Our Small Bathroom Renovation on a Budget

Our small bathroom renovation on a budget was something that has been in the making for several years. Seriously, we thought this would have been done years ago. Low and behold, life happens and months turns into years.

Anyways, it is finally done. It only took a pandemic to get us to do this. I think this is the longest Andy has been home for a long time and our kids are older.

Andy & I excited that this project is finally done. We were able to work together on this, though he did do more work than I since I am still working.

Why did we do this? Well, it needed to be done. When we first moved in the house the bathroom worked for us. But after kids, we realized the vanity took too much space for a small bathroom. We needed a better toilet. And I did not like the vinyl flooring though it better than the putting carpet in the bathroom. (Yes our master bathroom has carpet! Not a good idea at all!)

So here is the before.

So things we did way before this flooring and a new toilet. We hired someone to do our flooring. I do not remember the cost but it was not expensive. However though, our flooring has one or two cracked tiles. It is still better than vinyl flooring.

When the flooring was being installed, we installed a new toilet (https://bit.ly/2WuzTpy – Wayfair). We actually purchased 2 actually for upstairs bathroom and our guest bath. One of the reason we picked this toilet is that had great flushing power aka less clogged toilets. I am happy to report these toilets have been clogged free for 2 years.

Here’s the after.

Picking a Paint Color

After patching up all the holes and wall deformities, we painted the walls first. Picking a color for the bathroom was not a as complicated as I thought it would be. I have a slight obsession with grays now. I did google gray bathrooms to see what it looked like so I could get an idea of if it would be a nice color. We chose Sherwin paints because my BIL is a painter among other things and recommends their paint. The color we used was Tinsmith.

Vanity/Countertop 

The biggest purchase was the vanity and countertop. This was actually the second one. We purchased a smaller vanity (24in) sometime after we redid the floor and replaced the toilet. The vanity was under $200. However, finding countertop that was not expensive was challenging.

So we decided to get another vanity (bigger than 24in) and spent the a little more money on new vanity and countertop, but would have spent a little less on just a vanity countertop when we compared prices on getting a vanity countertop for a 24in vanity. 

We decided to go with brush nickel fixtures since the vanity has brush nickel knobs and handles. It was not hard to find all brush nickel fixtures. We chose Moen’s spot resist fixtures since we had a similar fixture in our guest bathroom and liked the look. So, the hook, towel rack, faucet, and toilet paper holder are Caldwell by Moen. 

We spent a total of $1000 and vanity was bulk of it at $800. It took us us a total of 4 days to do the bathroom project. We love it and the kids love it.