Primary Bath Renovation Update

We have been very busy over the winter making updates to our primary bedroom and bathroom. These two rooms have been the last two spaces to be renovated since buying our home 20 years ago. We have a small cape code style home and only had one full bathroom downstairs, in the main living area, and a half bath in the upstairs bedroom area. Adding a shower to the upstairs bathroom has always been on our bucket list and the awkward shape in our bedroom seemed to be the perfect spot for this shower.

You can see in this image the blue area on the left is the alcove in our bedroom. It was always an awkward space that we didn’t really use, however we did love the window there and the light it provided to our room, so our plan was to incorporate the window into the bathroom, but add a pocket door near that area so we could open it and get the light in our bedroom as well.

This shot gives a better idea of how we gutted and lifted the ceiling in the bathroom to match our bedroom and also decided to move the wall out to incorporate that window into the bathroom.

The pocket door adds more light into the bedroom and makes this bathroom more of an en suite since you can access it directly from the bedroom but also a jack and jill bathroom since there is another door in the hallway for everyone to access.

We went to our local Tile Shop and spoke to them on what we should use for the walls under the tile. They suggested this wedi system as it was easier to work with. We framed for two niches – one for shampoo/conditioner and the lower one I wanted as a place to rest my foot to shave my legs, as it’s always hard to do in a stand up shower with no tub.

While we were at The Tile Shop we looked to see how much the tile was and each piece was $120! When we counted up how many tiles we found on the side of the road it was $10,000 worth! If you want to hear more about that amazing story you can read it here.

We mixed up thin-set which had a 90 minute working time. Since this was our first time ever tiling, we cut, laid out and numbered each piece to make it easier to grab as we put them up. We loved the spacers that The Tile Shop suggested we used (vs. the Home Depot ones we used on the floor). They were expensive (about $200) for the walls but worth it as it keeps the tile from moving as we are working on getting them up. We went with a 1/16″ gap.

We tiled the two niches on a separate day as we wanted to get the 90 degree angles accurate and weren’t sure how far out the tile would need to come once the thin-set had set on the tiles below. We used cardboard to make a template around the shampoo niche, and then cut the marble to match.

After 24 hours, we used a rubber mallet to knock off the spacers. Sometimes the plastic wouldn’t break off and would stay stuck in the tile, so for those we heated up a 2″ putty knife and melted the plastic off.