Guest Bath - Contemporary Look

The 80’s was calling and wanted our guest bath back. No problem.
Removing the builder’s vanity was made difficult by the floor. The floor was installed after the vanity so the vanity was sunk down a little bit. The builders prefer to install flooring last so it’s not accidentally damaged by workers. This practice also restricts the builder to using a cabinet style vanity. We want to do it right. We will use a floating (wall mounted) vanity which means doing the whole floor first. If someone wants to change out the vanity someday, the floor will still be fine.

Removing the vinyl flooring is pretty easy but the staples and small nails used to hold down the luan (1/4 inch plywood) must be pulled manually – a tedious task. I put down 1/4 inch hardi-backer and we chose some gray porcelain tiles.

When installing a wall-mount vanity you need to install additional structure in the wall first. The vanity will have specific locations that must be tied to studs. Installing a 2×6 across all the studs horizontally will give you something solid to tie the vanity in to.

I installed a 2-button toilet (dual flush, 1,0 and 1.6 gal) – but you don’t need a picture of that.
To finish off, we put in a glass mosaic back splash.

Here’s a tip: When grouting a floor or back splash, the grout should be a background color. You don’t want grout to become a “feature” in your bath or kitchen. In this build, my floor grout was chosen to be gray, but for some reason it whitened after installation. I was not happy with that. I used a different brand for the back plash and you can see the difference – it just fades away and you don’t notice it.

Lighting: I replaced the traditional wall fixture over the sink with recessed, dimmable LED lights mounted in a small, hopefully not too obtrusive, soffit.

before: (after above)

-- Measure twice, cut once.