dream bathroom makeover

View the full dream bathroom reno reveal video here

We have one bathroom on our upper floor, and I refused to have it look like this:

To see the full video step-by-step process, visit my Instagram page and click on the “Bathroom” highlight bubble.

So the whole thing had to go. Once the demolition was complete, here is what the space looked like.

Having a small baby at the time – an 8-month-old – I knew we had a need for both a shower and a tub, however, I really don’t like the look of the alcove-style tubs like in the ‘before’ photo. They seem super outdated, and if we’ve got the one bathroom upstairs, we’ve got to make it count! I decided to put in a standalone bathtub in the shower area to make it like a little wet room. A bunch of trades told me I was crazy, but I stuck to my vision and I’m in love with how it turned out. And yes, it’s easy enough to get behind there and clean 😊

We also thought a super luxury touch would be to have heating floors. So once the membrane went down, I strung the wire where I thought there would be the most foot traffic for beautifully toasty floors!

I wanted a black & concrete-looking bathroom. I originally wanted to microcement the full bathroom, but just to microcement the shower alone was going to cost upwards of $10k, and that’s just not money that would be well-spent in my opinion. I may still microcement the rest of the bathroom myself to have it blend with the shower (more on that later), but I didn’t want to risk it just with the shower area because I didn’t want to risk any potential water leaks.

So we used this DensShield cement boarding to cover the walls of the shower and added another layer of waterproofing for good measure before the tiles went in. We also added some shower niches to house our shampoo bottles, etc.

I scoured about a million stores and online sites to find the exact wall tiles, floor tiles, bathtub, niches, and shower fixtures that I wanted. And voila! Here’s the end result: