Bathroom Renovation

The first room up in our massive house renovation was the bathroom. A tiny room at 2.6m x 2.3m our biggest struggle was how to fit everything in!! The orginal bath was cast iron weighed a bloody tonne and was sold on ebay for a whopping 99cents. What a bargain. I think the buyer regretted such a bargain trying to move it out of the house!


My planning diagrams trying to work out the best arrangement to fit a shower, bath, vanity and toilet into such a small room! This was such a tough undertaking! Having never tried to "organise" a bathroom before we ended up with the top left diagram as I liked the symmetry of having the bath in the centre of the room under the window.


Once the bath, toilet and vanity were removed we then had to rewall all the walls with waterproof hardiplank boards.


We thought that the tiling and building of the shower would be too easy to stuff up so we called upon a tiler to come do it for us. He never turned up on days, turned up late on others, had not showered for weeks and smelt accordinly. But he did eventually build and tile us our shower for the grand sum of $600. Seeing as he spent 4 days building it we wonder if he needs an accountant to figure out that he really was giving himself a raw deal.


We did have one disaster with our shower. Three days after the tiler was done all the white grout turned a beautiful shade of dirty orange which goes just smashingly with white tiles. He eventually turned up and fixed it. Three weeks later of course!


We decided to do a built in vanity to make extra space within the bathroom. My husband built this wardrobe in the ajoining bedroom so that the vanity could be pushed into the empty space it created.


We had a cabinet maker custom make our vanity. At a cost of $2100 for vanity and mirror cabinets it wasn't a cheap exercise, but allowed us to have it fit perfectly snuggly into the empty cavity within the wall.


Bench top is essa stone. The walls of the bathroom were tiled (by a less smelly tiler) and the ceilings replaced with plasterboard and new cornices.


My husband in his finest working clothes making final touches on the new tapwear by Consolidated Brass. The windows were painted and floor boards polished.

The bath is a claw foot fibreglass bath by Marbletrend with brass feet. My husband made a metal bracelet which sits over the plastic plumbing. Brass pipes cost a fortune so we bought a steel pipe and had it coated in brass and saved a pretty packet.


Ruby our Toller likes the new bathroom too!


The Genevieve toilet suite was purchased from tradelink and made by Raymor. The freestanding toilet roll holder by Consolidated Brass. We found these guys fabulous for all our brass and chrome fittings. They custom mixed our brass and chrome pieces to create exactly what we were looking for at no extra cost... Now that is service!


Finished vanity unit with mirror cabinet and mirror splashback. It took three attempts at getting this splashback to work! The first cracked, the second didn't sit straight and the third thankfully did as it was told!


Handlewear purchased from "Handle This" here in Brisbane.


The silky oak doors where estapoled and original brass door handles were restored by S.Cook & Sons.


And finally the bathroom is finished! This renovation cost approx 12k to complete. A huge chunk of our renovation budget but it is just so lovely to lay in the bath, gaze out the windows and reminisce about the smelly tiler and the journeys of the last year!