Cape Cod in Portland #5: downstairs bathroom

Wow, it’s been 256 days since I last made a blog entry here. To busy doing projects and getting ready for baby #2 I guess. I’ll show some work I did on the downstairs bathroom in this entry. The goal was to update the bathroom into something that matched the cape cod style of the house more closely.

Let’s see… this bathroom project was started a couple years ago shortly after the holidays. Next is a shot looking into the bathroom from the entrance. There is a long counter and oak cabinets with some ugly lights on the wall. Wallpaper covered all the walls except where the shower tiles are. The linoleum always looked dirty no matter how hard we tried to clean it.

Here another before shot. Notice the beautiful brown toilet.

The wallpaper came off fairly quickly with no major issues. I can’t handle the idea of ever painting over the stuff.

The shower tiles ended up staying. They were in excellent shape and matched the final colors we had planned.

The cabinets had to go. A pedestil sink would soon replace them. There were a couple layers of linoleum and the original tile which was in decent shape but cut out in a few spots and it would have been a terrible time getting all the linoleum adhesive removed. The small hole in the floor is a laundry chute down to the basement laundyroom. I ended up moving this to the right a foot or so as part of the plan for a small piece of furniture to act as a laundry chute opening. The all metal tub was in great shape and also stayed.

The next photo was after fairly significant progress was made. I must have been on a roll and forgot to take pictures. The subfloor is now covered with some plywood by this point and the trim work is completed. The plaster walls have a little orange peel texture on them now. The trimwork and wainscoting were by farm my favorite part of the project. The wainscoting is made from birch plywood covering the walls, MDF for the plate rail and horizontal pieces, and fir for the vertical pieces that create the rectangle sections. Crown moulding was also added around the room too balance out the wainscoting. Everything was puttied and primed to prevent any little nooks and crannies from trapping moisture.

I’ll finish up the bathroom project in the next posting. Thanks for checking it out.