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renovating your ensuite bathroom
There are several areas in our home that can use an uplift. Tackling a project one at a time, we are making practical changes to achieve this. This post is about renovating your ensuite bathroom.
When buying a house there are so many things to consider. There is the location, age of home, neighbourhood and much more. One of the most important is how the space looks inside. Our place has a lot of good things about it. However, a setback about it is that the property did not come with any upgrades. Luckily, this is not an issue for us. This place was purchased with the intent that we will be upgrading it.
original washroom 30 yrs old
For the most part, the focus has been on the main floor of the house because no one comes upstairs except for us. However, our bedroom and the washroom need a serious change. This particular task is focusing on the bathroom connected to our bedroom. It is a nice simple bathroom, but it is outdated.
old tiles removed in place of new tiles
I went back and forth on whether we should upgrade our washroom or not. If we do, how to do it. Should we change our look to a standing shower with a glass door? Or go for a tub, like what we currently have and standard tiles on the inside? Factoring in time, money and materials, I decided to stick to a basic tub and change our bathroom tiles. Price wise doing it this way is a lot less in cost and labour.
renovating your ensuite bathroom
When you are doing a DIY washroom, consider these factors. What is your budget and how fancy and luxurious do you wish to go? Think about the cost effectiveness and resource allocation for your project. This is an important factor because you can easily go way beyond your original budget. Make sure that cost effectiveness and resource allocation are always at the back of your mind when working on a home DIY project. We want to do a nice job but within or under our set budget.
We are going for a practical generic upgrade that looks good and can withstand another few decades. My intention is to use the cost effectiveness and resource allocation approach as much as possible, while remaining practical and elegant at the same time.
renovating your ensuite bathroom
Upgrading a bathroom can be very expensive, but not if you spend wisely. This is how we did it.
I initially was looking into a soaker tub 30” x 60” standard size. The best price was $436.00 CAD plus tax. This is the one we were on the way to checkout to buy. We needed to rent a truck from the tool rental in order to take the tub to our house because it does not fit in the car.
While waiting for the cashier to schedule a rental time for a truck, there was a clearance sign on bright orange paper in the distance, for an American Standard tub on sale from $149.00 to $75.00. I had to take a look at it and see how it looked.
I asked about the tubs on clearance and if someone can open the box for me to look at it. If it is on clearance you cannot return it. If you come across a situation like this, make sure to check out the product first.
With some help, him and another associate opened the box and the tub looked great! It is not a soaker tub like what I once had, but a basic simple bare bones tub. However, that thought went out the window. This is a bargain.
For someone looking to make such an upgrade, this may not work for you. However, all I want is to take a shower in a clean bathtub and therefore this is perfect. Luxury will come in our future when we have our budgets taken care of today. This is why it is important to use our head over heart when purchasing for household upgrades. The heart can come in and increase our budget ten fold.
They offered me to take it in the truck now without an appointment and bring it back within 30 minutes and pay $30.00 for the rental.
We rented the truck and bought the tub and densShield all together. Our bill came to just under $200.00. The men working there put the items in the truck and we took it home, dropped it off and returned the vehicle with a small courtesy gas payment.
Now that we purchased the tub and the drywall, we need to buy the tiles. There were a few styles that I saw and liked, but there was one that stood out for both of us. It is very simple and plain, but contemporary and neutral.
There is nothing gaudy about it and it looks like something that will stand well for another 20 years. The price is reasonable. At $1.79/ft., we purchased 5 boxes with 8 tiles in each box. The total cost of the five boxes came to $153.00
We have some leftover grout from the last project, upgrading the middle washroom floors, but needed more. We bought one box of grout for $15.00 and purchased the same flooring tile that you can check out on upgrading your kitchen floors as well as renovate your front foyer floors, which came to just under $64.00. The total for everything plus tax was under $270.00. We also bought 3 more bags of tile mortar for $15/bag. Plus add the rounded up $200.00 from the purchase of the tub and materials and the total for this massive upgrade is under $500.00.
Since we have the tools to do the job, there is no extra costs to complete this task.
What to do when renovating your ensuite bathroom:
- Before you start, remove everything from your bathroom first. Take away the floor mats, your towels, shampoos and soaps etc. Once everything is cleared out, do a last clean and sweep of the floors before you begin. Place drop clothes all around the parts of the house that you will be walking around so that you do not track dirt everywhere. Gather all your tools and begin.
Remove the quarter round and the baseboard trim all around the washroom. Using a sharp knife, cut the silicone around the bath tub. This is the top where the tiles meet the ceiling and along the two inside corners to separate the tiles on the walls.
- Begin removing all the tiles around the tub. Using a hammer, break the wall off in sections because this stuff is heavy . Do not try to chip the tile off first and then take the drywall off. It is better to remove the tile with the drywall, especially if it as old as the tiles.
- This is why we bought some new wall board. We bought 5 large 3×5 ft pieces of DensShield for $100.00, included in the cost above. Once you remove the tiles and drywall, make sure to pull out any nails or screws left in the studs. This work is dirty and dusty. My partner removed all the tiles and the tub. The work took about two hours to complete. This is only for removing the old tiles.
- Now that the tiles are off, grab a garbage bag and place all the old tiles in the garbage. This needs to be taken out before moving onto the next step. There will be a lot of garbage and it is going to be heavy. You will need a few garbage bags to put all the removed items in.
- Afterwards it is time to remove the bathtub. This tub we have is a steel tub. The new tub we purchased is a steel tub as well. It is harder to remove and install. This may take a little more time.
- Clean off the whole area before working on your next step. The reason to clean up as you go along is because this way, you are not tracking all that dirt throughout your house. Your house will get dirty no doubt, but you can avoid any extra mess by cleaning in between steps.
- My partner had to modify the bathtub drain/over-flow to suit the new tub so he used some 1-1/2″ ABS pipe and fittings and glued it together with ABS glue.
- Once the new tub is set in place, we installed the DensShield wall board around the tub all the way up to the ceiling.
- One really great factor about doing it on your own is adding things we did not have before. A new feature in our bathtub is a niche in the wall to place some shampoo and conditioner bottles as well as a bar of soap.
- Use fibre mesh tape and tile mortar to seal the seams in the wall board and let it dry.
- Based on the size of tile you buy, do some measuring to figure out the layout so that everything ends up looking good.
- Pre-cut your tile for the first part before mixing your mortar and then mix up a batch of mortar to begin setting your tile. The wall tile we used is a ceramic which can be cut with a regular tile cutter but the floor tile is porcelan which can only be cut with a wet saw and a grinder with the appropriate cutting wheel.
- Once the tile mortar is ready, start setting your tile and make sure you use a tile levelling system especially on large format tile to prevent the tiles from lifting up. This gives you a nice even surface.
- Let your tile mortar set for 24hrs and you are ready to grout.
- Silicone all around your tube where it meets the tile, along the inside corners, and even around your faucet and spout.
- We also pulled up our old linoleum floor and laid down new porcelain tile.
As you can see, the pictures continue because we painted the bathroom. There is no extra cost for us to buy new paint. This is the same colour we have in our living room and what is being used on these bathroom walls is what was remaining. Yet again, we are able to save money on an upgrade that would easily have taken out an extra $50.00 out of pocket. Meanwhile the upgrade to paint the bathroom is worth much more in the long run.
After it is complete, you can see that there is a brand new fresh paint job, new bathroom tiles, floor tiles and a new tub. Many people spend a few thousand dollars doing such a renovation as what is done here. We were able to complete this task well below budget, all because of smart buying and self-sufficiently doing this on our own.
A very successful home project has been checked off our list. Please read up on the home renovation blogs to see how many upgrades we made in 2021. All of them are at a fraction of what it normally costs to make such big changes.
Hopefully you are encouraged to build your wealth in such a way that keeps you rich for life. It is not always about how much we make, but what we do with what we earn that makes the biggest difference in our lives.
Thank you for reading. Please feel free to comment and leave feedback. I appreciate your support.
November 25, 2021.
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