Before I get too far ahead with the changes I want to be sure I illustrate what I started with. Aside from the bathroom, the other big project on the home is to remodel the upstairs. Being an old home, the original layout just wasn’t working for me. Sure there were three bedrooms, but you had to walk through the smallest bedroom to get to another!

When I bought the house it seemed that the back bedroom, though large, had been mostly ignored. At one point it was probably a rental, which will be more obvious in the pictures below.

Without further ado, let’s see the “back bedroom” that will someday be the “master bedroom” back in 2004 when I first bought the place.

Here’s a corner of the bedroom as seen from the bedroom entrance. You can see the nice deep closet built into the corner. The floor is a beige carpet, walls are just plain white.

Here is one of the two windows in the bedroom, and to the left of it is the door to the back staircase. It’s a narrow staircase that leads down to a shed and storage area. The window looks out the back of the house, over the shed roof, and into the neighbors’ yard (not like we spy on them or anything).

Here’s the last pic, looking back to the front of the room. Yes, that’s a kitchenette, complete with cast iron sink with running water. The door to the left is another closet, a very deep and very long closet. I really have no idea what the thought processes were that led to a kitchen in the bedroom and two huge closets.

Now that we’ve seen what the room looked like before, let me give you a quick peek at what it looks like today!

Pretty great huh? Now all it needs is a little paint, lol. I’ll make another post soon listing off the steps I took to get to this point.

I was going to start posting about the master bedroom, since that’s my first project, but this week I had a few surprises and now I’m suddenly doing a major bathroom renovation too!

It all started with the toilet. See, it’s an old toilet and it was running constantly and I just wanted to fix it. Pretty simple right? Well when you’re dealing with old things nothing is simple. I was clunking around inside the tank when suddenly I had one of those TV moments where water started spraying around everywhere and my simple fix turned into “I need a new toilet”.

When the toilet came up I discovered the floor underneath was damp and rotting, so “I need a new toilet” turned into “I need a new floor”. Off I went to Home Depot, where I found out they’re having a bathroom promotion - don’t pay for one year on any bathroom fixtures…and that is how fixing the toilet turns into a major bathroom renovation.

Before I continue on my path of bathroom destruction, I’ll show you what it looks like today.

Here is the view from the door, my cute little tub alcove and window (the window being the only ventilation for the room at the moment):

Here is the corner opposite the tub. There used to be two doors in the bathroom, but I took one out a year ago and only patched up the other side of the wall:

This is looking back towards the entry. You can see where the toilet used to be, and you can see the corner of the vanity:

Finally here’s the vanity. Something about all the empty space around the vanity bothers me, it’s definitely going to go:

Check back soon and I’ll tell you all about my big bathroom spending spree at Home Depot!