The bathroom with 3 doors!

Hard to believe but this mid-sized bath room has 3 doors!  Door one goes to the kitchen, which is good if you want a quick snack while you shower.  Door two goes to the laundry room, which is also good if you forgot your underwear.  (The laundry room is a bit of a mud room, so that means you can also go out side).  This is great if you need to feed the dogs or pull some weeds, but probably not straight from the shower.  Door three is the one that will be kept and comes straight from the living room.

Remodeling this bathroom was on the to-do list, but not anywhere near the top.  However, after removing a leaky toilet and carpet that had seen better days, we found ourselves with a stripped bathroom.  The fir floors were not salvageable, so tile became the next best option.  There was little reason to not install this now.

Our goal is for a period look to the home using the stores we have available to us and at an economical price.  We’re doing the work, so a regular supply of Advil is also a requirement.

Off to Lowe’s to purchase white square tile for the floor and sheets of 12×12 patterned tile for the border. Black strip accent pieces were also added to the mix.  The next day as we laid out the pattern, I realized it wasn’t quite right and the look was too modern.  We adjusted our plan and were really pleased with the expected result, except of course this meant we didn’t have quite enough trim pieces or white tile.  So back to Lowe’s we went, (which is now a 35 minute drive).  Lowe’s did not have enough of our 8 inch accent pieces in stock, but they were happy to order them and they’d be in soon or about a week.  So… off we went to The Home Depot who had the black accent strips in 6 inch lengths.  NOT a problem, we used the shorter accent pieces on the inside of the design and the longer ones on the outside.  A stop to the drive through Starbucks and we were on our way home again.

We trimmed the 12×12 patterned tile into 4 12 inch strips.  This is so easy it can be done with scissors and we ended up with a patterned strip for less than $1.00 a foot. It was a great price and so easy to work with.  I kept thinking as I installed it of one of my mother’s favorite sayings, “There is more than one way to skin a cat”, which if you think about it, is really pretty gross.

Day two we added grey grout, re-installed the pedestal sink and put in a new, non-leaky toilet.  More Advil for our sore knees and we are thrilled with the result.

The bathroom with three doors is in no way done.  It is better though, with a new floor and one door blocked.  Finishing the bathroom with three doors will now go back on the to-do list as we tackle the other more pressing projects.