One of the rooms which needs the most work is the bathroom. It had yellow, mouldy, peeling wallpaper and cork flooring. There was a heavy dark wall unit with mirror and a piece of wood where you mount a dryer on the wall (though no dryer). It has a corner shower and the sink is a pedestal sink with no cupboards. We have a wire 3-drawer thing for storage and a washing machine in there. The room - it’s tiny.
So, we’re going to hit into it as our first major job on the house. We’ve gone through heaps of ideas and have settled on what we think will be a good solution:
- remove wall unit and dryer mount board (done - with only one accidental hole)
- strip wallpaper (done - took Manda about four hours)
- rip up cork flooring (in progress - slow going thanks to several layers and carpet tacks! why!?)
- polish the original wooden floor underneath
- tile the walls from above the skirting boards which will have the paint sanded back
- make a wet floor shower or whatever they call it - basically we’ll just have a curved enclosure, no liner or base, similar to this one
- add a wall hung vanity to make the room appear bigger
- fix up the ventilation issue and put in down lights and a task lighting bar above the mirror
- do the same in the toilet (tiles, new toilet)
Phase 2 (or 3 or 4 depending on if we have to do the above in sections) will be to move the washing machine out and into the converted hall cupboard which will make an awesome laundry (pretty under-utilised space right now).
One of the key things is trying to look at pictures of bathrooms which are realistic to the scale or challenges of our renovation. We have been looking at Trends magazine and all sorts of books at the tile places we visited on the weekend but they showcase these amazing designer rooms which are the size of our entire house. The most we have been able to glean from these is “wouldn’t it be nice to be rich”, “they use nice matte tiles” and a few tiny tips like how larger, matte tiles make things look bigger.
We finally hit on looking at Flickr for some ideas, which has been quite helpful especially as we can find both DIY jobs and smaller spaces to look at. It’s amazing to see how much variation there can be! A favourite search of ours is http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=bathroom+diy - if anyone has any tips on where else we can get design/decorator tips we’d be glad to hear them!