House Tour: Upstairs Bathroom Before

I can remember the first time mom and I walked through this house. The owners were showing it themselves, because it was up for auction. I stepped into this bathroom, turned and said to mom, "we're going to have to factor a bathroom remodel right into the budget for this house." She agreed. We both knew it couldn't stay like that for long.

Once the paperwork was finalized and the P.O.s moved out (five weeks of me renting to them), I finally got the house all to myself. Little did I know then... But I always knew this bathroom had to go. I've even thought it could have made a good entry for American Standard's Ugliest Bathroom Contest. But they don't seem to do that anymore.

These photos were taken in September 2003. Once upon a time, there was a claw foot tub in here, but it was long gone by the time I arrived. I'd guess 1970s?

The ceiling was low, the lighting was ugly, the floor was squishy, the tub was shorter than normal at 4-1/2', its faucet leaky, any natural daylight was almost completely blocked by the weird shower wall addition, daddy couldn't even get to the plumbing access panel...

...that's about 10" there, people.
If your eyes can get past the nasty, teal with gold veins ...laminate?... wall panels, you can see they butchered the poor header on the medicine cabinet with that hideous 80s lighting.
The toilet also leaked. Alot. We woke up one morning to water dripping from the ceiling right onto the kitchen counter! I would have been a whole lot more disgusted if we had actually been using the kitchen at the time. Anyway, the downstairs bathroom wasn't yet completed, so my dad's solution was to turn the water off to the toilet (luckily it was the ingoing water that was leaking, not the, erm, outgoing). This did not render the bathroom unusable, however, because all we had to do was collect water dripping from the tub faucet into a bucket, and voila! Instant use of wasted water. The tub faucet was leaking about a gallon of water every two hours. Daddy intended to fix it, but he said the whole thing had to be replaced, he couldn't reach the plumbing, and we were going to gut this room in less than a year, so...

Check out the gold vein on that counter surface. Not matching, but coordinating.Just wait till you see all we did to this room. You may not recognise it. Once we realized how bad the water damage was, this room had to be torn down to the studs. And then some of those even had to be sistered. We bumped two walls out, raised the ceiling, leveled the floor, well, you'll see...