Powder Room Renovation A.K.A. Le Tigre Bath, One Room Challenge, Week 2

If you’re new around here, thanks for stopping by and welcome! I am Lauren Caron, an interior designer and the founder of Studio Laloc, an interior design firm based in Seattle, Washington. On the side my husband and I are remodeling our home that I’ve given its own hashtag #ourseattlecraftsman. We’ve renovated our kitchen, scullery and now we’re on to the Powder Room. This is my first foray in participating in the One Room Challenge and I’m really excited to be a guest participant. I hope you stick around and follow along as we make our 70s bathroom into a modern day jewel box! If you missed last week’s post please check out it via the link below!

Week 1 Post

We’re in the second week of the One Room Challenge and I wanted to share our process of the demo and what got us to the point of turning a corner on progress. As I mentioned in the last post, we demoed the powder room at the same time as the scullery. We technically didn’t have to, it just made more sense for us to only get down and dirty one time. We also needed to move pipes to accommodate the new sink in the scullery, as well as the medicine cabinet we’d be installing in the powder. I decided to add a wall mounted faucet as you saw in the design brief, so that would also involve rerouting some plumbing.

My husband’s best impression of “Here’s Johnny!” from The Shining

The bathroom after demo

The Powder just after demolition, from the scullery.

When we removed the two layers (in some spots??) of the vinyl wood paneling, we discovered (as expected) that the walls underneath were covered in the pebble dash render. The render is the same as our house’s facade and was in these two rooms because they were originally the back porch of the house. My husband found during demo a business card from the interior designer of the house. We figure he must have been the acting architect of the day. I actually looked up the address listed on the card to see if the house was still there, and sadly it is not.

Also during demo, we found that the lumber used for the railing on the original porch was repurposed as the exterior wall’s framing. We believe these rooms were framed out in the 70s? And that’s based on the bathroom’s design. There aren’t any official permits documenting the addition in the tax statements, so no one truly knows.

The business card we found of the original designer

The original porch lumber used to frame out the powder

Once we removed the old framing Jack reframed that wall and replaced the window that was there with a new double hung, Marvin wood and steel clad window. We purchased a matching set from the signature collection when we renovated the scullery so that they would be symmetrical from the back view of the house. It’s intentionally a lot smaller than the original. For a reference, the new-ish back deck is directly behind the powder and the scullery. If you wanted to, you could easily see someone doing their business in the powder. So now that the window is smaller and set higher up on the wall, provides a bit more privacy.

Another major step that had to happen before we could add the sheet rock was to move the toilet a few inches closer to the wall. This is a decision we went back and forth on, should we or shouldn’t we…. We wanted to move it over because we needed more room between the toilet and the vanity. And shifting it over made the entire toilet centered between the wall and the vanity.

Jack installing the window

The new window installed!

The next step was to add all the insulation in to the walls. This room won’t have it’s own heat source unfortunately. It never did before and it was never too cold in the winter, and there wasn’t adequate insulation then. We went back and forth on adding NuHeat heated floors, but that would require additional electrical work and a little more complicated tile install, so we decided that it wasn’t necessary. In a different world, I’d probably add it, but in our reality it made the nice to have, not need to have list.

Adding insulation

Ceiling insulation going up!

Let’s change gears to plumbing now! I didn’t take too many photos of the plumbing work, I have videos that I can share in stories on instagram. For a background of what needed to happen, we needed to shift the pipes down to accommodate the placement of the vanity cabinet with the wall mounted faucet. Also, though this doesn’t have much to do with the powder room, we added an extra extension to accommodate the new sink in the scullery.

I have a feeling a lot of you are asking if Jack is doing all the work! Well, for these steps it was mostly him. He loves to do demo and has it down. I leave all the grunt work up to him! I am more here for the design, window treatments, paint and finishing work.

THE TO DO LIST

• Demo Bathroom - Complete

• Remove Pebble Dash from Walls - Complete

• Reset plumbing to accommodate new fixtures and design - Complete

• shift toilet waste pipe over 3” - Complete

• Set electrical placement of overhead light fixture, wall sconce, plugs and switches - Complete

• Remove existing window and swap with new - Complete

• Create inset for medicine cabinet - Complete

• Install insulation - Complete

• Sheet rock walls and ceilings

• Mount tongue and groove beadboard paneling

• Set trim around window

• Mud seams and smooth coat over sheet rock

• Fill nail holes in beadboard

• Prime walls & ceiling

• Order paint

• Finalize window treatments & order fabric

• Install floor tiles

• Install baseboards and trim

• Paint paneling, trim & ceiling

• Install medicine cabinet

• Wallpaper above paneling

• Modify vanity cabinet drawers to accommodate sink & plumbing

• Install plumbing fixtures

• Install countertop and backsplash

• Install hardware fixtures - toilet paper holders, towel holders, etc.

• Photograph room

That’s it for this week’s post. I’m planning to share some of the videos we took during the demo over on instagram. So make sure to check those out. Next week we’ll be discussing the walls on and sharing some images of the tongue and groove pre-prime and paint. Then that will put us up to where we currently are. Do not forget to check out the other One Room Challenge participants by looking on the ORC website! There is apparently a record of 600 guest participants this year!?