Our First Bath Reno

This was Mr. Stinky's guest bath. He had seen better days. You can't tell from this first picture that there was wallpaper but oh trust me there was! It was that thick "vinalish" stuff from the 80's and was a pain to remove for sure. Lots of hot soapy water with one of those wallpaper perforator thingies and hours of elbow grease finally got it off. We ended up putting in a new low flow toilet which we either got for free(through a city of austin waterwise program) or minimal costs(this was 7 years and three pregnancies ago;) I can't remember.  See that hot pink stripe of tile in the shower?  We lived with that for the 4 years we were in the house and finally did something about it right before we put him on the market(see next picture with handsome hubby, cute kid, and beautiful new subway tile and hardware).  Shower curtains are great for hiding that kind of thing but why is it that we wait until we want to sell to do all the things we wanted to do?  Budget of course!  The truth is I do wish we would have done it sooner because it looked like someone had removed a couple of rows of the original white tile and put those in with super thick calk lines.  Needless to say we had to replace the backerboard and everything when we finally decided to do it.

We replaced the flooring(same tile through most of the house), added a new mirror, new vanity lights, new paint of course(I would't do this color again but 7 years ago it was okie dokey), new sink, faucet, added some blinds(to cover a not so nice older window), oh and a new door and trim throughout the room(we got the crown molding at a salvage store) and the absolute best thing we did was make the concrete countertop!  We  didn't have a clue what we were doing but thankfully the first one turned out great.  Concrete is cheap and so is MDF do we knew it wouldn't  hurt to try.  We cut a piece of mdf to size, added 4 edges or ends(picture a shallow rectangular open top box) and then cut out 2 pieces of mdf in the shape of the sink(the template was provided with the sink).  Then the mdf in the shape of the sink hole was screwed into the middle of the rectangular form.  We then painted on a sealer and added a bead of silicone in all the joints so it wouldn't absorb the wet concrete(in hind sight we should have used melamine so we didn't have to seal it but it was more expensive) then we put our little electric palm sander on the edges of the form to get the bubbles out.  After it was hard as a rock(imagine that) we unscrewed all the pieces of the mold and oh so carefully flipped it over.  There were lots of tiny holes on the smooth side so we made a little concrete slurry and wiped it over the top until it gave us the smoother look we were going for.  After that dried it was time to polish it with a beeswax sealer and some crazy  little cloth wheel thing that attached to our drill.  The only challenge after all that was getting it inside.  Oh how I wish I had a picture of that! It involved a wheelbarrow.....

So what do ya think? Have you tried any concrete projects? I don't have any real #'s here but I bet this whole project cost us under $250.00 not including the professional tile job that we had done right before we moved. Have I mentioned we are determined not to tile anything ourselves again and have the utmost respect for professional tilers?

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