In Part 1, I removed everything in the bathroom. Once the drywall patches were dried up, the first thing I did was paint. Next up was flooring. I chose to go with Allure vinyl plank flooring, which is relatively inexpensive but looks nice and has a nice textured feel to it. This is a floating floor, each piece is 1×3′ (three “tiles”) and has opposing adhesive lips on opposite sides that stick to each other.

When we bought the house, the two most recent updates the previous owners had done were the kitchen and bathroom. We’ve touched every other part of the rest of the house — from painting every square inch (except kitchen and bath) to the complete reno of the basement. The bathroom had a new toilet, tub and surround, faucet, cultured marble counter-top/sink, and presumably vinyl floor. The tub surround is a very simple, just some Solid Surface around the outside, but it’s actually nice.

One of the things the upstairs bathroom is lacking is an exhaust vent. Vents are important to keep the humidity from getting too high, and are especially great compared to opening a window while you’re running your heating or air conditioning. You can see the old slider window here, which is the only one left in the house. I’ve sealed it with silicone caulking on one side, and weather stripping on the other, and we pretty much leave it shut.

While I’m doing the wiring in the basement, I decided to also fix something that really annoys me: my upstairs bathroom plug. As you can see, there are two sockets, and they’re connected to the light switch. This means we usually have a wire all the way across the wall/counter, and my girlfriend is always changing plugs for her hair appliances. I cut a hole for a 2-gang box in the wall, and ran a wire down there, beside the central vac pipe, and down through the floor into the basement.

Since the house has only one bathroom, we decided adding a second half-bath to the basement would be a good investment, as well as a useful addition to us right now. When we moved in, there was an existing sink in the laundry room, which I’m pretty sure was the old kitchen sink and cabinets. I took this picture after I had taken down several cabinets (I unfortunately did not take very many ‘before’ photos), but there were two big cabinets mounted right above the sink before.