Need some advice/input for bathroom remodel Warning icky photo.

[Anarchy82]

Quote:
X2


Your best bet is to pull down the walls and ceiling in the bathroom. Make sure the damage is not worse then thought. VENT the bathroom vent. Install green board on your walls. You can do glass block, but if you do make sure you ran the vent.
As long as you install green board and get a bathroom paint, you don't have to go all the way up to the ceiling with tile if you do not want.

The curtain over the window that was said by CityGirlintheCountry is a great idea also.

I know some people say to just cover over a window, and people do it. But as a contractor, I can not recommend doing that. You will not know until it is too late if you have a leak in the window. A window is meant to be able to breathe from both sides. When blocked from one side you can start a moisture problem which then can leed to mold and mildew problems.

 

[Skittlez]

Thanks for all the advise guys! I would love to gut the whole room, but not sure if I have the money or stamina for it. I will if I have to though. I do have a stool and a cement shower in the basement we can use while I tear into the main bath. I am really leaning toward the glass block for the window. I like the natural light. The window is not really see through anymore. I have hard water and there is a pretty good layer of scale on the window.

I would like tile, I figure I only need about 650 tiles to do the job. The wall on the right is a shared wall with my sons bedroom. I can't really take space from the bedroom it is only 9x11 and my son is cramped as is. The left wall shares a wall with the stairs that go up. I hate doing bathrooms. I have a pedestal sink to go in already. I have already put in the smallest stool I could find. I only have 2" in between the stool and tub. Not much room to work with. I thought about taking out the tub and going with a walk in shower, but I probably will just have the tub refinished.

The problem with the tub is the walls on the left and right actually sit on the tub. I have never seen that before. I am not sure they can properly refinish the tub because of the walls. If I tile, I would need to put up cement board and I am not sure if that would be thicker then what is already up.

The vent should be fairly easy to reroute. I can route it out the back wall above the window. Kind of like a dryer vent.

The bathroom is the last room in the house to be done and I know it is going to be a nightmare.

Anybody is welcome to come and practice their skills

 

[Skittlez]

Looks similar to my bathroom. There is a window inside my tub as well.

This is what it looked like when I started-


After I pulled the tile board off the walls-


At the end of the remodel-


I had the tub enclosure retiled and the tub re-porcelained. I pulled off the old tile board and put up beadboard and molding. I replaced the medicine cabinet and the lights over the sink. The whole deal got painted (with semigloss on the bottom to make it easier to clean). The toilet and sink came with the house. The space is really small. The pedestal sink makes it feel bigger.

To deal with the window I went and found a pretty vinyl shower curtain. I put a rod up at the ceiling and hug the shower curtain over the window. It keeps the water off the wood and blocks the view of the neighbors. I did paint the window frame with a couple of coats of semi-gloss paint as well. At some point I will have all the windows replaced. For now this system works great.

Good luck. Bathroom remodels are great once they are done.

Yours turn out very nice. How long did it take?

Had that same set up when we lived on the farm. Had to use marine outdoor paint for our window. Sometimes a house didn't have a bathroom to begin with and found a small room to install an indoor bathroom.

Tile would be your BEST bet. Wished I had done that with my bathroom. Right now I'm dealing with some funky brown mold (or it could be somehting else) up above the ceiling of our shower. We dont have a vent nor could install one, so we deal with it by cracking the bathroom door when we take our hot showers and ope it up when we are finished.

As for covering up the window with shower stall. Yep you can do it! We did it for our kitchen which I wanted a gallery type and one window HAD to be done. Since it was a brick house, I had to put white foam board behind that window, caulk it inside the window and outside of the window, and dry walled it up. In order not to make it look crudy, I put a frosted glass storm windows on it. It was lovely! You can even make shutters to cover up the flaw and a flower box underneath the window! Never had a leak or water seepage coming in at all from that window. So this is what it is layered from outside to inside....frosted glass storm windows, original window panes and set up (tear NOTHING out!), white foamboard, about 4 to 5 inches thick for the entire window opening, put insulations in the cracks or on the outside of the window frame, plastic wrap and then drywall it up.

This is our bathroom.


this is our kitchen. The window we covered up, is directly above the sink and as tall as the cabinets.

You can't even tell there was a window above the sink. Do you have any issues with moisture from the covered window? My window is on an outside wall, I think it would cause problems if I couldn't find siding to patch the outside.​

 

[CityGirlintheCountry]

Skittlez- I had a guy come do the tile work for me. It took him two days to complete the tub. The bathtub guys came out and spent most of one day stripping the tub and refinishing it. I did all the rest. It, of course, took about four times as long as I thought it would take. The demolition part was pretty speedy. I pulled out the old medicine cabinet fairly easily once I figured out where it was screwed in. The lights just sort of twisted off. Pulling off the tile board was nasty, but not hard.

Putting everything back took longer. I started by sanding and painting the top. It took half a day. The bead board/trim install took another couple of days. There was some patching to do of the wall by the tub where water had gotten behind the tile board. Most of that beadboard was pre-painted before installation. I did a final coat once everything was in place just to clean it up. The light fixtures took a while. The house is old and the wiring is not color coded. There was an impossible number of wires back there. It took a while to figure out what was what and get the new fixtures wired to the right cables. The new medicine cabinet was bigger than the old one, so that took the better part of an afternoon to fit into the hole.

The main part of the bathroom took a couple of weeks to get it all in place. I wasn't working on it all day every day. It was a meandering sort of process. Once I got it all done I decided to do crown molding. There was a wallpaper border around the top that I couldn't get off. You could see the seam where I painted over it. I ended up putting molding over that edge. It looks pretty cool actually, despite being a ginormous pain to do. Angles are no fun.

It was a pain to have the bathroom messed up for so long, but it was so nasty before the remodel that it was worth it. It makes me really happy now.

 

[cravenchx]

Quote:
Fantastic job.
Why did the original builders think
a window in the shower/tub was a good idea?
Living in an older home does have its problems.
But, man I am impressed with your do over!
Are you for hire?

 

[CityGirlintheCountry]

Quote:
Thanks!

I think the house originally had a tub, but no shower. I have actually seen a number of old houses with a window over the tub. I'm not exactly sure where the original bathroom was in this house. I know it had an outhouse until sometime in the 60s. The current bathroom was added around 1963 (if the newspapers I found stuffed in the wall are any indication). I'm guessing the window was there and they just added the shower part after the fact.

Of course, given all the other random stuff that was done to this house over the years it is possible that they did it on purpose.

 

[Skittlez]

Thanks Citygirl. I know the house was built in 1940, but I have not found where a possible out house was. I did find the old coal pit and a foundation to an old building in the back yard. I am thinking this will take me about a month. I am still debating whether to do it now or wait until late spring when the weather is warm. These old houses have cans of worms all over. Nothing goes smooth and easy. We have found some interesting things in the heat vents though.