Our Son’s & Daughter’s Bathroom Renos: The Before
The first big project we’re tackling in our new (old) house is renovating my kids’ bathrooms! They’re in pretty sorry shape - worse than we knew when we first bought the house. We knew we’d want to redo them eventually, but we decided to go ahead and bite the bullet so that they’d have functional, beautiful bathrooms they can use for the long-haul. We’ve got a 6 year old son and a 1 year old daughter and I’m excited for them to use their own bathrooms - we basically all share the primary right now!
Today I want to show you the “before” photos of these 1920s ensuite bathrooms. You’ll get a good sense of how small they are (7.5’x5’) and I’ll explain a little bit about our plans to make them function a little bit bigger even though we aren’t moving any walls. I literally stood in the tub for some of these shots and took the photos on the 0.5 zoomed out setting on my iPhone and oh - didn’t clean anything up either, ha. Real life with kids, my friends!
If you have any tiny bathrooms in your house that need to stay tiny, this one’s for you! Get ready to take some notes and follow along on this journey. :)
Our Son’s Bathroom - Before
This bathroom has a few original elements to it like the pedestal sink and faucet, cast-iron tub, and white subway tile. There have been a few updates to it over time and it’s definitely a hodgepodge so I can’t wait to take it down to the studs and give it an entirely new look.
To make it more functional, we’re going to take out the radiator by the window. Though we did find we used the radiators a little during the coldest part of the winter, the bathrooms were plenty warm without them so we’re going to gain a few extra inches in here by taking it out. That will allow for a real (albeit, shallow) vanity with storage to go in place of the pedestal sink. Above it, we’ll put in a new medicine cabinet and vanity light. The toilet will stay where it is.
The tub/shower will become a walk-in shower with a sliding glass door, which I can’t wait to see in here! My son is almost exclusively taking showers now, so it’ll be nice for him to just have a shower in here as he gets older.
Our Daughter’s Bathroom - Before
This bathroom has a lot of similar original elements to my son’s bathroom, apart from the newer vanity. It also has this whiteboard-type material extending the walls up above the original subway tile that are in bad shape. The plumbing situation in here is also pretty poor. The tub is rusting around the drain because the faucets drips continuously. We have the water cut off at the shutoff valve right now and it still drips. I can’t wait to rip it out and put in a new tub and tile in here.
We’re making some more significant changes in this bathroom - or at least as significant as you can get without shifting the walls! Right now, it’s a jack-and-jill bathroom with access to two bedrooms. Since we use one of those as an office, we don’t need it to have access to a bathroom, so we’re doing the bold thing and closing off the door on the toilet side. It’ll make it a fully en-suite bathroom for the corner bedroom, which will become our daughter’s room (it’s currently my husband’s office, so we’re flip-flopping them!). There’s no going back after this, so finger’s crossed we’re making the right call.
This will allow us to move the vanity over next to the toilet, which has a little more space. We’ll be able to get a 24” vanity in here rather than the tiny one that’s in there now!
I’m making some final decisions about the designs now and starting to place my orders, so I’ll be back next week with the plans for these cute little kids’ bathrooms. Be sure to follow along on Instagram too to see the progress. I’ll be sharing a good bit there as we get into the demo and construction phase!
