Bathroom: From Eww to Elegant

My favorite projects are taking something from gross to glorious.  This client has an early 1900's home in downtown La Grange, TX that has some very beautiful original characteristics, but was in dire need of a master bath overhaul.  

The home owner's largest issue was the fact that there was no dedicated master bathroom.  The one bathroom downstairs was off a hallway that went between the master bedroom and a guest bedroom.  The second issue was that the husband needed his walk in shower and wife needed a beautiful claw foot tub and currently there just was not any room for both.  The third issue was that the new homeowners wouldn't even use the bathroom because it looked like someone was murdered in it. (see before picture)

So I went to the drawing board.  The hall wall had to go.  The master closet needed to move over.  The door needed to be a wall...and the little niche underneath the stair way which housed the tank water heater needed to be re-thought.  Being that the client wanted a huge tub, we decided to upgrade them with a tankless water heater so that they would never run out of hot water.  Then we decided to move the location of the tankless to the garage so that we could free up the space underneath the stairs--then we had a space for their walk in shower.

Once we started swinging the hammer and getting the old stuff out of the way, we realized that their current 8 foot ceilings could become 11 foot ceilings by moving some plumbing, hvac and electrical wires.  We had to add a beam in the middle of the bathroom to hold up the second floor and had the idea to wrap the beam in some of the old shiplap that we took from the walls.  We put in some bead board on the ceiling and nailed up some crown molding to keep the trim looking consistent with the rest of the house.

We decided to use a 1 inch hex tile in the shower with classic 3x6 white subway tile.  On the floor of the bathroom we wanted to go with some more curves to add a bit of femininity to the masculine strait lines of the shower.  A marble topped vanity and classic trimmed mirror added some nice flair.  The husband finally conceded to the price tag of his wife's fantasy tub which creates the perfect center piece for the bathroom and ties the bathroom perfectly into its original time period.

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