Bathroom Remodels

Posting this for my aunt, she wants to see what we've done. I hope she likes the pictures.

I thought I had taken some still pictures of what my bathroom looked like before the remodel. If I did, I cant find them. The video is kind of shaky, and I went pretty quickly with it, but it gives you an idea of what I had before.

Here's the After pictures!

The glass in the shower door is called "glue chip". Looks nicer than some of the shower doors you can buy off the shelf at Lowes. It was supposed to be 1/4in glass, but they apparently couldnt find that glass in 1/4in. So the door ended up taking about 3 1/2 weeks to order, and they did it in 3/4in glass. (didnt charge us extra for the 3/4in glass, according to the installer)

The glue chip up close looks kind of like a car window that's gotten iced over by an ice storm. I really like the look of it. It's smooth on the inside of the door, so we had to buy squeegees to wipe the water off the door when we're done showering. Big reason we didnt go for clear glass.

The shower stool in the shower is made out of teak wood. (old sailing ships used to use teak. It's apparently a good wood to use around water) I decided I didnt want to use that shower stool because it wobbles on the sloped shower floor. So, I gave it to my mother to use in her bathroom as a seat to sit on when she's drying off from a shower, or trying to put her shoes on or something.

Her shower is a bit bigger than mine, so she could probably use it in there without the stool wobbling as much as it did in my shower. I think she likes it better as a place to sit when drying off tho. I did try it out in my shower a couple of times and just didnt like it.

Liked being able to sit down under the spray tho, so I might go out and buy a shower chair that has adjustable legs on it...might be able to fix those so it wouldnt wobble on the sloped floor.

The shower wand is left over from my old shower. It's still in good condition so I didnt change that. I am still waiting on a longer pipe for the shower wand to attach to. They lowered the floor, but not the shower pipe. The floor was lowered by several inches, and I'm only five foot four. So, it's kind of a stretch to reach it. When my mom was using my shower for a couple of weeks during the construction of her shower, she couldnt reach the wand. She broke her shoulder back in February, and while that's healed, she has a hard time raising her arm up like that, so I had to leave the shower head sitting on one of the grab bars I had put in the shower.

About the grab bars. Reason I had them put in, is because I sometimes have problems with vertigo. Kind of makes it hard to wash your hair and close your eyes and lean your head back to rinse shampoo out of your hair, when closing your eyes and leaning your head back will make you lose all sense of where you are and make you fall down. (that was a long sentence. I hope I got the commas in all the right places)

The grab bars were helpful for my mom when she was using my shower, and my dad really liked the idea of having them, so he asked for grab bars in their shower too. Think that was his only big request on his part. (They actually had grab bars in their old shower, but the guy who built their old shower was an effing idiot. He used the wrong kind of screws in their shower. When the contractor took their old shower apart, the screws on their grab bars were rusted thru and were not far from failing completely.)

I also had grab bars put on the wall outside of my shower. My shower has 2 horizontal bars and one vertical bar. (vertical is above the horizontal bar and is centered in the middle of the back wall of the shower). There's another vertical bar right outside of my shower and a horizontal one. The horizontal bar makes a great towel bar too.

The grab bars are pretty much the entire reason we did the shower remodels. My fiberglass shower insert didnt have studs behind it. (I have pictures to prove it) There's a local pharmacy that installs grab bars, and they said they have special things they use that's supposed to brace grab bars in fiberglass showers. I just didnt trust that they would hold. So my dad had me call a decorator that my aunt (not the same aunt I'm posting these pictures for) knows and she helped us pick out the tile and got us a really good contractor. (first remodel we've ever done where the contractor actually knew what he was doing, had the right skills to do what he was doing well, and didnt take a year plus infinity to do the work)

The decorator also helped us pick out new paint colors and new carpeting. My dog TinyMonsters (died in 2006) did a number (#1 and #2 specifically) on our old carpet, and after four years of no dog, our house looked like we still had a dog. (I'll do another post later to show off the new carpet if my aunt wants to see it too)

The shelves in the shower are made out of Corian. They're set into the tile. I like how they look. Got the extra shelf so that I'd have an extra storage spot for dry washcloths. The top one is high enough that I can keep the washcloths dry so I can dry my face off if I get soap in my eyes.

We also had the floor of my bathroom tiled with the same tile they used in my shower. It turned out really nice.

I also got a new toilet for my bathroom. Kind of wish I hadnt. The new one is more environmentally "friendly" and is seriously low flushing. We'll just say that it cant be all that "friendly" to the environment when you have to flush the damn thing 3 times just to get anything to go down. Plus, I'm not used to toilets that burp the water up and then suck it down. Toilets are supposed to swirl the water. I'm a big fan of the Coriolis effect. (now watch, I'll get comments from the greenies who will accuse me of destroying the planet with a swirling flush toilet)

I'll do another blog post tomorrow with pictures of my mom's bathroom, since she had more stuff done to hers.