It feels like a lifetime since I’ve posted here, but I’m back to share a room makeover as part of the Fall 2020 One Room Challenge. If you don’t know about the One Room Challenge, it’s a twice-yearly six week event where participants support each other in finishing one room. Anyone can join as a Guest Participant. This is actually my second One Room Challenge, after I created a nursery for my daughter Juniper. This time I’m sharing the makeover of our ugly main floor bathroom.

If you’ve just arrived at DIY in PDX via the ORC blog, welcome! I’m Rachel, and I blog about everything DIY, from fixing up my old house, to making accessories and decor, to growing plants and cooking. For the Fall 2020 One Room Challenge, I’m sharing the gut renovation of the most-used bathroom in my house.

First, I have two confessions:

1. This room is already done. Well, mostly. I still have some DIY projects and final touches to add. But I’ll be taking you through the week-by-week makeover for the ORC.
2. Even though I’m a big fan of DIY, we hired a contractor to renovate this bathroom, and he and his subcontractors did all of the work.

I have zero regrets about hiring professionals to take on this room. If we had tackled the project ourselves, our bathroom would have been out of commission for far longer. It’s our main bathroom, the only one accessible without creeping by a sleeping baby, and the only one with a shower. So we needed it to be usable again as quickly as possible. And I have no doubt that this bathroom turned out far better, in much less time, than it would have if we had tried to do it ourselves. Especially since most of our time is currently eaten up these days by chasing after a toddler.

Are you ready to see a hideous bathroom? I’ll start with the best part of the room: The door. It has a pretty charming little transom window. Everything goes downhill from here, though. You can see some of the ugliness inside through the window.

The bulky yellow/orange cabinets seem like they were probably repurposed from the kitchen at some point. They have the same doors as the kitchen cabinets. (Though the ones in the kitchen were stained much darker when we moved in, and now they’re white.)

They go all the way to the ceiling, and make the room feel WAY smaller. And though they offer a lot of storage, we actually didn’t use the top shelves because with the high ceilings, we couldn’t reach them without a stepladder. Plus, the deep shelves are pretty impractical, though the pull-out drawers I added helped a lot.

The tall cabinets flanking the door leave no spot for a light switch, either. There’s one outside the bathroom, which controls the hall light and the bathroom light, so you can’t turn on the bathroom light by itself.

You can see another issue here: The wall that was added so a shower/tub could go along this wall. It really chops up the bathroom and makes it feel much smaller. This room is almost square, but it doesn’t feel like it.

Next we come to this giant sink, complete with some very questionable tilework. Those big fields of grout are perfect for collecting dust and grime. Just what you want in a bathroom. With that sink plunked on top, it was clearly a DIY job. You know I love a DIY project, but not like this. It’s all way bigger than it needs to be for a small bathroom, and really lacking in usable counter space.

Thanks to this bathroom, I will never like a vessel sink. Even the most beautiful vessel sink in the world isn’t appealing to me. Sorry sinks, it’s not you, it’s me.

There’s no fan in the bathroom, so the steam is perfect for rusting the fixtures.

Another problem in here is that the window overlaps the tub. So you see that big brown hair clip on the shower wand hose? We kept the shower curtain liner clipped to it so that water wouldn’t get on the windowill. Classy!

Let’s get back to the tile, though. Not only is it very much not my taste, but it was very badly installed. Apparently whoever installed it didn’t believe in tile spacers or worrying about getting the tile flat against the wall, and let’s not even get started on the lack of any bullnose tile or edge pieces. Plus, I’m pretty sure the big tile was meant for floors (ironically, the floor tile is different), because it is quite textured. Those little nooks and crannies are perfect homes for mold and mildew in the shower.

You see that little inset tile on the left? If you’re wondering why it’s there, I have a story for you. (Warning: It’s kind of grisly.)

So when we first moved into this house, we decided to have a housewarming party. We invited a few neighbors we had met, including the guy who lived across the street. I’m going to call him “Ron.” (Not his real name.)

Our main familiarity with Ron was that he spent a lot of time in his garage, brewing beer while blasting heavy metal music. There was a lot of hosing out the garage, because I guess you need to keep it very clean to brew beer.

On the evening of the party, after Ron arrived he proceeded to make very good friends with a bottle of whiskey. When he asked one of our friends where our bathroom was, our friend suggested that maybe he should use his own across the street. The suggestion was rejected.

And that’s why we heard a crash in the bathroom a few minutes later. Another friend of ours knocked, and inquired whether Ron was okay. “I’m fine,” was the slurred reply. But when he didn’t come out, our friend ventured in.

And what he found was Ron, in a puddle of blood in the bathtub. It seems that he had been standing with his back to the tub, using the toilet, and passed out. He fell backwards into the tub, pulling the shower curtain down as he hit the back wall of tile, which used to have a ceramic soap dish attached.

You’ve heard of ceramic knives? When the ceramic soap dish was hit with Ron’s body, it broke, and sliced open his back like a knife.

Although Ron insisted otherwise, multiple people thought he needed stitches, and we decided to take him across the street so his wife could take him to the hospital. As my husband and another friend were helping him home, he muttered “This is bullshit!” about the situation.

His wife, awakened from her slumber, didn’t seem at all surprised to hear what had happened. We found out later that he needed 200 stitches on his back. He brought us some of his home-brewed beer to apologize a few days later.

The bathtub needed a thorough cleaning, and some minor surgery. I pried out what was left of the soap dish, and replaced it with a coordinating piece of tile I attached with caulk. Since I knew we wanted to remodel the bathroom ASAP and rip out all of the tile, I didn’t worry too much about how it looked.

But here we are, six years later, with my tile band-aid still in place. Even if I’d known it would take this long to get around to remodeling the bathroom, I don’t know what else I would have done, though.

Sordid history aside, here’s everything we want to change about this bathroom:

• Nuke all of the tile.
• Fix the window/tub situation.
• Remove the cabinets.
• Remove and replace the vanity and sink.
• Add bathtub niches for storage.
• Get rid of the need for a shower curtain.
• Replace the vanity light, and add a light switch inside the bathroom.

Basically, the room needs to be gutted. For years I’ve had a whole Pinterest board of bathroom inspiration, so I knew exactly what I wanted. If you follow me on Instagram, you might have caught a story here or there about the progress of this project, but otherwise I’ll leave you in suspense until next week. Demo time!