New bathroom update

At the beginning of last month I announced that we had started another major project – adding a bathroom upstairs. If you missed that blog post you can click HERE to see what we started with.

There’s been a lot of ‘behind the scene’ (under the floor!) progress such as adding plumbing…

and some ‘not so behind the scene’ in the downstairs bathroom! These pipes will be enclosed when we get around to redoing that bathroom.

More ‘not so behind the scene’ plumbing…

(Ignore the green siding… we’ll get around to pressure washing it one of these days, ha!)

We (I say we but it’s really just Countryboy!) have a bit more plumbing to do after the new bathtub arrives when we’ll know the exact measurements for the drain line.

Speaking of bathtub, I finally chose a bathtub. I had originally wanted to use one of the old clawfoot tubs we have but it ended up not being feasible. I also wanted to actually soak in the tub without my knees sticking up out of the water while soaking my shoulders so we decided to bite the bullet and get what we wanted. What an ordeal though! There are SO many choices and options to choose from that after twenty minutes of looking online my brain would shut down and that was the end of that. It literally took me weeks to decide! There was also the money thing holding me back but we’re at the point that we needed the tub in order to finish the plumbing so that we could proceed.

While I was heehawing around with choosing a bathtub, CountryBoy started on the ceiling. After finding and fixing a leak around the vent pipe on the roof (sigh)…

he went to work salvaging some old tongue & groove flooring that was given to us. When we originally got the wood I wanted to use it on the floor in that room which was originally a bedroom. When we decided to turn it into an upstairs bathroom I decided to use it for the ceiling…

It has been stored in a barn but the barn roof above it leaked so there was a good amount of the boards that were unusable.

He cut them down then scrubbed them and set them out to dry…

Once dried he painted the tongue and grooves. We knew we wouldn’t have enough to cover the entire ceiling so we went to buy some more but our Lowe’s no longer carried tongue and groove flooring. We were dumbfounded as to what to do but we ended up buying some new 1×3’s and CountryBoy made his own tongue and groove using the router. He mixed the old boards in with the new…

added a ‘poop vent’ (his favorite part of the new bathroom, teehee!) then we put three coats of paint on the boards…

Lots and lots of time was spent on the ceiling but it looks awesome especially when compared to its beginning…!

While he tackled the ceiling I started working on the walls which consists of 1/4 inch paneling. You can see in the above photo where I’ve filled the holes with wood putty and I spent a good amount of time scraping the caulk that was around the baseboards and every piece of trim that hid the seams of the paneling. Then I sanded the walls and we put two coats of paint on them. I don’t have a picture to show you of the painted walls but it’s looking quite clean and crisp in there. No more stained and dingy walls, yay!

Shortly after we got up this morning the power shut off for quite a while. Thank goodness the coffee was already made! We decided to take advantage of the power being out and started changing out the off-white receptacles and switches (that now looked awful against the white walls)…

to some brown ones that we already had…

You might be thinking ‘brown, why brown?’ You’ll see when it’s all finished!

We (again, CountryBoy!) also added another receptacle that can be accessed by the vanity and is a GFCI outlet. Always handy to have in case I wanted to blow dry my hair. Yea, right! Not me, but maybe somebody will need to use the outlet for something.

Another much-needed change was the entryway. The original step up into the room was much higher than your normal step height. CountryBoy was able to lower that section of the floor turning it into two smaller, more normal steps. Much easier on the ‘ol knees!

The bathtub won’t arrive for a few more weeks so while we wait to finish the plumbing we are going to work on the other half of the room that is already plumbed.

First up, filling holes, seams and other rough spots with wood filler in preparation for the peal & stick vinyl plank flooring. This is where we left off today…

After the filler dries and is sanded smooth CountryBoy will mark the center of the floor then work his way towards the far wall (in the upper left corner in the above photo) and the entryway. We’ll lay the flooring in the same direction as the ceiling.

There’s a vast amount of work that has to take place before all the pretty stuff goes in but bit by bit it’s coming together!