Old Home Bathroom Renovation Years in the Making - One Room Challenge Week 1

I’ve been so excited to start the One Room Challenge this spring. I’ve had intentions to do it for so many years and the timing just hasn’t worked. The One Room Challenge is hosted by Apartment Therapy.

You know when you’re trying to read a recipe but there’s an essay ahead of the ingredients? This is like that. The backstory - the why to our bathroom remodel taking 4 years to get going. Please feel free to jump ahead if you’re just here for the before pictures.

When we bought our fixer upper home in January 2018, we got to work renovating and updating. The house was built in 1900 and had been last updated in 1973. It was filled with bright colors, a 1940s kitchen and some pretty scary bathrooms. We started by making the living spaces more livable with paint, pulling up carpet, doing a temporary facelift in the kitchen and turning a small room on the first level into a powder bathroom/laundry room. We did a lot those first months but when we found out in March that we were expecting our first child in November, the project timeline became even faster. We ended up doing our full kitchen gut and remodel years sooner than expected and renovated our guest bathroom head-to-toe other than the cast iron tub. The primary bedroom and our family room followed and November came, our baby came and our furnace went out. Add new furnace and AC to the list of updates.

As you can imagine, once our first child arrived, the ability to work on projects became much more challenging. We took turns doing projects while the other parent spent time with our daughter. The first year of Hyler’s life, our front entry way was renovated, new siding was put onto our home and our daughter’s future big girl bedroom was finished. We kept moving forward with projects and when she was a little over a year old, in March 2020, we had big plans for a backyard landscaping/hardscaping project, a total lead remediation including new windows and the start of our primary bathroom remodel. That seems like so much in such a little time but it somehow felt slow going or at least like an easy pace. Oh, and I was also pregnant with our second child.

But March of 2020 meant the beginning of uncertainty in our businesses. The lead abatement was through a Health Department program so that was amazing and covered, the backyard renovation was scheduled and we had the funds set aside but once the bathroom was gutted, it just sat. We wanted to do the project but couldn’t justify spending the money when all of Austin’s work as a photographer had been canceled.

Low cost and free projects became the new priorities. I stopped blogging. We got busy with family life and started spending more time designing and cultivating our yard. We turned an unfinished space in our basement into an office for Austin. The primary bathroom just sat without walls or a floor for years but little by little, things are moving forward. Last year Austin got the framing for the shower up, the subfloor down, our electrical and plumbing rough-ins were done and insulation was put in place. This winter the drywall was hung and finished.

We are so much closer than we were spring of 2020 but it still feels like such a long way to go. That’s why we’re participating in the One Room Challenge this year. We will be sharing our progress and plans for the next 8 weeks with the idea that week 8 is the big reveal of a very finished bathroom. We redid almost every room in our house in 1 year, we’ve got to be able to finish this space in 2 months, right?

Follow along for updates! Next week I’ll be sharing the space as it is now along with the design plans and weekly breakdown of what we plan to accomplish. Want to get project updates in your inbox? Click here to subscribe.

The final reveal is May 24th. Please check out the posts by the other participants here.