Budget-Friendly Guest Bathroom Makeover Under $500: Transform Your Space

We wouldn’t have called our house a ‘fixer upper’ when we moved in, but it was definitely rough around the edges. The guest bathroom, though, was one of the rooms that gave you that horror-movie-scream sound effect in your head as you walked in and your eyes zoomed in on the gross bathtub, peeling window paint and yellowing white walls. Needless to say, it was in desperate need of a full guest bathroom makeover.

So, we decided to take it on as our very first big room update. Being ballers on a budget, we used subway tile and paint for most of it and it really is amazing how much you can achieve with just cosmetic updates.

This is the story of how in a couple of weekends we transformed our room, made a giant mess and avoided serious injury with a massive glass explosion in the eleventh hour (keep reading for pics.)

Painting Our Guest Bathroom

We picked a moody green color called Muted Sage by Behr for the walls. We wanted a modern vintage kind of feel in there without making it look out of place in the rest of the house.

I was like 10 weeks pregnant at the time so Alex did most of the painting of the guest bathroom, which is not,*ahem*, his strongest suit, but it looked great in the end.

We spray painted the chrome light fixture black with our favorite black spray paint and got new light shades for it to tie us over until the budget allows for a whole new fixture.

Speaking of paint, we also updated the weird beige fiberglass tub surround with a white tub and tile paint to freshen it up.

Again, Alex did this and let me tell you IT IS FUMEY. The windows don’t open in our super old house, probably for energy efficiency reasons and definitely not for fire safety reasons, so he used a mask and had a few fans going as well as the nearby exterior doors open.

It was still so strong though that when we went to bed that night he asked if we should stay somewhere else. Instead, he shoved towels under the guest bathroom and our bedroom doors so I wouldn’t breathe it all in. Bless him.

He said the instructions on the kit were pretty straightforward, but the stuff is really thick and goes on the same way, so you’ve got to be really smooth and careful with your brushstrokes and drips.

We’ve got a couple of drips we can still see but overall it’s such a huge improvement.

Tiling

This was our first foray into tiling so we started easy with classic subway tile. Since there wasn’t any tile or fiberglass surrounding the shower area to start with, we assume what’s behind the drywall is moisture-proof and just tiled right over it.

Like usual we learned our technique from YouTube and used trowels to add thinset to the walls in small sections and stacked up the subway tiles with spacers.

I was so proud of my first couple of rows until Alex took a progress pic and I looked at it and realized I was doing it in a stacked pattern instead of the traditional staggered subway style.

Luckily it was pretty early and I just shifted the second row along to correct myself.

We got into a pretty good groove of me thinsetting and tiling, then at the end of each row Alex would measure and cut the tiles to fit using this little manual tile cutter we got. It worked great on subway tiles because they’re so small and you can just score and cut them really easily but probably wouldn’t work on bigger tiles (it totally failed me for my scrap wood boot tray).

The tiling process took so much longer than we thought, like a good couple of days worth of work. In fairness, it was our first lesson in how janky old houses are because working around a wonky window and a ceiling that isn’t level was such a struggle but we got there in the end.

We chose a dark gray sanded grout to again give a modern vintage kind of feel, and got that done in a day, with sand everywhere. We truly underestimated how much sand is in sanded grout.

We used a dark gray caulk in the inside corners of the walls where we tiled, and a white caulk around the windows to clean it up and (hopefully) hide the unevenness a bit.

The Great Glass Explosion

By this point everything was looking so good and we were dubbing ourselves home improvement geniuses, but there was still the problem of actually using the shower without a door or curtain. We thought a fixed glass panel would solve our problem and also not block off any more light in our little showering cave, so we ordered a glass door from Wayfair. We used this one.

It arrived really quickly, was pretty cheap for the size and style, and was super heavy. It came with the clamp pieces to secure it against the wall, other pieces to rest it on the tub, and gloves to handle the glass, so we were pretty confident.

I sat in the bathtub and lined up the little bottom pieces on the tub edge as Alex handled the glass.

Then it went to shit.

Alex had the special glass-handling gloves on and walked the panel into the room. He was careful not to hit the sides, he didn’t rest it on the ground and didn’t hold it too tightly because we were both nervous about a glass explosion.

Cue the glass explosion.

For literally no reason at all, as Alex was holding the piece up in front of him, it shattered into basically glass sawdust. It ironically showered me in fragments as I sat (thankfully looking down) in the tub.

When the loud boom was over, I looked up at Alex and he was standing there like a mime with his hands in the position of holding up the glass panel, but no glass. We both got a couple of little cuts, but it could’ve been much worse.

It was SUCH A MESS. We had friends coming into town the next night and this was our last step before our first guests saw it and of course now we had created the devil’s glistening runway in the hallway to our guest room.

We spent hours cleaning up the pieces and shaking our heads. Luckily Wayfair sent us another piece free of charge (I guess it happens a lot?) and the next time we installed it about a week later we had a handyman do it for $50. Best $50 we’ve ever spent.

He wielded that thing around like it was a Nokia phone and both Alex and my insides were irreparably clenched as he haphazardly plopped this glass on the side of the tub. I don’t think I breathed for five straight minutes.

We added a few finishing touches to the room like these Amazon shelves and we changed the faucet to this one, and then we were done our very first room makeover.

I mean, look at these before and afters 😍

We still have some plans in here like replacing the light fixture, mirror, stenciling the tiles and maybe making a new vanity, but it turned out so well.

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