Bathroom Transformation

Our 2nd full bathroom was in dire need of some help when we moved in. It was pretty outdated, run down, and kind of dangerous. It was dangerous for 2 reasons: #1. There was a nice thick layer of black mold in the old drain plug & #2. The track and wheels of the doors for the shower/tub were bent. With a simple wrong move of the door, one could easily send the door crashing into the tub. Due to the different marks in the tub, this apparently happened a few times (once to us personally). Because there was a big mirror in one of the doors, we were just waiting for a big accident to occur.

When we first bought the house and were assessing things that need to be done, a total bathroom make over was projected for the distant future. Steve jokingly gave me a $200 budget to "revamp" the bathroom so we could get by for a few years. I succeeded in revamping the bathroom with a mere $35 and advice from my sister :).

While my sister and her family were visiting a few weeks ago, my sister helped me take down the old wooden shutters from the window and put in new blinds.

[Here is a shot of the bathroom before we moved in. You can see some of the wood shutters on the window.]

[Wooden shutters have found a new home in the basement (and by new home, I mean the scrap pile)]

[New blinds]

Once we got the window taken care of, she randomly got the idea to take down the old shower/tub doors. This involved taking off the top bar, unscrewing the side bars, tearing off the bottom bar, and digging out all the old caulk. While she was here, we successfully got all the bars off, but the caulk was proving difficult. I ended up finishing the project on my own.

[Shower/tub previously had sliding doors. Here, you can see one of the gold bars we had to unscrew from the sides of the shower. The top bar easily came off without any screws.]

It took me another day of taking off the caulk (it came off pretty easy with the help of Fantastic, a simple household cleaner) and another day to re-caulk. I went ahead and stripped all of the caulk off of the entire shower. I decided if I had to redo some, might as well update it all. Some of the previous caulk was done wrong. In fact, a couple areas were done with a glue or cement that I could not remove. I had to just re-caulk over it. I must say that taking caulk off is way easier than putting it back on. Even with tools, making the caulk all look nice and properly sealed is a pain.

[No more death doors or gold trim bars. All of the edges have been re-caulked.]

We had to purchase a simple shower curtain rod; however, I already had hooks, new mildew-resistant inner curtain, and a polka-dotted shower curtain from my college days that just happened to match the paint perfectly! We also bought a new suspension rod shelf unit for the shower. There previously was a metal one that had rusted. Luckily, the new rod just happened to cover the bad cement/glue caulk job the previous owner had tried.

[New rod suspension shelf unit & "new" shower curtain]

With just $35, a couple days, and a lot of elbow grease, we now have an almost brand new bathroom (oh and we also got a new drain plug, so no worries on the mold!).