Project Renovation: Bathroom

Finally, the bathroom is complete and more importantly clean, for now, because anyone who has renovated will know the persistent dust you have to deal with. As some of you may know, we didn't anticipate having to do just so much to the house as we have had to, but the one room we did know we needed to change was our bathroom. We knew that from the moment we saw the property online.

We both spent a lot of time planning this bathroom, months in fact. I'm not the most practical person, I plan what I would like and then think how I can get it to fit into a room (and afford it). G is the practical one and will always bring me back down to reality. Our first job was to take away the built in wardrobe out of the back bedroom which was part of the house, and give this space to the bathroom. We were able to do this ourselves, I say we, I didn't do a thing at this stage. Once we had the wall moved, we had a long discussion and decided to change from oil heating to gas and thought we were best to do this at this stage before we bought anything for the bathroom. This was organised and installed in March of this year, so it was now time for us to start shopping for a bathroom. I did a lot of the brain storming, thinking of tiles, sinks, bath shapes and styles etc. Once we both agreed and had a clear idea of what we liked we started shopping around.

We decided to go with Watershed Bathrooms and Tiles Antrim after visiting a number of bathroom showrooms. I was lucky enough that a friend worked in the showroom, and to be honest I would have been lost without his help. As you can see above, our ideas were brought to life with a design drawing, which included the tiles we had chosen along with the bathroom furniture also. I was very anxious about it not fitting in the space we had so having this tool completely settled any nerves I had, from then I was really excited to see our plans come together for our first project in our home. The only item which wasn't purchased from Watershed was our vanity unit and shelves which we had bespoke built by Simply Rustic Furniture. We were able to pick a style of vanity we liked off their website and emailed over our specific measurements in the finish we liked and also requested two matching shelves, this was really straight forward and was the perfect piece for our bathroom. We sourced our own plumber and we only had one company in mind which was Go With the Flow Bathrooms NI who were able to do every aspect of the bathroom fit, from plumbing, tiling, plastering and any electrical work that needed to be done. This for me was really important as it meant we didn't have to arrange all the various aspects of the refit. We were lucky enough to know Stuart who runs
the company therefore I was able to go to work and let him work on the bathroom.

The work took about 2 weeks, because we moved around some of the plumbing as we were changing the position of the toilet along with the addition of the freestanding shower which hadn't been there before. I was like an excited child calling over the house every couple of days to watch the work progress and come from our original green bathroom suite to what we have today.

I have never been so happy to see something come together, when your ideas and plans finally come together and go beyond your expectations. Once the refit was completed we then had the job to paint the walls. First of all, it didn't entirely go to plan, we were complete novices to decorating especially with newly plastered walls, so there were a few tears and teething problems but we got there in the end. We went with Dulux Polished Pebble and we knew it was important to get bathroom specific paint, it was the perfect shade to tie in with our tiles and added some brightness to the space.

I am in love with this space, and I cannot wait to have a hot bubble bath! If you have any questions send me a DM on my Instagram here! I'm hoping to share each room in a blog post as we complete work, we are due to have some rooms plastered before Christmas and would love to share the renovation of these on my blog!