Slowly Making Progress

When doing a renovation there are a couple things to keep in mind: 1) it will take longer than anticipated, and 2) it will cost more than budgeted.  Our little DIY bathroom redo is slowly making progress.  And I do mean slowly.  The problem?  Time.  With Mr. Man working all week and driving to Macon every Sunday to visit his father, that leaves us one day each week to get as much done as humanly possible.

Where We’re At
The demo is done and the new subfloor down.

The clawfoot tub has been refurbished—and looks fantastic thanks to Prestige Resurfacing here in Atlanta.  You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to find someone to come pick-up a tub.  I called several re-glazing companies, most of whom told me I had to bring the tub to them.  As I have no means of transporting a cast iron tub, I scratched them off my list.  One agreed to come pick the tub up for an additional $100, then informed me I’d have to have someone here to load it onto their truck.  Scratch.  And one actually told me that he thought it was overkill to have the exterior of the tub re-glazed.  What?!  Scratch, scratch, scratch. 

Finally, I called Prestige Resurfacing. Keith listened to what I wanted, picked up and delivered the finished tub, and was on the lower end of the quotes I got. When Keith picked it up we discovered stamped into the iron on the bottom of the tub the date of manufacture: 10-5-1903. We’re not sure the tub is original to the house, but it could be as the house was built in 1904.

The sink has arrived.  Okay, this is the second one.  The first seemed too small, and I didn’t feel it really worked with the table previously purchased to serve as the vanity.  If you don’t want standard, builder-grade products from Home Depot/Lowe’s you have to order everything, and I mean everything, online making it hard to tell if what you’re ordering is really going to work in the way you envision.  Anyway, I returned the first sink I had special ordered and got a new, bigger, better, bolder sink from DecoLav.


Sink #1

Sink #2

The fixtures for the clawfoot tub have arrived and are even better than anticipated.  We are trying to stay under $5000 for this renovation and the shower enclosure for the tub is a big expense, running upwards to $2000.  After a thorough web search I wound up buying the Telephone Shower Kit Conversion with tub filler, handheld shower and overhead shower, along with the shower enclosure from Signature Hardware.  We decided to go with chrome as this felt the most authentic to the house, and we are going for an update vintage look.

Next to arrive was the faucet for the sink.  Once again, the real thing did not measure up—not that the faucet isn’t gorgeous, because it is!  I still salivate when I see it and it’s even more beautiful in person—it just totally over powers the sink sitting atop our delicate French country table.  So back it’s going.  Vintage Tub & Bath was happy to exchange it and told me this is often the reason for return of this particular faucet.  I do love the bridge design though and am going with a smaller bridge faucet made by the same manufacturer of the shower kit; crossing my fingers that this one will be perfect.

First choice

Second choice

What’s Next
Plumbing is getting done this weekend.  Then we are on to drywall and tile.  Unfortunately we’re going to be out of town for a couple of weekends so we are looking at mid March before we’ll be ready to put everything in place.