The Great Pandemic Bathroom Remodel
Started: 2020-08-05 19:58:00
Submitted: 2020-08-05 22:13:47
Visibility: World-readable
In which the intrepid narrator shows off before-and-after pictures of his pandemic bathroom remodel, and contemplates the legacy of the project
I wrapped up The Great Pandemic Bathroom Remodel less than forty-eight hours before moving out of the house, so I didn't have much time to enjoy the finished bathroom. (I did, at least, get to use the shower for a week.) By the time I was done, the bathroom looked almost totally different: I had replaced the shower entirely and redone the floor; and we had the rest of the tile refinished in a glossy white. (I also changed the lights above the mirror, but those are barely visible in these pictures.)
The only thing that remained was the tub spout, because I wasn't confident I could get a spout long enough to reach over the edge of the tub, and I was afraid of making a mess with the tile and the plumbing to connect the tub spout under the countertop. (Given everything else I did in the bathroom I probably could have managed to make it look good, but I didn't have any time to spare in the end.)
My only real complaint about the outcome is that the new bathroom is oppressively white. (It got worse after I took these pictures when we had the entire house painted with the current trendy off-white paint color (Benjamin Moore White Dove, I'm told).) If I had stayed in the house I would have wanted a different color, but white is versatile and generic so white we choose.
I ended up spending around $3.5k on the materials and tools for the project, not counting my time. In an alternate universe in which we had gotten a contractor to do the work for us we would have paid that plus their labor.
The project absorbed virtually all of my otherwise-unscheduled time for six weeks (and encroached on my work time; I took a couple of days off to work on the project). I don't have a clear estimate on how much time I really spent, but a very-rough back-of-the-envelope calculation (four hours a day on the weekend, ten hours a week during the weekdays) gives 120 hours. (I'm 80% confident this is on the low end.)
The biggest question — the counter-factual question I will never know the answer to — is whether this whole project was really worth it. It will probably help our house get a better price because fewer people will be scared away by the obvious water damage around the shower. But I don't know how big that impact will be (and, as I'm writing this, we're about to list our house at a price that's 6% less than what we paid for it, let alone what we paid installing carpet and updating the house or fixing the roof or painting the house after we left, and I don't know if we're making the right decisions around the sunk costs in the house).
But whatever happens I'm still proud of the work I did to remodel my bathroom, by myself, in the middle of a global pandemic. This project was an order of magnitude bigger than any home-repair project I've previously undertaken; any one piece of the project was equivalent to any earlier project. I bought a bunch of new power tools, and blades and drill bits (and two diamond hole saws). (I'm no longer scared by my circular saw, but I still have a healthy respect for it.) I laid tile and flooring, created a partition wall where none existed, soldered plumbing, and painted baseboards — and, in the end, I signed my name on the work so maybe someone will see it, someday.
