the next day.

5. Grouting the floor was exactly the same as grouting the shower. Spread on the grout, let it sit for 30 minutes, wipe off the excess with the grout sponge, then wipe down the tile with a damp cloth. Presto.

More things to keep in mind:

–The floor tiles we used came in sheets, so there was no cutting tiles to fit against corners or walls. I just had to pop off enough of the small tiles to get the rest of the sheet to fit. It’s important to make sure that only enough tiles are popped off to get the sheet to fit against the walls/tub–putting down single tiny hex tiles to fill in gaps sure ain’t fun.

–We used quarter round trim to cover up the gaps between the edges of the tile sheets and the walls. For the most part, we covered all the gaps.

–After the grout had dried completely (a few days), we applied grout sealer to prevent it from staining and to keep out moisture.

Here’s a quick reminder of the before:

And after:

If all this sounds too easy to be true, it’s because it kind of is, but it also kind of isn’t. The prep work (cutting tiles, getting level rows, getting spaces right on the floor) took me at least twice as long as the actually tiling and grouting. But once the prep is done, the laying of tile goes pretty quickly.

 

Post is linked up at One Project Closer’s Link It Up #1. Check it out here.

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Bathroom How-To: Hanging Cement Board

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Not too far into our work on the bathroom, it became pretty clear that we were going to be doing several things we’d never done before. While this, at first, seems pretty risky, it turned out to actually be (mostly) not that big a deal. Thanks to the avuncular Internet we were able to watch YouTube videos and read tutorials on just about any task we weren’t familiar with. After having been on the search-end of tutorials and advice, I thought it’d be good to offer my own experience as a novice working through some of the work in the bathroom that Kristen has mentioned so far, like here, here, and here.

First up: cement board. I wrote a quick walk-through about the cement board in the middle of Kristen’s post here, so some of the information in this post will echo the earlier post, but this post is more detailed and provides a step-by-step explanation of everything entailed in our CB installation.

 

After we’d basically stripped the bathroom to its bare walls, the first thing we wanted to do was put up the CB for the shower tile and on the floor for the floor tile. This CB acts as a base for the tiles–it provides a better backer for the mortar and tiles than, say, plywood, and it acts as a moisture barrier of sorts. There are several brands of CB, but we went with Hardibacker in 3′ x 5′ sheets that were 1/4″ thick. In addition to the board, we had to get some CB screws (these are made specifically for cement board in that they are corrosion resistant), junction compound (which is similar to tile mortar and is used to seal the joints where the different pieces of CB meet), and joint tape (again, made specifically for the joint compound and CB–not the same as joint tape for drywall).

So the first thing we did was measure the space in the shower we were going to cover with CB and then tile. Then we drew out lines so that we had to make as few cuts, ergo as few pieces, as possible. All there was left was to actually cut the CB. There are two methods of cutting CB: 1) score and snap and 2) cut with a saw. We ended up trying both at different points in the bathroom work (I’ll get into that later on), but for the most part, we scored and snapped. With just a plain old box cutter, we went over the cut lines, I’d say a good 5-10 times, slowly because the box cutter doesn’t always like to stay on the cut line. Then, we snapped the board along the line (this is really a two-person job because it’s more likely that the board won’t break on line if you try to do it by yourself). A few pieces we had to sand a little because the breaks weren’t completely even, but once they’re on the wall, these uneven lines don’t matter too much.

After we had all the pieces cut, we hung them on the wall. Our tub turned out to not be exactly level, so we made sure the top line of the CB was level, and then our tiles would be straight with only a little extra space in places where the tile and tub met. Hanging the CB is another two-person job because someone has to hold the CB in place while the other person drills it in. The CB screws we bought claimed to not need pilot holes, which was true, but what ended up happening was that as the screw went into the wall, it would start to push the CB out (i.e., the CB would actually move toward the drill instead of toward the wall). So one person had to hold the CB as tight to the wall as possible while the other person drilled in the screws. (I have a possibly erroneous feeling that drilling pilot holes would have fixed this, but I didn’t actually try it.) We put in just enough screws to affix the CB to the wall tightly.

With the CB up, there were obvious gaps between the pieces. This is not a bad thing. The different pieces of CB should have some space between them to allow for expansion and contraction. And these gaps get filled in with joint compound anyway.

Filling the gaps with joint compound was the easiest part of the relatively easy process. Using a compound spatula, we spread on the joint compound so it filled in the spaces between the CB pieces. Then we took the CB joint adhesive tape and laid it on top of the compound-filled gaps. (This tape acts as a structural support–similar to how rebar  is used to strengthen concrete structures.) Then we covered the tape with another layer of joint compound and let it all dry. The next day, we could sand the joints and start hanging tile, not that we did, but we could have.

A few things to keep in mind about using and hanging the cement board.

1. If you use a saw to cut the CB, you’ll want to wear a mask because of dust. The CB dust has stuff in it that you certainly don’t want to breathe in.

2. Also, if you use a saw to cut CB, make sure you have the right kind of blade. I tried using a jigsaw to cut out holes for the shower fixtures and ruined two regular jigsaw blades (which I didn’t realize until after I finished (long story)). Cutting with a jigsaw blade you don’t know is ruined is not fun.

3. When you screw the CB into the walls (or floors), get the screws as far in as you can (within reason) so that the screw heads don’t stick out. If they stick out, this will create problems when you tile because the tiles won’t all be flush.

4. Installing CB on the floor is exactly the same as hanging it on the wall. Except way easier.

I hope this post maybe answers questions that novice CB hangers might have, and, at the very least, doesn’t give bad advice. I’ll be posting soon about the next task for which I had no previous experience and learned about from uncle Internet: tiling and grouting.

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