Powder room turned full bath part II - Demo and remodeling process

This powder room turned full bath was probably one of our most ambitious projects that we have undertaken in our house, just because of the relocation of all the plumbing.

I already shared the mood board and before pictures. Here is just one before picture before we move on to what happened next.



The first step was to remove the existing window and frame for a window in the new position to make room for the new vanity. We did this at the same time as the windows where being switched out in the living room.



We had someone come in and make a big hole in our house for that. Looks sort of weird.



Here, the new window is in and some drywall has gone up temporarily to pass drywall inspection, then after that the other drywall came down on the right as we moved on to a new permit.

Next, we had the floor opened up to have a look-see at the plumbing. If you are into plumbing, these next four pictures are for you. Get out the pop corn and enjoy. (I made that pop-corn gif. Isn't he the cutest. You can use him in the comments as well. That is, if you were to write a comment - by typing colon popcorn colon with no spaces. Not that you have to, I enjoy also just seeing you were here on my stats.

But back to the plumbing porn. Can I say that here?



So let's see what we have there in the floor. The thickest one is the sewer pipe from the toilet. The thinner one running the same way - horizontally on the picture - is the water for flushing. flushing. Running the other way - vertically in the picture, there is a pipe under the toilet pipe, which is for the kitchen sink which is located behind the powder room. The other two thin pipes, I believe is for the fridge that also used to be located in the kitchen on the other side of the wall and for the out door faucet for the hose in the back yard.

At any time feel free to check out our floor plan.

Are you on the edge of your seat?
It's quite lovely, isn't it? You're welcome!



If you are trained in the plumbing field, which I am certainly not, as you can see by my use of one plumbing term after the other, it is quite evident that there wasn't enough room to tie in the pipe for the new shower, which was to go where the pipe for the fridge is.

That brought our little project to a screeching halt for many months while we pondered our options. But since that is all in the past, I can fast forward you to getting these two fabulous guys out in the above picture.

We settled on the solution digging a little 1x3 ft square in the garage behind the shower wall. You know, just a small hole. In the garage floor

They used a camera to scope out the plumbing in the garage, so we knew where to dig the hole. Cool, right?



Fast forward to some more digging and some more plumbing happening. You now see the toilet pipe moved over slightly and there is a drain for the shower. Yippeee. The project was ready to finally move forward.



Concrete goes back and fills up the floor along with some re-bar and stuff.



The shower got prepped and floated and ready for tile too.



Finally some finishes came along. Here the floor tile has been put down. We got a cement colored 12x24 ceramic tile. We got this one at Marazzi.



We used the Akurum kitchen cabinets from IKEA for our vanity. We made our table top out of 3/4 inch solid red oak flooring. Similar to how we built our entertainment center in the living room.



Here we have installed the two wall cabinets. One of them we cut in half length wise so it is only 5.5 inches deep. It just holds the width of a toilet paper roll. On the far right is a wide panel, which is made from an extra door. I did this to make the vanity visually take up space the entire width of the wall. I did that to off set the impact of the shower and minimize its effect at much as possible.

Also I really like having a cabinet that stores a gazillion rolls of toilet paper. It's kind of awesome.



Here is a side by side of where we started and how this project looked just before all the finishing touches were completed, which by the way happened just before our big Christmas party last year. That involved several last minute trips to Lowe's hours before all the guests arrived. Interesting for sure.

But in the end the toilet was fully functional, food was served and everybody had a great time!

Stay tuned for the reveal coming soon.

Updated: Powder room turned full bath part III - the reveal