This project involved taking everything down to the studs and starting over.
The existing shower that was there leaked, which meant the basement floor flooded if you tried to use it.
When we had a company come in to install a new septic pump (as we were doing the demo on the bathroom), they found that the shower drain was full of sand and they had to clean the lines out.
Apparently we were lucky that things didn’t back up into the house.
Probably a good thing we caught that before we went any further with the bathroom
Once the demo was done, I added a bathroom fan and vented it outside (there was no bathroom fan before), and installed a proper frost free hose bib and water supply to an outside faucet.
Originally, they had a sink to the right hand side of the door, but I ended up changing it to a regular cabinet (so I built a new cabinet & epoxy countertop) and moved the sink to the left hand side.
They had installed a sink in the room to the left of the bathroom, so I just used the water supply lines that were already there when I moved the location of the sink.
Once I’d finished with the plumbing, I hung all the drywall, mudded, taped and sanded everything before covering everything with 2 coats of primer and 2 coats of paint.
With that out of the way, I installed a new shower – including a new section of drain pipe that led out to the septic tank.
After that, it was time for tile.
Once that was done, I put down insulated subfloor (we ended up installing insulated subfloor throughout most of the basement), vinyl plank flooring, installed a new toilet and door and then did all the baseboards and door trim.
Then I built a cabinet to fit the space using plywood.
Then I made an epoxy countertop, and installed the cabinet and soft close door hardware.
After that, I did a simple tile backsplash and installed mirror above the sink.
And that we hung some art to hide the access to the water lines to finished everything off.
Given that the temperatures can drop to -40 degrees Celsius or lower in winter, I wanted to make sure that I could access at least some of the water supply lines in case they froze and I needed to get at them – rather than having to tear through and redo the drywall again.
And if I hadn’t told you, you’d never know.
