Since Sara and I moved into our house in October 2016, we’ve been wanting to upgrade all the bathrooms. Our top priority was remodeling our only downstairs bathroom, a dark forest green half bath eyesore. This picture is from when we were first previewing our house and the decor before we moved in.
Before:
After:
We took to Pinterest for some bathroom design inspiration and eventually settled on a modern-style bathroom with cool grays and a white quartz countertop.
Credit: Kylie M. Interiors, Decor Pad
I wanted to minimize the amount of time that the restroom would be out of commission, so I planned on prepping as much as I could before the demolition. To get started, I purchased a remnant piece of Carrera white quartz from a stone fabrication shop in Fullerton, CA, for $150 in February 2018. The piece was too large for transport in my small Ford Ranger, so the shop I was purchasing it from offered to cut the stone down to manageable size for an additional $100.
This was enough countertop to complete the downstairs bathroom and one additional full upstairs bathroom. I secured the quartz upright for transport and it made the 25-mile journey home. With the help of a neighbor, I was able to offload the quartz into my garage. Moving this stuff by myself would not have be possible.
I wasn’t able to fabricate the stone until May 2018, since my woodshop was going through some major upgrades, including a Paulk-style outfeed table, dust collection system, and the addition of a refurbished cabinet saw. In this time, we purchased some items for the bathroom renovation including the sink (KES undermount sink) and the sink hardware, a Delta Lahara faucet, from Amazon.
My father-in-law is a general contractor and was nice enough to lend me his stone fabrication suite of tools. This included a worm drive circular saw with a stone-cutting 7” diamond blade, Dewalt angle grinder with stone cutting disc, a Metabo polisher with 8 grits of polishing pads (50,120, 220, 400, 800, 1200, 3500, 8000), and a waterproof apron. I set up the stone on some sawhorses in my front yard and went to work. I cut the countertop to final dimensions and then made the hole for the undermount sink using the paper template included by the manufacturer. The exposed edges would get a simple round over. This process was tedious—getting into the tight corners of the undermount hole proved to be difficult, but I was pretty happy with the end result.
I went to test fit the sink to the underside of the stone and noticed that stone would overhang the sink by about ¾” all the way around. This seemed like a bit much, but I found that the manufactures template for the sink is the defacto guide for undermount cuts as related to overhang, so I’ll just be sure to seal it well and clean underneath the overhang every so often.
Our goal was to give the stone the appearance of being thicker on the front and sides so I purchased some knife grade polyester resin in order to glue a strip of stone to the front and sides. I experimented a little with the resin before trying it on the workpiece. Once all was glued up, I polished the front and sides.
(In progress view of the strip of stone being glued on)
The holes for the faucet were drilled with a stone cutting drill bit purchased from Amazon as well. I carefully laid out the location of each hole, made a simple drill guide and constantly sprayed the bit with water to keep it cool while I drilled the hole.
Once the stone was done and ready for installation we turned our attention to the existing bathroom. We decided the peel all the paint off the walls since the previous paint job was done rather poor and sloppy, and it ended up being a good decision, because when we started peeling the green, there was a shade of mustard yellow underneath!
After peeling all the paint, we decided on the color pallet for the walls, cabinet and ceiling/baseboard. From the samples at Home Depot, we decided on “Sterling” for the walls, “Lunar Surface” for the cabinet, and “Bit of Sugar” for the ceiling/baseboard. The grade of paint we went with was Behr Ultra. We also need paint supplies so I bought the 8 piece roller tray set from Home Depot (https://www.homedepot.com/p/8-Piece-Roller-Tray-Set-RS-701-SP/100064287), which served its purpose well for the bathroom, and should work for our other bathroom renovations as well.
We weren’t ready to paint quite yet however, since I still needed to demo the existing countertop and patch/clean the walls. We wanted to keep the existing cabinet, but I would create new door and drawer fronts to achieve the “full face” effect, where the front of the cabinet would have no gaps at all.
During the demo I accidentally damaged the drywall just above the cabinet so I had to move a large section and repatch it. The prep work for the countertop took far longer than the actual installation. Also, at this time, I decided to change the light switches to the flat switches and added a timer for the ceiling fan. Ah, yes, the ceiling fan.
The existing ceiling fan was obnoxious and needed replacing. I purchased a quiet Panasonic fan with a built-in light. Installation of this fan was so much harder than I planned for, and honestly, the main takeaway is make sure you read ALL the installation instructions before you start cutting holes in your house. Nonetheless, I got the thing installed and it works great!
(Here is a picture of the fan already installed since I forgot to take one in progress).
We ended up painting the walls, cabinet and ceiling/baseboard with two coats of paint, as recommended by Behr . Once everything looked fresh and clean, we installed the countertop. I cut a ½” plywood board for extra support under the quartz and adhered the countertop with silicone. I intentionally waited until this point to create the backsplash so that my dimensions would be dead on. I polished the backsplash with the same rounded over edges as the countertop. The backsplash was cut 1/8” from the edge of the countertop in order to maintain the 1/8” bevel on the countertop edge. Everything was sealed with white silicone purchased from Home Depot. I was really pleased with the results!
(You can see the large part of drywall cut out)
(Patched drywall)
Next was faucet hardware installation. I wanted to complete this before the sink went in so I’d have more space to work. I followed directions provided by the manufacturer and everything went smoothly. I waited to install the sink drain plug until after the sink was installed.
The sink was installed directly to the quartz bottom using silicone. In addition to the silicone, I created support pieces for the underside of the sink out of ¾” plywood to add some mechanical support. The new sink was in a slightly different location than the old one so I had to extend the drain catch by adding a small piece of drain pipe.
(Drainpipe off slightly – before extension)
We ended up picking out a modern looking light fixture from Home Depot for above the mirror. There were no surprises during installation, as the previous light fixture used a very similar mounting box as the new one.
I was so relieved to be finally finished with all the non-woodworking stuff, since all that was left to do were cabinet doors, drawer fronts, mirror frame, and the floating shelves. I began with the cabinet doors constructed using ¾” MDF in 5 sections.
This was my first experience with overlay hinges. I purchased these Blum hinges off Amazon. I like them because they allow for quite a bit of wiggle room to get your reveal exactly how you want it.
(Painted and installed doors – with penguin dog toy)
The drawer fronts are simply ¾” MDF cut to size. The hardware we used was also from Amazon. We liked the look of these satin nickel pulls, as they matched our faucet hardware really nicely.
Throughout our house, we have a couple of walnut accent pieces, so I wanted to carry that theme into the bathroom. The mirror frame and floating shelves were made out of a single piece of 8/4 walnut. After I had removed the old mirror, I had cut it to size with a glasscutter and created the frame using those dimensions. I splined the corners of mirror frame with hard maple for additional strength, then stained it with boiled linseed oil.
For the floating shelves, I bought some metal rods designed for supporting floating shelves from Amazon. The trick to getting these to work is to drill a perfectly vertical hole in the shelf to accept the rod. I started the hole on the drill press and finished it with a cordless drill.
And finally, just for fun, I also made a tissue box cover out of walnut. All walnut was wiped with 3 coats of boiled linseed oil.
Add some art and we’ve got ourselves a decent looking modern bathroom!
Itemized cost list:
- Quartz $250
- Sink $80
- Faucet $172
- Fan $145
- Paint $50
- Paint supplies $20
- Light fixture $70
- Cabinet door hinges $16
- Drawer pulls $22
- Polyester resin $23
- Walnut and other wood $60
- Fan timer $20
- Shelf supports $22
Total = $950
Finished:
Final thoughts:
This bathroom renovation/model was totally worth it to us! It probably would have cost us at least double of what we paid in materials. Hopefully we learned a little about our remodel, what to expect, and what we can do better for the next one. We still have two more bathrooms, so we’ll see what happens!
– Tim