![]() There’s very little in the way of stuff down there (it’s a vacation rental, so just the basics), and that was refreshing. Our daughter kind of enjoyed the novelty of living downstairs – it was a whole new home, but weirdly familiar – and to be honest, we kind of liked how clutter-free it felt. Luckily, this was all happening during the late-winter offseason, so we moved into our empty Airbnb rental unit downstairs. They estimated it would take five or six weeks, so of course it took seven. On the left is the frame for the new plumbing wall. It was kind of a massive job that required coordinating a carpenter, plumber, electrician, and tiler, among other moving parts and people. We were adding a ton of new plumbing and changing the whole configuration. Our bathroom remodel was not straightforward. That type of bathroom remodel should only take one to three weeks. Some bathroom remodels are a pretty straightforward, quick job: Rip out the old stuff (tiles, tub, vanity, toilet, lighting, even the walls if they’re gross), and replace it all with new versions of the same stuff in more or less the same formation. The other guy who gave us an estimate came in higher because he didn’t think of this simple workaround. Also: Talk to multiple contractors, of course. Explain your vision and ideas to a couple of contractors and see what they think - a good one can tell you what’s feasible and what isn’t. ![]() Lesson learned: It’s ok to think outside the box. To do it, they had to rotate the cast-iron radiator that was up against the bedroom wall, and move its supply pipe a couple of feet over - but all in all, it came out really nicely, and saved tons of work and money (though I still need to paint the rotated radiator): Then they’d just box off the pipes in that bedroom, in a little indent about 9 inches by 2 feet. Luckily, Craig at Almar Building had the brilliant idea of running an all-new toilet drain and supply lines out the back and down through the first-floor bedroom, down to the basement. A lot of the plumbing would stay in the same corner, which is important to think about.īut what we didn’t realize was how difficult a job it is to pitch a toilet drain all the way across the room (to meet up with the main sewer pipe): You need the toilet drain pipe to be angled downward, not just flat across – and you cant just drill giant 4″ holes through all your support joists to get it across the room. the standard 60″), but that was fine with us it’s an apartment, not a villa. It meant using a slightly shorter tub (54″ vs. Here’s the contractor’s more professional version: In the end, here’s the floor plan we decided made the most sense: Finally, we thought: What if we could get rid of the radiator altogether to free up some space? It turns out, we could - by using radiant heat floors (the pricey option) or installing a small electric heater in the wall (the cheaper option, which we chose). And we wanted the tub away from the window if possible, to let in more light - and that wall is the longer one, better suited to a tub and all the plumbing.Įvery time I thought I found a solution, I’d realize that I’d forgotten to leave room for the big old cast iron radiator. The washer dryer couldn’t block the window, that much was true. I got some graph paper (how awesome is graph paper?) and sketched out layout after layout, trying to fit the puzzle together: moving the sink here, the shower there, the toilet to this side… any configuration I could think of. With more than 50 square feet to work with, I knew there had to be a way to fit a washer dryer in the bathroom without making it feel like a shiny, tiled coffin. Here’s what the original layout looked like – you can see there was some wasted space behind the door, where we kept a little IKEA storage thing: Our 7′ x 7’6″ bathroom is by no means big, but it’s not tiny. ![]() Here’s how it all went down, and some lessons we learned from our bathroom remodeling adventure. Well, we did it - and in fact we’ve spent almost a year with our new bathroom now. ![]() So we decided to remodel our small (and only!) bathroom by moving the toilet across the room and carving out space to include a stackable washer and dryer. So, where were we? Oh, right - getting ready to remodel our bathroom. To recap: We live on the top floor of a two-family house, and our laundry was down two flights of narrow stairs in the basement.
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