Solely personal

Guest bathroom renovations (before and after)

In December 2015 I bought the Lake Shore Drive apartment I’d been living in for three years. It’s a great space, in a location I love, with killer views, but it needs some work. So for 2016 I am going to be having fun customizing it and upgrading it as I find the money, the energy, and the parts.

I decided to do the guest bathroom first because everybody said it just needed to be nuked. With the help of my trusty contractor, that’s what we did. Amazingly, he was able to get this done in just a few weeks and in time for the Apex Airways party.

It’s not completely done — I still have a glass shower door and some shower trim to order — but that’s coming soon. It’s done enough that I wanted to show it off now.

Welcome to the guest bathroom, mostly original, vintage 1965 materials.
And here is the new version. I wanted to be crisp, very bright, and clean. Clean. My God, clean. It took a gut renovation to get this bathroom clean.
Here’s the old sink. This has to be 1990’s maybe. What’s with the mystery plastic panels on the wall? What is that hiding…?
New sink. I like the fact that it is flat and basically edgeless, which maximizes usable space.
Chris and I both scrubbed and scrubbed that toilet. Nothing was going to get it clean looking.
Here is the new one. Nothing fancy, but it’s closed for modesty’s sake.
Notice the lip at the ceiling level. This tended to make it seem even darker than it was.
Now the light is halogen, and it’s centered. And it makes the glass glow.
Actually the shower basin was a slightly jazzy terrazzo-like material. I don’t know what you call it but it was probably cool in 1965. The shower door was never cool. And you couldn’t get it clean.
Here’s the new version. Ahh.
Chris and I tried and tried and tried. I have to say it was three times worse with my former roommate, who didn’t care. But this was the scariest part of my home.
And now. I am going to see that it gets professionally cleaned so that nothing… like… that… happens again.
Yeah, that’s three scary 1965 switches and an ungrounded outlet.
I’m obsessed with dim technology. I had to pay extra to get this put in because this particular wall, while solid and plaster, is really thin. The box pretty much fills the entire wall.
We called this the “toaster oven.” No, it’s not really an exhaust fan… it’s a heater with a fan connected to it. It’s 11pm. Do you know where your children are? Could they have been incinerated in their bathroom?
Glowing, soft when needed, and it’s clean.
Swear to God this is not fifty years of dirt. The ventilation in this building does allow grates to attract dirt. Still, we couldn’t clean it all off.
So, we got it cleaned and replaced. This is so much less threatening.
So there you have it. That was before…
…and this is after.

By the way. The coolest thing, to me, isn’t even in these pictures. If you look inside the medicine cabinet, there are outlets in there! I have never seen this. But it makes sense. If you want to charge stuff, do it in there. No outlets hanging around by the sink. (The old bathroom had no outlet by the sink, which was an annoyance supreme.)

The next project is the master bathroom.