2 Months of Kyle's Life: Finishing the Basement Bathroom

With my parents living with us temporarily, we chose to finish the unfinished bathroom in our basement. This way they have their own bathroom, plus now we have an official guest bath for visitors.

Let me start by telling you how much work Kyle put into this bathroom. To save on costs, we chose to do the work ourselves. Or, mostly, Kyle did the work himself. Kyle spent a solid two months working on this project. Every night after work, he came home, ate a quick dinner, and worked on the bathroom until 10 or 11 pm. Sometimes later. By every night, I mean, every night. And every Saturday. He put in a lot of time and effort. And now he is exhausted and says he won't ever do that again. We are both sick of Home Depot. You know you've been there to many times when the cashiers begin to recognize you (this happened to Kyle). And when you start to know the people working at the store, what their names are, who works in what departments, and who is most helpful.

Enough talk. Let's get down to the nitty gritty.

Here is what we started with:

The rough in plumbing was done on the bathroom. But the layout was weird. So, Kyle and coworker/friend Jake, spent a Saturday busting up concrete and moving around pipes and vents.

Then Kyle framed the bathroom, installed the shower, and ran the waterlines into the bathroom. (Jake helped with part of the the waterlines as well.)

Once the waterlines were in place, it was time for drywall. Wow was that a lot of work. And took a long time. Two weeks, just for drywall. The repeated layers of mudding and sanding was a lot of work.

Sanding the mudding smooth was messy. 

Once the drywall was done (hooray!) it was time to prime. It was at this point that it really started to look like a room.

After priming came painting. We chose to paint the room gray. There are so many shades of gray. It is ridiculous! Warm gray, cool gray, green gray, blue gray... I love gray on the walls, but wow, it was hard to choose one to paint with.

After painting, Kyle installed all of the fixtures and it really became a bathroom!

I'm not going to lie, it really was fun going shopping and picking out everything to go into the bathroom. I felt like I was always at the store picking something up for the bathroom. Life was crazy for a couple of months. But, we got through it and now we have a guest bathroom. And now Kyle can relax. No more projects for a little while. And definitely none as large of a scale as this one.

We love how it turned out. I think he did a fantastic job! Now if only the rest of our house looked like this...

Here it is again, before and after: