Guest Bath Remodel - THE BEFORE

Late last year, amidst being 100 months pregnant, the holidays, Croix's Birthday, wrapping up projects before maternity leave, our Patio Project and Croix's big boy room + Custom Closet projects we decided it would be a good idea to add one more tiny little thing to our plate - the remodel of our downstairs guest bath.

Just writing that I realize how insane that makes us sound, and to be honest I think we did stretch ourselves a bit too far, I mean we literally set our Christmas Dinner table (for 20+ plus guests) on CHRISTMAS DAY! Nothing like the last minute...OY! But there was a method to the madness, so let me explain...In 2017 I designed the bath display for the Luxury Living Show at Phipps Plaza. You all may remember me mentioning it...

Photo via AH&L Magazine.

After the show the displays were disassembled and all cabinets came back to Bell Cabinetry & Design (company I work for). For months the cabinets sat in the warehouse until it occurred to me that I could use them. We have 4.5 bathrooms in our house and I knew Croix's Bath Remodel  was on the horizon and who couldn't use another vanity + giant pink towers? So, Brent and I went and picked them up. Once we got them home we stored them in the space between our kitchen and dining room - the space we had dubbed our future home office. As we have worked to re-do and organize various spaces in our house, this area, the "future home office" area, has become the dumping ground for all the things. Every home has a space like this, problem was, this space is wide open to the rest of the house. There are no doors to block or hide what we have going on in here and worst of all, if you should come visit and enter through the front door, you have to walk past this monstrosity to get to the other areas of our home.

Exhibit A:

If you've been following along you know we re-did Croix's Bath earlier in the year so that got one of the 61" vanities out of the space, but we still had a lot of other items in here including another vanity + giant pink doors and shelves (the actual towers were still back at Bell). It was driving me nuts and knowing that we would have people around for the holidays + the fact that I would be at home for maternity leave first of the year I really wanted to get this space cleaned up and cleaned out which meant re-doing Guest Bath. Let me introduce you to this space...

Much like Croix's bath upstairs, there was nothing wrong with this bathroom. Everything worked properly, but there were two points I hoped to correct by re-doing the space. 1. I wanted to make the bathroom more efficient. Our home was built in the 1920's and before the big addition that was done in 2007 (before we owned the house) this bathroom was the master. So, it came with two vanities.

Two vanities is a plus in a master or a shared bath, but for a Guest Bath it was unnecessary and when you have two 8 foot towers that could take up that space and provide a TON of storage it just made sense to shake things up. And 2....I just wanted to make the space more "us"...you know, freshen it up a bit visually. There was way too much brown going on in here...

So, the plan was to remove both vanity cabinets/countertops/fixtures, the floor tile and the shower tile. A vanity would go back in front of the tub/shower but the vanity beside the toilet would go away forever. The plumbing would be capped and this would be the future location of the linen towers. The tub and toilet would stay, but all other elements would be removed.

The only way we could swing this was to hire out the labor this time around. At this point in my pregnancy and in our lives we couldn't tackle this DIY style. A project that would take us months to finish up could be completed by a professional in a weeks time, so we decided to give the whole hire a professional thing a whirl for this project. Obviously this is a more expensive route than DIY'ing the project so the name of the game was to keep costs to a minimum with the material selections to balance things out. I also had to make decisions quickly which doesn't come naturally for me in my own home for some annoying reason, but I did it and we are very happy with the end results both visually and monetarily. Here is a shot of our living mood board for the space:

The project wrapped in about a weeks time and while I'm currently nailing down some final details with art, etc...the bathroom is totally usable (already been used by several guests!) and the linen towers are full stocked and organized. It's a happy space and I'm excited to show you the AFTER soon.

PS - If you follow me on Instagram you've seen some of the after shots of this space in my stories and on my feed, follow along for the inside scoop on some of these projects before they hit the blog... _CourtneyShearer

Unless otherwise noted, all photos are my own.