Back To The Bathroom Remodel (Bedroom-To-Bathroom Conversion)

I’m finally back to the bathroom remodel. Unfortunately, the work I did yesterday doesn’t show up in pictures. I applied the Modern Masters Venetian Plaster Clear Coat that protects the finish on the walls. It’s not a required step, but it is recommended for high traffic areas, and I consider a master bathroom to be a high traffic area where it’s helpful to have walls that can be wiped down and cleaned periodically. The clear coat is applied with a trowel in the same way that the actual Modern Masters Venetian Plaster finish is applied.

If you missed my posts on the Venetian Plaster wall finish, you can find those here:

• Venetian Plaster Walls & Wainscoting Questions
• DIY Teal Venetian Plaster Wall Finish Using Modern Masters
• The Final Bathroom Walls (Definitely Finished This Time!)

Lately, I’ve been spending my evenings trying to organize my photos into folders on my computer where I can actually find them easily, and for the past few days, I’ve been working specifically on editing and organizing the photos that I took of this house on the days that we were handed the keys after closing. It’s been so fun to look back at those and see just how far this house has come.

In the next few days, I want to do a complete “walk through” of the rooms of the house that are finished (and two that aren’t — the bathroom and the home gym) and show you the original pictures, and then current pictures showing the exact same angles.

But until then, I thought it would be good to at least look back at where this bathroom started. If you’ll remember, this bathroom was the original master bedroom. People who are new around here are often confused about why our master bathroom is located just off of the home gym with a door leading to the back yard. So let’s start there.

When we bought the house, this is what the floor plan looked like. You can see the master bedroom on the left side, with a door leading to the hallway, and a small walk-in closet sharing a wall with the hallway bathroom, and then a tiny connected bathroom.

To prepare this room for its conversion from a bedroom to a bathroom, we removed the walls separating the walk-in closet from the bedroom, and then squared up that room by stealing some space from the very large hallway. The doorway leading from the hallway into the bedroom was closed up, and a new doorway from the home gym to the bedroom was opened up. So right now, this is what it looks like.

So this is what the bedroom used to look like. This was the view from the bedroom door in the hallway.

And now if you’re standing in that very same spot, you’ll have your back against a solid wall (no more doorway that leads to the hallway), and you’ll be standing in the water closet where there will soon be a toilet installed. 😀

And from that view, you can see the wall where the vanities will be installed straight ahead, and you can also see the new doorway on the left that leads to the home gym.

But if I step forward a little bit, past the toilet area and into the main part of the bathroom, this is what that view looks like today. The original window on that right wall was replaced with an exterior door for easy access to the back yard.

Looking in the opposite direction, this was the original view — the original bathroom on the left, the walk-in closet behind that closed door, and the bedroom door leading to the hallway on the right.

Now the wall that separated the bedroom from the closet is gone, and that whole back wall (i.e., the back wall of the closet that you can’t see in the picture above because it’s behind a closed door) has been enclosed and squared up by stealing room from the spacious hallway. And a new wall has been built to leave room behind it for a large shower on the left and a toilet area on the right.

That original bathroom is still there, but the doorway leading to that room has been drywalled over (or actually, it was in the area where the current shower is now, so the opening has been closed off with concrete board and a tiled wall).

All of the plumbing was disconnected from that original bathroom, so we don’t have to worry about pipes leaking with no way to get to them. That bathroom will be torn down eventually, but it’ll have to be done from the outside since there’s no way to access it from inside the house anymore.

And then on the right side where the bedroom door into the hallway used to be, this is now the view…

The wall on the right in the photo below is the wall that was straight ahead when walking through the hallway and into the bedroom. The wall on the left is the one separating the bedroom from what’s now the home gym.

And that view now looks like this…

The bedroom originally had two windows, but while we were still using it as a bedroom, we had the window replaced with a door for easy access to the back yard. But this was the original view.

And this is what that same angle looks like today…

The original bathroom and walk-in closet doors were on perpendicular walls.

The door to the original bathroom has been closed up and that area is now a shower. The original wall separating the closet from the bedroom was torn down, and that area is now the shower, with a new wall built to separate the shower and toilet area from the main part of the bathroom.

And again, this whole wall was moved back, borrowing space from the hallway. The doorway leading to the hallway was closed up, and a new doorway leading to the neighboring room (the home gym) was opened up.

So today, that same view looks like this…

So back to the floor plan. People who haven’t followed along on this process and my plans are often confused about why a master bathroom is connected to a home gym with an exterior door leading to the back yard. That confusion is understandable, especially when you notice that right now, there’s nothing labeled “master bedroom” on the current floor plan.

The ultimate goal is to tear down the original tiny master bathroom, as well as the huge sunroom, and to add on to the back of the house. The addition will include a new master bedroom, a laundry room, and a family/media room. Once that’s done, everything will make sense. It will eventually look like this…

And I think that once we have that addition built, we’ll still keep the doorway between the home gym and the master bathroom. It just seems so convenient to have access to the shower and bathroom directly from the home gym. But if we get to that point and decide that we no longer want that doorway, we’ll just close it up. But for now, that doorway provides the only interior access to the new bathroom.

So the process makes things a little unusual right now, and sometimes the process can be confusing. But in the end, things should make sense. 🙂

I’m very excited to be back to work on this room! I’m still waiting for deliveries for things I need, like the walnut veneer I ordered to build the vanities, and the shower fixture part that I’m missing and ordered about two months ago, and the 15-lite French door I ordered to go between the bathroom and home gym. With supply and shipping issues, remodeling these days takes a whole lot more patience and understanding than it used to. 🙂 But it’ll get there eventually!