upstairs bathroom reveal

I’m so excited to share photos of our upstairs bathroom! A little backstory on this overall project and upstairs renovation: we bought our house in fall 2018 and were quickly captivated by the 100-year-old house’s location and charm. The house had a lot of quirks and needed some love, but no major renovations or construction projects were required. The upstairs was two rooms, both with awkward layouts and poorly constructed closets. The upstairs also had a bit of an attic vibe – there were sloped ceilings on both sides and dormer windows on either end of the space (one of which was covered by a window A/C unit). It was dark up there and we really used the space for storage, as a ‘den’ and office, but mostly just for a guest room when family and friends came to visit. The space functioned fine, but didn’t look super great. And, the big inconvenience was that there was no bathroom upstairs…which leads me to share about our  house’s overall bathroom situation.

The downstairs of our house has two bathrooms – one off of our master and another in the hallway. Here’s some photos of our two downstairs bathrooms! The hall bathroom has a clawfoot tub (we took down the shower rods/shower head – it was such an eyesore), so basically – when people visit and they want/need to shower, they had to use our master bath. Totally fine, but definitely meant a lack of privacy for us, and left guests feeling a little awkward having to ask if it was an okay time to shower. We knew that we wanted to have a bathroom upstairs to make the upstairs a lot more usable and functional for guests, and also for ourselves! We love the idea of eventually turning the upstairs into a large kids space or a big master suite, so having a bathroom up there was key.

In the fall of 2019, we met with an architect to construct a plan to renovate our upstairs, with the main update being – A BATHROOM! We ended up hiring a different contractor to execute the work (Veler & Co based here in East Nashville) which kicked off at the end of November. The project was scoped to take 10 weeks and be done one week before Winnie was due. We were shocked that 1) everything got done on time and 2) the project cost remained within the original scope, because so many things went wrong! We live in a historic neighborhood, so we had to deal with regular city permitting plus approval from the historical commission on our plans. On top of that, SO many items arrived damaged, incorrect or late including the bathroom sink (cracked), bathtub (cracked), bath drain (wrong), sink faucet (wrong), bath faucet (wrong), bathroom flooring (cracked), and the bathroom mirror (cracked). PLUS we added on to the original plan last minute and decided to insulate the entire space and add three skylights – one you can see here in the bathroom!

We are thrilled, thrilled, thrilled with the way this bathroom turned out, and even more so with our overall upstairs space. I’ll share more photos from our renovation and what our new hybrid den/guest space/office/play room looks like, but for today – I  want to give you all the details on the new upstairs bathroom!

Here’s some progress photos!

Here’s the blueprints the architect drew up for the space.

The space was definitely not the easiest to work with; we didn’t want the bathroom to be too large as to not take up too much of the overall upstairs footprint, but we still wanted a bathtub. The slanted ceilings and walls and tight spacing constraints also presented a bit of a challenge design-wise, and our contractors and plumbers had to work their magic with some old house quirks, plumbing, and pipe issues. The room itself is about 8’4 x 5′.

There were SO many decisions to make when it came to picking everything out and honestly, it was pretty overwhelming for me! Grout colors?! Shower faucets?! Not something I  know a ton about or even really care about, but I’m glad I  put in the time to do a lot of research to find exactly what we wanted. We first picked out a bathtub and knew we wanted a deep soaker tub, although our options were fairly limited given the tight space. We ended up ordering this tub from Kohler and I’m so happy with it! The tile we picked as this bright white 4×16 inch subway tile. We decided to go with the bright white + matte black look, with pops of gold. I picked out this Delta matte black faucet with this Delta matte black shower head . The bathroom walls are painted Pure White by Sherwin Williams in the bathroom (and the entire second floor).

When it came to flooring, we couldn’t do real tile, because of the weight and how the tile would shift in our old house, causing more problems. Our contractor told us to pick a ‘luxury vinyl flooring’ option and candidly, I  couldn’t find a lot that didn’t look like wood. Since the rest of our upstairs was wood, I  really didn’t want to have faux wood in here, because it wouldn’t match perfectly and just felt off to me. Thankfully I  found this 12×24 inch marble vinyl flooring that I think looks super nice! It was a bit more expensive than other options, but definitely worth it, in my opinion!

Next up – the vanity! I ordered this white vanity on Black Friday, as well as a corresponding marble top sink. I knew I  wanted to swap the hardware – this is something we’ve done on so many things in our house — kitchen cabinets, our IKEA cabinets, dressers, and more! Basically, don’t let the way drawer pulls look deter you from buying something because it’s a super easy swap that can make a big impact. I  ordered these black and champagne gold drawer pulls and love the way they look! I picked a matte black sink faucet that goes well with the tub/shower faucet. The original mirror I  ordered arrived completely cracked, so we ended up changing our plans and using a gold mirror that was previously hanging on the back of our master bath door. Although it was a tight squeeze to fit the mirror in (because of the sloped walls), this mirror is *much* higher quality and actually looks way better than what I originally ordered. Here’s the mirror! On either side of the mirror, we have black and gold wall scones — super affordable and look really good from Poly & Bark. I ordered these matte black dooknobs and this matte black set for the toilet paper holder, towel bar, towel hooks, etc.

*Edited to add: I’ve had a lot of questions/comments about how we hung the shower curtain on the sloped ceiling. We found basically NOTHING online about how to do this, so Eric just came up with his own solution. It was a bit of a challenge with the sloped ceiling, but Eric ended up cutting a dowel to match the slope of the wall and used a regular shower curtain tension rod to hang. We then painted the dowel to match the wall color so it seamlessly blends into the wall. If you zoom in on the photos below, you can see more!

We are so, so happy with the way the bathroom turned out! And, even more happy the project was wrapped up before baby joined our family! I’m linking all the sources below and will be sharing more photos of the rest of our upstairs renovation very soon. Thanks for reading! xx

SOURCES

Tub/Shower:
Bathtub (Kohler)
Shower Head (Delta)
Bathtub Faucet (Delta)
Shower Tile

Vanity/Sink:
Vanity
Marble Sink
Sink Faucet (Delta)
Vanity Hardware

Other:
Flooring
Gold Mirror
Wall Sconces (Poly & Bark)
Matte Black Hardware Set (TP holder, towel bar, towel hooks, etc.)
Doorknob

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