Mom's Bathroom Remodel

Let me preface this post and my earlier one on the kitchen by saying that my mom is the queen of practicality and frugality. She accomplishes incredible feats on a dime. When we moved into this home my senior year of high school, we were coming from a 70X14 trailer that had housed my parents and (at the time) 10 of their 16 kids. Needless to say, moving into a 2000 square foot basement was really moving up, even if it didn't yet have electricity and we had to cook on the stove (the one used to heat the house, not the one in the kitchen) for the first few weeks. I remember waking up to the noise of dad firing up the generator outside my window so we could use our curling irons to do our hair for school. My sister Shelley and I had a huge, beautiful room that we got to design ourselves. It had a window seat. The pink carpet remnant that was purchased for the room wasn't quite large enough, so we had a 2 foot border of white carpet to finish it off. We also had our own door to the bathroom. It was wonderful!

Halfway through my sophomore year at BYU, the second floor of the house was finished, more than doubling the living space. And it was all done completely free of debt.



So, onto the bathroom remodel... Most of the labor was done over the 4th of July weekend. The bathroom "before remodel" was worse than the kitchen "before remodel" in many ways. There were mold and decay issues in the subfloor where water was continually sitting after so many kiddie baths. Like in the kitchen, the cupboards were mix and match. Pink walls with coordinating (darker) pink mouldings and flowers, linoleum flooring, bare-bulbed fixtures. The mirror was two smaller ones put together. In the before pictures we've already started removing mirrors and wall cabinets. Here it is: The BEFORE...

And AFTER...