The House Next Door Guest Bathroom Updates
When we bought this house, the guest bathroom was massive and the master bathroom (which shared a wall with the guest bathroom) was tiny. We completely demolished the wall separating the two bathrooms (and demolished a coat closet too) and made the room one big blank slate to work from.
During demo, we found a couple of sheets of old wadded up newspaper behind the walls. The paper is The Indianapolis News, dated July 21, 1958. I got such a kick reading the articles and the advertisements. The cartoon in the picture below is a comic about Alaska becoming a state (Alaska's statehood was approved by Congress on July 7, 1958).
The guest bathroom had an original 1950's cast iron Cinderella (or Princess) Bathtub that we just didn't have the space for, but really wanted to re-home. We had it on Craigslist for weeks, and had a bunch of hits, but nothing ever panned out. Being cast iron, it weighed about a million pounds and would've been really hard to transport. I was bummed we had to demo it – which was a project itself!
We ended up splitting the room right down the middle to make two nearly identical sized bathrooms; one side the guest bathroom and one side the master bathroom.
Although we suspected it, we got bad news when we found a cast iron vent pipe behind one of the walls we demolished. It was right in the center of what would be our new guest bathroom, so we had to remove it and install a new one in a different location. Next, we roughed in plumbing and electrical, framed the space, installed a new bathtub, hung green board and cement board, and installed recessed lights and vanity lights. Then all the final pieces – paint, custom vanity with quartz countertops, ceramic hexagon tile floor, subway tile in the shower, new mirror....new room!
