Master Bathroom Renovation | Tile

Where to start?! When we purchased our home we knew the master bathroom had some urgent  significant issues that needed to be addressed right away. During the inspection a shower leak was discovered. The leak appeared to have been active for years, maybe even close to a decade. As a result, the bathroom floor was literally rotted out and sinking in and resting on the plumbing underneath the house! Not good. And not a cheap fix either. But we wanted the home bad enough that we took on the renovation and although it was extremely stressful at the time (we’ve learned we are just not renovation people) I am so happy with the bathroom updates.

Alright, so enough backstory! I have a lot to cover in detail so I’m going to break the projects up into a few separate posts. Feel free to pass over this series if bathroom renovations aren’t your thing!

Let’s dive in, shall we? A few BEFORE pictures so you can see what we were working with.

The first step in the renovation process was removing the floor. I actually didn’t mind the original tile in the bathroom but it had to go so we could replace the flooring and the sub-flooring. Once the tile was ripped up we then demolished the flooring.

Poof — in one afternoon the floor to our bathroom was GONE. You could literally see right into our crawl space at one point. We also discovered that the floor joist wasn’t sufficient for the weight of our bathroom so we had to replace it with a new one. This was actually the most expensive part of the renovation. Once the floor had the correct support we then laid new and improved sub-flooring and then new flooring.

After the demo was complete it was time to begin tiling. To keep the progress moving quickly we had to find tile that was in stock and ready for immediate delivery. Well, apparently that is not how tile shops operate, which we learned after taking a half day off of work to trek all over town to various tile shops. After awhile it all started to look the same, the price tag had me in hives and the delivery timing was just not feasible to keep the project on track.

I carried these two tile inspiration pictures with me everywhere we shopped…

Dreamy, right?

Our last tile shop of the day was Lowes, which I had very low expectations going in to. However, I was quite impressed with the tile selection and grabbed a sample of Marble look-alike porcelain tile to bring home and compare to the other two tile contenders. Naturally, I then called an emergency meeting with my best friends to come over and look at my tile and pick their favorite. And because they are all super awesome, they did just that (don’t worry, I provided mimosas in thanks)! In pictures they loved #2 (middle) best, but in person they loved #1 (top) the most! Then I asked Instagram (duh!) which tile y’all liked best and received SO many helpful responses. One commenter said she went with a similar white marble tile (pictured at the bottom) and now sees a corporate lobby building every time she walks into her bathroom. LOL. After she said that, I couldn’t unsee it either. And tons of other commenters warned me that if we went too light the floor would show every single hair and speck of dust! I can always count on my Insta-friends! The advice and votes continued to roll in…

And the top tile won by a landslide, which was funny because the middle tile was actually my favorite, but of course the most expensive. Our final two contenders were priced at $1.49 sq ft versus $6.99 sq ft which was a ginormous difference in cost. And since we had budgeted zero dollars for a bathroom renovation we went with the popular, cost saving tile…

Honestly, I couldn’t be happier. We didn’t even have to cut the tile because there was an option to order it in 12×24, which is the size we wanted. We also went with silver grout.

On installation day the tile guy asked me which pattern I wanted to lay the tile in. I hadn’t even thought about a pattern so I asked him to lay out a few options. Once the samples were ready Matt and I both agreed that the herringbone pattern was perfect so we went with that.

And that wraps up the flooring! On to the shower…