Bathroom Sneak Peek

I mentioned in my last post that we were starting to reno the main floor bathroom.  Although we haven't gone as far as removing the tub, it has still turned out to be a fairly big project.  It's not finished yet, but I thought I would give you a sneak peek of what we've been up to.

This room was most likely redone in early 90's and had harvest gold fixtures with pastel pink and blue wallpaper (matching the wallpaper in the kitchen).  All of the walls and even the ceiling were wallpapered.  We're not sure about the future of this room.  If we ever add an addition off the back of the house, we would love to relocate the bathroom and make this space part of the kitchen.  For that reason we have decided to keep the tub for now.  It's old, but in great shape and it doesn't make sense to rip it out.  We have plans to cover the front panel, but I'll share more about that in another post.

When we started removing the wallpaper, we realized that it was going to be more work than we had anticipated.  We have now found eight different patterns of wallpaper in the room!  Some were like cardboard.  Others had been covered with adhesive and drywall compound.  It was definitely like taking a trip back in time!

After finding so many layers (including 6 layers on the ceiling!) we realized that by installing beadboard 3/4 of the way up the wall, we could reduce the amount of paper to strip down.  We love the look of beadboard and it is historically accurate to the time of our house, so it seemed like a great option.

We originally bought 4x8 sheets of beadboard, thinking that it would be a quick install.  But, after taking a closer look at some of the intricate cuts we would have to do under the stairs and around the window, we opted to buy the tongue and groove pine panels instead.  They have been much easier to work with and were still fairly quick to install.

At some point the original mouldings were removed from this room, so we opted to add in larger baseboards and capping on top of the beadboard.  We went with 8" pine boards around the bottom and 4" boards for the capping.  We still have the final mouldings to add in, then the whole room will be primed and painted.

I can't wait to get everything painted and get the new toilet and vanity installed, but for now we have decided to take a break to recover from our wedding.  It was a busy week, doing all of the final wedding preparation while starting this project.  We were hoping to have it finished before the wedding but we just got too busy.  Hopefully after some relaxing time, we'll be back in full gear for the remainder of the summer.