A record of Bathroom Reno: The Floor Plan & Picking Tile
Ok, now we are cooking with gas! Perhaps I should not use that expression for a bathroom reno… ANYWAY… we have made plenty of progress since partially demo-ing the room last week (more on that here), and hoped to share our final floorpan with you (IT IS SUCH A GIANT IMPROVEMENT!) and our final tile picks (along with a few other things we debated, why we chose what we chose, etc).
So here is the old bathroom layout. Yes we lived with it like this for over six years. Yes, it was A LOT of doors (the one leading from the hall to our bedroom is right behind where the tub is below – so there were five in a ten step radius or so). And the only natural light in the whole space in short was stopped by a bunch of walls and doors, so it made it as far as the toilet and perhaps the tub on a good day and that was it. It was so dark and cave-like and closed off in here:
Simply to refresh your memory, here is a photo of the bathroom as it looked before last week’s demo session (you can watch a full video of how weird the space was right here too if you wanna be thorough). This photo was taken by John as he was standing in the doorway of the closet and looking back towards the tub (you can refer to the room sketch above to get your bearings a little more).
And here is the room after our little demo session last week, when we took down all the walls that were blocking the view and the light to have a view of the space that is a bit more uninterrupted while we planned our next moves (like what goes where, what sized vanity and tub would fit, etc). It was already looking SO MUCH MORE OPEN. I am sorry for all the caps lock in this post, but bathroom renovations GET ME GOING.
Ok but back to the floor plan, remember this was the original layout for reference:
And after approximately 5,379 distinct plans and drawings and taping things out on the floor over and over again (and meeting with our plumber & electrician in person to make sure our ideas were in fact physically doable and not prohibitively pricey), this is where we ended up:
As for the general inspiration and feeling that we’d enjoy to get from the space, we are hoping for soft layered tones and textures – and classic finishes feel truly good to us (and seem like they’d fit so nicely into our house). Our bathroom has been dark and dated and boxed off for so long it is going to be so pleasant to have an open, light & airy space to enjoy.
But back to laying out the room for a second. I mentioned that we considered around a million distinct room layout options & I am not kidding. Fairly much if you can think of another option we considered it. More windows in the bathroom? We certainly thought about that! In the end we hoped to use that wall space for the mirror & lights over the vanity – and the single window we have provides tons of light now that the walls are down! Plus adding another window to the bathroom would look weirdly unbalanced from the exterior of the house since it would be too close to the existing bathroom window to match the other exterior window spacing back there. That is simply one example of the mental gymnastics we did for every aspect of this room. But I am never one to stop at one example…
We also heavily considered stealing space from the bedroom or the closet. We mapped out so many versions of that and it consistently felt silly and over-wrought, and once the walls came down and we realized how big this space is as it is (around 8 x 13′ feet!) we realized we did not need a single inch more – in fact we can fit a 72″ double vanity, which is one of the largest ones they make! Plus I get a freestanding tub (a big deep one that I can fully submerge myself in – instead of my knees and whole chest being out – imagine how pleasant that will be?!) along with a pleasant walk in shower! We have room to spare simply as this layout is.
We also thought about adding access to the closet from the bedroom instead of through the bathroom, but it is truly pleasant to shower & walk right into the closet to get dressed instead of popping back into the bedroom and back into the closet, and since we could make the bathroom layout exactly what we hoped and keep that closet doorway (while widening and centering it!), we are so glad with things as they are in the plan above. We think it is going to be stunning and it’ll feel more open with them both connected with a pleasant wide doorway (so light can flow through the whole space) instead of making them into two smaller rooms on their own.
It was also truly helpful to talk to our plumber and electrician to figure out what is truly possible. For example, where the ductwork runs in the shared wall between the bedroom and bathroom means a pocket door will not work, which is simply fine with us because we enjoy the idea of a frosted french door.
And after proclaiming that I hoped a big frosted double french door on the podcast, I realized that in practice it would be annoying to have to shut two doors behind you every time you go to the bathroom (sure you can leave one shut at all times and simply enter and exit through the other one, but that misses the point because I thought it would be lovely to see both of them thrown open from the bedroom). Thankfully I think a single frosted door will be vivid. Light will flow in and out, and it’ll be straightforward to simply shut one door behind us. Score.
We also heavily considered squeezing in a water closet but after removing all these walls we simply did not want to add any back in. Sure the toilet might be more private behind a door, but the whole bathroom has a door that we can shut for privacy & we have never had a water closet and prefer the open feeling light-filled space more than having a compact toilet room. I know what I am saying might make you want to cup my face in your hands and whisper to me that I should trust you, and that I would in fact enjoy a water closet, but we have deeply thought this through (6+ years of planning this reno in our heads – ha!). I fully respect that some people out there might enjoy ’em & even believe they could not exist without them, but we all want distinct things from our bathrooms and having a soaking tub and a vivid walk-in shower was a much nicer way for us to “spend” that space, while keeping everything open and light filled, so we are thrilled. Also we do not give a hoot about resale, this bathroom is for us to use & enjoy for a pleasant long time ;)
Oh and I was fully sure that we hoped to add a window to the closet literally as lately as last week, but when we mapped out where it would have to be in order to make sense and look balanced from the outside of the house, it would have looked insane in the closet (picture it crammed into a corner with the trim literally touching the corner of the closet) and a few people told me they have windows in their closet and it fades their black clothes (THE HORROR!). So we realized that a big light-filled bathroom is our dream, especially with a pleasant wide & centered door that leads to the closet, and assuming we have some pleasant closet lighting and plenty of functional storage in there, it’ll make us happier than a weird window crammed into the corner that feels like it is simply in the way and in the wrong spot.
Closets like this are giving me so much inspo (we are planning to use a combo of Ikea wardrobes and drawers and systems + wood/trim to build things in and make them look more custom).
As we mentioned on the podcast this week, now that the layout has become crystal clear to us, we at last felt confident sufficient to order some of the bigger items for the room – like the tub, the toilet, and the double vanity (we are likely going to paint it a soft gray-green like the bathroom inspiration picture a few photos back).
And the toilet is the same one that we have had for years in our downstairs powder room. We enjoy how pleasant it looks (it is like a toilet with upgraded porcelain molding!) and it feels fairly strong to at last be upgrading another one in our house (the only one left to upgrade will be the hall bath – and we are coming for that room next!).
Ok, and back to the tile picks I mentioned! We are so excited to have at last made a decision (we have looked at more tile in the last week or so than I think ever in our lives). Remember we shared inspiration images in last podcast’s show notes when we were talking about our bathroom plans?
Well, we knew we enjoyed a classic tile choice in an interesting and less expected arrangement (like the ones above) so we began to mess around with distinct patterns on the computer to see what we liked. These were things we made when we were trying to plan the shower wall pattern by the way, and these are all proportions that happen when you are using 2 x 8″ tiles (the length to width ratio of the tile changes the shapes they make):
After mapping out the three sketches above, and looking at tons of inspiration images (like our two tile inso photos) we chose that we liked the look of “two by two” best. Why? We thought the “four by four” and “three by three” were excellent as well, they simply felt like squares (and sort of parquet-ish since we both lived in NYC if you get that reference) and we both gravitated towards the stair-stepped look of the top right tile layout for the shower walls the most since it was more dynamic to us (it felt less like squares someone shuffled around in distinct directions, if that makes sense). But again, we enjoyed them all! We simply had to pick a go-to!
At this point, we felt truly smug that we had mapped everything out and reached a decision… and then we realized that a lot of the 2 x 8″ tile was extremely pricey (or sold out, or harder to find in the quantity we needed) so it felt like we were back to square one (pun not intended). But then we took a trip to Home Depot, The Tile Shop, and Floor & Decor to break out of our tile-block and simply look at what we could find in person (it is straightforward to fall into a computer worm hole, so head to the store if you can to break that curse).
Anyway, at our third stop, Floor & Decor, we in fact found something we Enjoyed (except for that crazy dark spot in that one tile below). Consistently buy more tile than you need so you can pull out those random weird tiles for a more well planned and congruent look. Especially with natural stone, there are simply outliers, so it is smart to use them under a vanity for example – or not at all if you have sufficient to pluck them out and not use them.
It was 2 x 12″ tile, which is distinct than 2 x 8, but we realized when we laid it out on the floor and played around with layouts that it would make that dynamic stair-stepped pattern, it would simply take a 3 x 3 arrangement instead of a 2 x 2 one. And WE Enjoyed IT!
Laying tiles out right on the floor of wherever you find them can clarify so much! This is kind of an awful shot – there is plastic covering the tiles, hence the glare, and they will not be laid in this angle, they’ll be done in the stair stepped pattern above, but you get the idea (also they look nothing like they do in real life online, which is annoying, so I am glad we looked in person!).
We chose that marble hex tiles in the same material by the same brand would coordinate and add some more tone on tone texture for the shower floor, so you also see those in the shot above. And that large tile is the floor tile that we picked to layer in there too.
When it came to finding the floor tile, we in fact STRUCK GOLD (caps lock again, sorry not sorry) at Home Depot because we found this lovely marble looking tile that is giant and $2.49 a square foot and simply so vivid (we brought it with us to Floor & Decor, hence having it to lay on the floor in the photo above). I have seen a lot of marble-look polished porcelain floor tiles that look stamped on and fake or simply not the right tone (too warm or too cold or not distinct sufficient from each other so they looked cloned) and this tile is none of that!
For the price you cannot beat this anywhere (trust me, we looked – ha!) and even if this was $10 a square foot I’d likely pay it because we fell in love. So it sure is lucky that it is crazy affordable, especially because it’ll balance out our shower choices which were pricier. We are also extra excited about using this floor for the whole room (both the closet and the bathroom) because they have consistently been chopped up (part tile, and part formerly-carpet-turned-painted-subfloor). So having them all be the same flooring after all these years is going to feel so good and so much more seamless. Here I am playing around with it on the floor upstairs. It is going to be STUNNING. I am verklempt.
For anyone who wants to see some other tile we considered, we also liked this one (I think it is this, also from Floor & Decor). It is not as long of a proportion, but we truly enjoyed it as well.
We also debated a chevron or herringbone floor laid with these tiles and then a brick-layer pattern of this in the shower. And a large marble hex floor with a chevron shower. We also enjoyed the idea of a basketweave like this on the shower walls, and we even considered a color like this shiny deliciousness. Honestly we went round and round and likely could have done ten versions of this bathroom that we enjoy, the final picks are simply the ones we enjoyed most of all and thought would look so dang good together, all layered into one room. Also this tile was VIVID but the price was truly high – but if someone else out there simply needs like a dozen squares for a laundry room backsplash or something (remember how 13 tiles majorly upgraded our laundry room), it is good. Send me a pic!
I also cannot wait to pick lively stuff like fixtures and faucets and even things like hardware and toilet paper holders and towel hooks. How good is this toilet paper holder? And this leather wrapped hardware on Etsy? And this lovely mirror (check out the name – ha!). I am fairly much consistently in a hyper/euphoric state while planning this reno because we have waited so long to do this, and it feels like it is going to be the room that dreams are made of! And also long hot baths.
As for what is next, we are fully demo-ing the room soon (the vanity is supposed to arrive next week and then we will have everything since the tub and the toilet already came – which thrills me to no end because we were originally told the vanity would take 4 weeks).
If all goes well in two weeks we should have it fully gutted and then the plumber has to shift some things around in the floor and we have to prep for tile, tile, and then likely do some work on the walls and some electrical updates and then it’ll be time to in fact install the new things (MY TUBBBBBBB) which is quite exciting indeed. My goal = to have my whole body submerged in my new tub (with the aid of some snorkel gear) by November 15th, which is John’s 38th birthday. Because there is not a better birthday present than a snorkeling wife in your new but likely not fully done (but hopefully close) bathroom.
P.S. Do not forget to read the first post about this bathroom reno to see a video tour and check out the exciting half-demo-ed pics. This room is going to be unrecognizable when it is done.
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