One Room Challenge Week 2 Bathroom Progress: Demo, Electrical, Plumbing & Drywall

I’m back this week with progress to share on the bathroom for the One Room Challenge! We spent a long time figuring out the details of electrical, plumbing and tile layout to get where we are today. While I enjoy all of the details, drawings and planning it takes to get to actually drywalling the room, we are so excited to move past the drywall stage and onto the more transformative parts of the renovation.

If you missed the before photos & design plan from last week you can read up on that here. As a reminder, here is the new layout for the bathroom:

Tyler demo’d the bathroom down to the studs. This room (and the adjoining laundry room) was at one time a covered porch that previous owners converted into a bathroom. We’ve always had issues in here with leaky plumbing & water damage so it felt good to open it all up and find where the problems were coming from.

We got going on the electrical and plumbing which was fairly straightforward the the exception of figuring out the shower valve: as you can see in the design rendering, the shower valve is on the opposite wall of the shower head because I wanted to be able to turn the water on without getting hit by water. There were lots of mixed reviews on whether or not this was possible – but we ended up figuring it out and I’m really happy about this detail.

Ty ended up reinforcing the floor joists and laid all new subfloor & insulation (we also got going on installing the shower pan – more on that in the coming weeks). The pocket door also went in which allowed us to maximize the space in this room.

In hindsight, we would’ve hired this drywall job out. It’s a small space, but because it’s small (with lots of corners) it took more time on the finishing end. But between having a baby, our regular jobs, and a fun/busy summer, Ty was able to get all of this done himself and I’m so proud of the work he did!