Renovating a 1960's Bathroom

When Mike and I bought our home, the absolute first thing we had to do before getting any boxes in was to do a complete renovation on the full bath. Mold was growing under the house near the toilet, as well as under the tub not yet visible under the house. The shower doors were damaged and rusting over. The drywall had so many holes and patches that it just wasn't worth it to keep. The vanity, due to a lack of proper ventilating, had been overrun by surface mold.

This bathroom was a massive safety hazard.

Luckily for us, much of the cost for the renovation had been credited to us by the seller and we were able to pay for all of it with the money we originally intended to use for closing. Due to the nature of the project, we hired a professional to handle the heavy work.

We took the shopping of parts into our own hands by sourcing all the things we needed for the bathroom ourselves. Check the end of the post for our list of products.

Everything had to be removed from the original bathroom, even the window. As advised to us by several of our inspectors, we removed the existing window as it was a safety hazard if anyone fell while showering. Plus, you could see right into the shower area because it wasn't frosted over. The window had blinds up. Blinds. No. All the nope. The window was replaced with a 36" x 12" duel-pane sliding window that was placed higher up and centered on the wall. It's perfectly out of reach of the water, too!

Mike and enjoy modern design with a dark twist. For our bathroom, we went with a 12"x24" glossy white tile for the shower and a 12"x24" matte black tile for the floor. We picked out our white & gray marbled granite countertop and glossy white vanity at the same tile store. For fixtures, we stuck with silver to match the rest of the house.

All of the core items we bought for the bathroom were from either Granite Tile Expo or Lowe's. Sourcing the materials ourselves was a bit of a challenge, but we saved several thousands of dollars by doing so. Going through your contractor can cost you up to an additional $5000 depending on what types of items you're looking for.

Overall, there's not much I would do differently in this renovation if I had to do it all over again, though there are things I will be swapping out in the future. The vanity mirror I got is nice but we feel like it's the wrong one for this space. We're leaning towards a very full rectangular one. The vanity light will be replaced and the mount will be moved higher, while the curtain one gets moved into the half bath. The floor register was painted black by our contractor before we could order one off Amazon and the paint is scratching off, so this will be replaced the soonest.

I'll probably end up replacing things like shower curtains and accessories as our needs change, but otherwise we've been really happy with how our bathroom turned out! We've been living with it for a year now and it's been wonderful!

I'll be putting together a tips post specifically on renovating a bathroom, along with a list of things you can expect to happen for other first timers as a helpful guide! Let me know in the comments below anything you'd like to see in that post!