Our Budget Bathroom Remodel

Ooooh guys, this mostly-unplanned budget bathroom remodel has given us some very satisfying before and afters to show you and it’s truly gone from the worst room in the house to one of the best.

You know the phrase ‘if you give a mouse a cookie?’ I had never heard of it once in my life until about a month ago when I heard it in different situations with different people about three times in the span of a week. Does that ever happen to you guys, too? It’s very weird.

Anyway, that phrase (or book or movie, I actually have no idea what this mouse’s deal is) is very applicable in our bathroom.

If you’ve followed along on our Instagram you’ll have already seen most of this process, but we started with dingy, old, stained-grout wall and floor tile, hollywood lights and a half-wall of old, chipped mirrors. The tub was grimy and had clearly been painted at some point (it was originally RED, which is very pay-by-the-hour motel to us), and I’m going to be honest, no matter how much I cleaned it, it just always smelled like pee.

How we started our budget bathroom remodel

We knew we needed some kind of budget bathroom remodel in here because it truly was awful to live with (especially in a one-bathroom household), and we knew we couldn’t afford a real tile-replacement-new-tub kind of a remodel right now.

It all began with me finding a beautiful brass mirror I’d been eyeing at Target on a really big discount at an outlet store, and finding two discounted shelves at the same place. Obviously, it was fate, and I spent the next three weeks putting all my time and energy into this bathroom, snowballing the project until we’d touched basically everything.

My first step was painting the vanity in a moody green (Coriander & Olive by Sherwin-Williams). I just used a regular satin paint and did a couple coats of polycrylic – the same method I used in our last house that held up well.

Going in phases

As for the more intensive remodel elements, like most things in our DIY journey, we kind of just started going for it and figuring it out as we go. First I removed the built-in medicine cabinet/mirror and patched up the drywall. I’ve never done that before and it is notttt pretty back there, but it doesn’t need to be with my beautiful brass mirror covering it.

Next I took down the Hollywood lights and was kind of worried there would be a sewer rat’s smorgasbord of wires back there but luckily it was like a regular light fixture: win!

I replaced those lights withmodern black sconces that gave me the perfect modern vintage (yeah, I know that’s an oxymoron but I don’t know how else to describe it) vibe.

Our mirror demo trick

Obviously this was Alex’s favorite day. He doesn’t usually lurk around much when I’m trying to hang a shelf level or installing wall hooks, but if he hears there’s going to be some destruction around then he’s always creepin’ somewhere to get involved.

Luckily for me, it turns out he’s a pro at mirror removal. It was kind of slow going at first especially because it was like 30 12×12 mirrors instead of one big one, but he used a chisel and hammer to get in behind the mirror, then went up and down in the gaps between the adhesive swirls, if that makes sense. Trying to chisel away where adhesive results in a wholeeee lot of glass shards, just ask our feet.

Our mirror demo trick

Oh, this beadboard, I love it so so much. We decided to cover the half-wall tile in the non-shower part of the room with beadboard right over the tile to avoid demo. To do that, we drilled through the beadboard with a regular drill, and when we got through and to the tile, we switched to a tile drill bit to go through that part through the wall.

We did that in about five spots on each beadboard piece, then loaded up on construction-level Liquid Nails (making sure not to go anywhere near the screw holes) and screwed the beadboard into place. Once the beadboard was super stuck to the wall (about 24 hours later) we removed the screws and wood-filled them.

We added a 1×4 to the top and bottom of each section of beadboard as trim.

We painted it all Roman Plaster by Behr in Satin and then went around every single seam with waterproof caulk because in all honesty I’m a little worried about moisture getting in behind the beadboard but that’s a wait-and-see type deal.

Toilet removal

Okay, this is the part where we almost got divorced. Turns out people are out here just changing out toilets in their bathrooms and not talking about it because not once have I ever heard or seen on Instagram someone replacing a toilet and yet when I mentioned it everyone said it’s soooo easy. THEY’RE SO WRONG.

This task took us honestly about 12 hours. We had what must have been the original prototype of a toilet flange sitting rusted out in our sewer hole thing, and despite watching every middle aged dad on YouTube tell us how to do it, our ancient house had other plans.

What was convenient, though, is that we weren’t that inconvenienced by being out a toilet because we did about 1,237 trips to Home Depot that day which provided ample bathroom breaks. So, yeah, I won’t be writing a how-to on changing out a toilet but I can recommend many YouTube videos that’ll help.

Did you know you can paint tile?

With a new toilet that didn’t perpetually smell like urine, a freshly painted wall free of funhouse mirrors, new wall shelves and a new mirror/sconce situation, the budget bathroom remodel was already looking soooo much better.

However, the dirty old tile was still causing trouble.

I used a tile refinishing kit to paint around the bathtub and the vanity countertop and it made a world of difference.

Night and day. Like, it’s truly amazing.’

I’ve used kits like this before (in both of our bathrooms in the last house) but this time I used a different brand and liked it a lot better. I’m planning to write a blog post next week comparing the two and giving the pros and cons, so sign up to our newsletter so you can see the tips I learned while doing this over *checks notes* THREE different bathrooms.

Did you know you can paint floor tile?

This next part is a total mess: you’ve been warned. In our laundry/pantry makeover recently, I painted the linoleum floor with a pattern stencil and it turned out amazingly. It’s been about a month and it’s held up so well, no issues at all, but not the case in this bathroom lemme tell ya.

So, I used the same method of regular wall paint with the Rustoleum floor coating sealer. I will say, I went against the directions because it’s a two-step process and I thought I could get away with using regular paint as step one because I didn’t love the color options in the actual product.

I used Cracked Pepper by Behr as the first step and I loved the dark color, but when I did the sealant, it bubbled and created VEINS on the floor over about three of the tiles.

I have a couple of theories on why this might’ve happened:

• It was too humid (even though we avoided the bathroom and didn’t shower for 24 hours afterward)
• I used too much sealer in that spot, because that’s an area where I piled it on and didn’t use the fairly thin coats I’d used on the rest of the floor
• That’s the spot right under the air vent and it was really cold this last week so we’d been blasting the heat. I’m not sure why but that seems like something science might’ve interfered with?

I ended up scraping the paint off those tiles and redoing the whole process on just those three, but when I did the sealer again, it went a little bit over onto another tile. The original three were totally find the second go-around, but the new tile bubbled up! I was so frustrated, but took a deep breath, blasted some Cardi B and did it all over again. Third time was the charm.

Finishing touches

I know I’ve said this about 457 times throughout this blog post, but I truly am amazed at the difference this budget bathroom remodel made in our dingy one-bathroom house. It used to be the room I hated the absolute most, but now I actually enjoy getting ready in there (ready for, you know, the living room because it’s 2020).

I added these towel hooks along the blank wall, with one next to the mirror as a hand towel hook. Here’s a link to the wall shelves but I don’t have a link to the powder room sign (it was Target, too, but a find a few years ago at another outlet store).

The amber jars on the shelves add to the whole vibe, and putting all our bathroom products in matching amber glass bottles with pumps makes me feel like I’m both a very legitimate adult and always in a fancy hotel. Here’s a link to the little caddies we put them in (SPOILER: you don’t even need to drill any holes in fiberglass or tile because they’ve got a magical adhesive strip that holds a surprising amount of weight).

I added this jute rug and a Turkish rug I found on Etsy.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for following along and I hope we’ve inspired you with a few ideas for your own little stinky cave room in desperate need of a budget bathroom remodel. Make sure to follow along on Instagram and sign up to our newsletter for more room remodels and DIYs.