Pepper Design Blog

Building a Bathroom: Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

Hope you had a great weekend! We had family in town so we played and enjoyed good food while also sneaking in a few house projects. Thanks for helping out, Mom and Dad!

I have such a neat find to share. I’m so thrilled with this random thrift store discovery that I still can’t believe my luck.

I was perusing a local shop that was on its way out of business (very sad, it was a spot that carried some great gems) when I came across a beautiful, arched mirror high on a wall at the very back of the store. When a clerk came to help me get this guy down, I was so happy to discover that it was heavy and really well built. So heavy that I was at first wary it might not mount right and actually passed on it. But its unique shape and quality taunted me all day and eventually I went back to pick it up.

So happy that I did!

I love love how our bathroom is coming out but it is in need of a few unique pieces to balance out our new modern updates. Our home is a juxtaposition of old meets new. She’s a 1930′s bungalow with high, arched ceilings and lathe & plaster walls, but she’s also expected to be fresh, modern and functional for a family living in the 21st century. It has been one of our main goals all along to pair that vintage-meets-contemporary design aesthetic throughout, and when a room begins to feel too much one way or the other, it’s a clear sign that it’s time to inject the opposite into the space.

Enter the guest bathroom with its brand new glass tiled shower, crisp blue walls, brushed nickel fixtures and stone grey floor – now it’s time to inject some of that old-world bungalow charm to compliment the subway tiled chair rail (a more permanent nod to the original style of 1930s baths). A feature of the mirror that I love best is that the unique shape actually kind of reminds me of the arches in our living room, dining room and guest room, a key feature of Spanish-style homes.

(A few have asked about the grey grout and yes, we took the unconventional route of grouting the entire shower in the same grey as the stone floor. It was Kev who had to get me on board with this one but I’m super thrilled with the result – and lack of any grout stains that may show up in the future).

A cool shape, right?

Kevin was skeptical when I brought it home but humored me enough to give the mirror a shot for a little while. And now he sees why I dig it so much.

Please ignore that manilla colored door in the background… it is screaming for a coat of glossy white paint. (Manilla must have been the white of the 70′s because this home has fully embraced that cream trim look.)

I don’t often get to sneak away to go thrift store shopping these days with how busy work has been and how difficult it can be to shop with the little one, so when I pop into a store here and there I am often bemused at my lack of good fortune. I rarely find what I’m looking for. But in my book, this mirror spotting could be my one find for a long time and I’d be a-okay with that.

Now it’s time to add a little art, a few additional fixtures (like this one):

Some paint touch-ups, shower door and baseboard additions, and soon our bath built from scratch will be ready for its big reveal. Thanks for your huge amount of patience .

More building a bathroom posts: installation time, vanity wars, subway tile installation,  floor tiles and toe warmers, a quick catch-up on our work on the bathroom in 2011, tiling with recycled glass, choosing and installing a bathtub, demo time!, a peak at the layout, initial inspiration, partnering with Lowe’s

We partnered with Lowe’s on our bathroom remodel and had the opportunity to try out some of their product at no cost and some product at a discount. The ideas and stories shared in this post are entirely our own, promise.

Renovating Adventures: Our Floor Plan

I thought a nice bird’s eye visual of how our home is laid out might be helpful when keeping up with our renovating adventure.

When it comes to titling posts over here at PDB, I try and label different home renovating topics by the room that we’re tackling (Building a Bathroom, Project Nursery, etc). All of those remodeling posts fit under the larger category of Renovating Adventures (you can always filter posts here by just our Renovating Adventures by clicking on the pink button in the right sidebar titled ‘Home Makeover Project’. Hmmmm…. perhaps I should rename it so they match).

But, I realize that even with all of the labeling, tagging and categorizing it can get a little confusing to navigate our house, so I thought that maybe a floor plan would help. Here’s a closer look at just the house:

That’s our current floor plan above. PS did you know we have a granny flat in the backyard? (see top floor plan) It’s a little studio that we rent out to a friend and that little supplement was one of the main reasons we were able to buy into the neighborhood we’re in. That, plus buying a home highly in need of gutting. (We tried to buy into the best neighborhood we could afford, even if it meant buying a home in need of a lot of TLC and sweat equity.)

PSS I filled it in so that the colors are kinda, sort of similar to the color scheme in that room. A lot more blue than I had thought – all blue bathrooms now that I think about it.

Just for comparison’s sake, here’s the floor plan of the house when we moved in in 2008:

Do you see all of those closets? Don’t get me wrong – storage is awesome. But that’s a lot of closets.

When it comes to walls moved, here’s what we bumped around over the last three and a half years:

And here’s our current floor plan one more time just to clarify all of those arrows above:

The den became the new kitchen, the kitchen and office were combined to create one large bedroom and three closet spaces in the hallway became a 3rd bathroom for the house.

And just for fun, here’s a sketch of what we have in mind for this and next year:

It primarily involves creating a master suite out of one of the bathrooms, part of the hallway and the current back bedroom. I’d also love to bring the washer and dryer indoors (out of the garage) in a stackable format in a new closet in the hallway.

As far as outside goes, we’d like to expand on our current outdoor fireplace and grilling area (that Kevin built three years ago) with a deck, pergola and extended block wall in the side yard, as well as a stone path and lawn area in the back.

I’ve been meaning to put one of these guys together for a while (finally updated a version Kev had made for an architecture class) and I hope it’s a helpful visual as you see our before and after photos and read our renovating posts! I’m a map person and sometimes I have to get my bearings by getting a bird’s eye view on things, then it all makes sense. I’ll keep this guy easily accessible just in case you need to find your bearings around here in the future.

Building a Bathroom + Going Green: Installation Time

We’ve just finished installing our new vanity, vanity top, faucet and toilet! Our previous set of three closets is really beginning to look like a bathroom now.

To date, we’ve demoed those three adjoining closets, reframed all walls to create one 10×10′ ish room, Kevin used his amazing skills to plumb the entire space, tile was installed, electrician came out to help us with lighting, we’ve painted and we chose a vanity, sink and toilet.

Let’s start with the toilet. I’m excited because it’s been a while since I’ve had an opportunity to post on anything Project Going Green and this first install more than fits the bill.

Did you know that all toilets manufactured today use less than half the water of older models? The average pre-1992 toilet uses 3.5 gallons of water per flush (wow) and today’s low-flow versions use a mere 1.6 gallons. BUT there’s an even better solution. High Efficiency Toilets – or HETs – (which are marked with a WaterSense label by the EPA to vouch for their credibility) drop that number down to 1.1 or 1.28 gpf (gallons-per-flush for those not up on their toilet acronyms). That adds up to a savings of about $90 per toilet per year. Consider that an average toilet lasts upwards of 20 years (that’s nearly $2,000 in savings) and since the program’s inception in 2006, WaterSense has helped consumers save a cumulative 125 billion gallons of water (a finite resource) and over $2 billion in water and energy bills. Now those are some numbers.

Okay, stepping down from my green soapbox now.

Back to the down and dirty. This here is the nifty little space that we used to use to pass tools to one another from the bathroom to the crawl space below. There was never a toilet there before so it was basically just a clean hole in the dry wall.

Then along came our Kohler WaterSense toilet from Lowe’s.

I don’t have any fun pictures of Kevin reworking the plumbing below or above the floor (more about plumbing a new toilet here) but he’s a self-taught master DIYer.

A helpful tip for caulking the base of the toilet is to use painters tape. You can see that the little blue bits above help to keep the caulk from getting caught in the grout (they’re not placed under the toilet but right up against it). When you wipe up the extra caulk and pull up the tape you have a nice even line.

If you are replacing a current toilet these are the pitfalls to watch out for: make sure your new toilet will fit where your old toilet was once installed (measure from behind the toilet to the floor bolts – you don’t want to get stuck with a toilet that is too long and doesn’t line up with the drain when you are in the process of removing your current one), turn off your water supply before you start and don’t forget to plug the drain hole to keep gases from escaping (but don’t let that rag or whatever you’re using fall down the drain). Lot’s of tips can be found right here.

Now onto the vanity. You can read all about this big decision (I agonized over it…) and how we found the perfect vanity and top combo here.

Before any securing, screwing or gluing went underway, we had to get the vanity on level ground.

Shims are used to level out the vanity and are almost a guaranteed necessity in a home full of unlevel walls and floors like our 1930′s bungalow.

Those guys will stay put during the install and then will be snapped off (half remaining under the vanity) when we’re finished.

The part of the cabinet that actually makes permanent contact with the wall is the back of the vanity – two screws later and she’s stuck.

Next is adding the vanity top, complete with a thick line of adhesive (applied with a caulking gun) for an extra secure hold.

That line of adhesive is applied to the top of the entire cabinet (where it will come into contact with the vanity top):

As well as to the back of the top.

Not to worry if it makes a mess, you can wipe up any smooshed out adhesive afterwards.

It looks great!

Kevin has also finished installing the new faucet which looks really great with the combination of the dark cabinet, sea salt blue walls, glass shower tile and white subway tile. I initially was leaning towards an oil rubbed bronze faucet for that vintage vibe (since the goal of the new bathroom was to build a modernized space that fit in a 1930′s home):

Not sure why it felt more vintage to me but I love our oil rubbed bronze faucet in the kitchen and I thought from the get-go that that would be my choice.

After much wondering I picked up a brushed nickel and an oil rubbed bronze version from Lowe’s…

And eventually settled on this Moen Caldwell faucet:

A brushed nickel finished in a slightly vintage shape and feel. Love how it looks with the rest of the bathroom (we have the matching shower head and tub faucet on the other side of the bathroom now, too). The new bathroom is almost here!

More building a bathroom posts: vanity wars, subway tile installation,  floor tiles and toe warmers, a quick catch-up on our work on the bathroom in 2011, tiling with recycled glass, choosing and installing a bathtub, demo time!, a peak at the layout, initial inspiration, partnering with Lowe’s

We partnered with Lowe’s on our bathroom remodel and received some product at no cost and some product at a discount. The ideas and stories shared in this post are entirely our own.