the basement bathroom - a tale of woe
This is how our basement bathroom looked when we moved into this house. They had done lots of updates upstairs but the basement, in its entirety, was sad.
My daughter loves her privacy, though, so she wanted her bedroom down there, making the basement bathroom her bathroom.
I just couldn’t let it look like this.
What is even happening here? Why is there a built-in cabinet in the corner? Why is the shower stall (foreground, left) in the part of the room with the shortest ceiling and not by the WINDOW? Of all the colors you could have made the original tile—pink! turquoise!—they picked TAN. ugh. You can’t even make that fun.
No money to do a huge renovation at that time, so I did a mini-reni ;-) with peel-n-stick wallpaper from Spoonflower, painted the cabinets a pink chalk paint (it sticks without sanding) matched from the wallpaper, and decked it out with all sorts of vintagey black and pink tchotchkes (you can see more of this bathroom’s “AFTER” photos in my Quirky Bathrooms Portfolio. But sadly, that’s not the end of the story. Because then the sewer line collapse thing happened, and those guys had to jackhammer up the entire bathroom floor , ruining everything. But! I turned that whole TRUCK FULL of lemons into lemonade, because while the floor was opened up with a huge hole you could bury a man in, I had them reroute the plumbing, moving the stupid shower stall from the corner with the low ceiling to the far wall where it was both next to the window and could be an actual RECTANGLE shape. More to come in the next post about how it’s turning out so far….it’s almost done!
This is a photo I sent to the contractor when we were discussing what still needed to be done. You can see the peel n stick tile over the top of the old beige floor tile, and to the left of that, a big swath of the floor that is just concrete. That was a four foot deep hole the day before. Meanwhile I was having to SHARE A BATHROOM WITH MY TEENAGER and I think anyone with a teenager will understand how that is NOT OKAY. We kept the toilet where it was, but moved the sink to where the shower stall had been, and the shower to that far wall (it feels ridiculous to say “far wall” when the whole room is like 4 feet by 6 feet).