Another Christmas, another bathroom remodel. This time it was the hall bath, and it was a total gut job. Walls, ceiling, and floor. New tub, new toilet, and new sink. This bathroom had a lowered ceiling with 4 foot tube fluorescent lights, very dated and not practical if you are tall. The new bath has a deep soaking tub, a heated ceramic tile floor, ceramic tiles around the tub, a granite vanity top, better lights, a better vent, and a toilet seat lid that has a slow close feature; just drop it and it slowly closes itself.
This was the worst project ever. I have sworn to never remodel anything ever again. We’ll see how long that lasts. I was going to list all the things that went wrong, but then thought it would be shorter to list the things that went right. Nothing. I took vacation from work between Christmas and New Year’s. I thought I’d start a couple of weekends early so I didn’t have to work all day every day over the vacation. I wanted to minimize my need to rush to get things done. It didn’t quite work out that way. We ordered the new tub in November. It was supposed to be delivered the day after Thanksgiving. It was a week late. And it had two huge cracks in it, clearly not able to hold water, its main purpose. Back to the store to reorder another. Two weeks later, we get the new tub.
I won’t go into too much detail about all the other stuff that went wrong, no one wants to hear that. It would just have been nice to open a box or package and install something without having to modify something else to get the product installed. One example was the vanity. The pipes that came out of the wall kept the drawer from closing, so I had to remove the shutoff valve, cut the pipe shorter and install a new valve. When I was thinking about things that went right, I thought the vanity top went in nice. Well, that’s true, but it was the second vanity top we had. The first one looked bad (mistakenly relied on the picture on the website), so we returned it and got a different type (went with granite). Installing the wall tile wasn’t too bad (time consuming), but grouting was a big old mess (more grout in the tub than in between the tiles). I wasn’t going to replace the toilet because the old one was good and fairly new. However I screwed up cutting the floor tile around the closet flange (toilet drain). It really didn’t look wrong until I re-installed the toilet. The old toilet’s base tapered in the back, so there was a big gap between the tile and the toilet. The choices were to chisel out the bad tile and cut a new tile, or buy a new toilet. I opted for a new toilet because the way things were going, I would have accidentally broken more than one tile.
Before pictures:
Here’s the bathroom before construction. The old tub had scratches, the floor was worn vinyl tile, and of course the ceiling was too low. The old vanity and mirror were in good shape so we sold them on craigslist. 
In progress:
We rented a drywall lift to do the ceiling. Worth every penny. 
After pictures:
Finally it is done! 
