Once Upon a Bathroom

Our house has one bathroom.  This is not unusual for a downtown house of our size, but one bathroom in this day and age certainly is.  The upside—scrubbing only one toilet and shower!  But having only one bathroom means it had better combine function and style in one package—at least in my perfect world.  In a nutshell, our bathroom originally had neither.  In fact, our bathroom had some really odd things going on with it…check out the shower.

If you’re wondering why there is a shower curtain at the back of the shower (in addition to the front curtain), it’s to cover the wooden window that some genius plopped right in the middle of a place that should be totally private, not to mention waterproof!  To give the poor builder some credit, they probably were required to stick to a code that said if there was no fan, there had to be a window in its stead.  (By the way, I wonder if that’s how the word “instead” originated.  Hmm.  Pardon the English teacher digression.)  Whatever the case, we knew the window either had to be replaced by a more waterproof version or completely knocked out.  Since we weren’t all that confident in knocking out walls—or windows—we buzzed over to the Home Depot to check out the cost of a replacement window.  Turns out it would cost about $200 to replace the wooden window with a vinyl (aka waterproof), blurred (aka private) window, and that did not include installation—another area of concern.  But $200 isn’t exactly pocket change when you’re on a budget, and we weren’t totally convinced that the window wouldn’t warp at some point.  On top of that, if we ever are able to replace all the windows in our house, we’d like them to be uniform, and we definitely weren’t ready to commit to a window style at that point.

In the end, our friend told us that he could remove the window, and while he was at it, install special waterproof cement boards, Durock.  That brought a grin to our faces, because it meant we could get rid of the built-in soap bar holder (a mar in nearly every shower) and redo all of the tile starting with a clean slate.  Plus, we’d never have to worry about any weirdness with our neighbors knowing exactly when we happen to be showering....

And thus began the gutting of the bathroom—a happy day and the beginning of an epic journey.  Well, maybe not epic, but definitely long and dangerous full of adventures.  Does anyone else have a funky bathroom story to share?  Do Tell.