A Working 1st-floor Bathroom

2025/01/04: (now updated -- click on the photos to see a larger image)

My sister, Karen, came over from Indiana for a week to goad me into getting some work done on my house.  One of our projects was getting the downstairs bath operational again.  I still have some detail finish work to do, including re-surfacing the tub. This is what the room looked like as of New Year's Day -- 

This bathroom had been a "junk room" for many years, ever since one winter day when a cold draft coming through gaps in the old dry-stone foundation froze the supply line to the toilet and caused the shut-off valve to disconnect from the line. Fortunately, I was home when it thawed, and so I was able to shut off the water in the basement before too much flooding occurred.

Yes, I used a windowed door for this room -- I wanted more natural light to be able to reach the interior/central hall from which one accesses the foyer, the living room, this bath, the "front room", and the stairway.

You might notice the two rust-stains on the door-jamb to the left (fortunately, they will be hidden under the door-stop trim work).  That is from a massive water-damage event several years ago when the supply-line to one of the sinks in the second-floor master bath froze and burst due to raccoons getting into the lower attic and ripping out a lot of insulation.  I was out of town when it thawed (at the time, I worked a 2+ hour drive from home) -- every room in the house, but two, suffered water damage.

 

EDIT 2025/04/ 12:

The downstairs bath is nearly complete, just a few trim pieces to cut and install, and a bit of the woodwork to stain and finish.

Here is the bathtub, refinished both inside and out, The outer refinishing involved striping multiple payers of old, probably lead-based, paint, and then applying primer and enamel paint.  While the directions for the refinishing kit (for the inside) say that that it can be applied with a brush, we found that we got a much better result by using small rollers (and the work went much faster).

I may someday look into finding a more decorative faucet for the tub, but for now this functional one is fine.

As mentioned above, the door into this bathroom is a "french" windowed door.  On the inside is mounted a sheet of plexiglass with with a decorative film applied to it. I wish the photo did it justice. I'm really satisfied with how it turned out, especially when the door is viewed from outside the room.

In the corner, behind the door, is a cheap kitchen wall cabinet mounted atop the baseboard, for linens and such.  We continued the wainscoting around the side of the cabinet (thus hiding the particleboard side ... as I said, it's a cheap cabinet).  I built the cabinet's countertop from strips of oak flooring glued together.

To the right of the above photo, you can just see the edge of one of the two in-the-mall shelving units we built. They're to the same design as the open-shelf spice cabinet I built for the kitchen (as seen below).

 

This photo is from the doorway, toward the outside wall.