OH PENNY TILE BATHROOM!

I am posting a pretty picture first, or else I'll get depressed. Then, I'll post the uglies.

The before, during, tearing out the bad tile job, the re-do and finally the after. 
No, I'll just post everything backwards today.

First off, here's the sketch ::

When we designed the bathroom, we decided we wanted a big shower [for San Francisco standards], since the upstairs bath is so small. And we wanted a cozy lil' nook for the toilet, so we decided to build a diagonal wall, giving us more space where we needed/wanted it, and less where we didn't. We couldn't figure out where to place the sink, so we kicked it out of the bathroom altogether and placed it right outside.

[The sink we designed so that it will blend into the rest of the design of our "den", with floating sink & shelf that has the faucet/trough hidden in it. But that's another post].

Instead of adding a shower pan curve, we dug out the concrete a little deeper, so that we could have a step down shower. [a little hard to see in pic below]

We had a lot of plumbing going on in the walls. All of the plumbing from our rental unit next door was running along the walls of our bathroom. Since the den was the 'bonus room' behind the garage, we wanted to make sure that it wouldn't feel like a basement and avoid soffits at all costs. To mask this, we built a shower bench, which has all the plumbing running above and below it. No one needs to know.

We really wanted to have a dual shower. This one was a need. One with an in-ceiling shower head/shower tile, and another with a hand shower. The hand shower was needed to give Arson & Riot a bath. Also both fixtures had to work at the same time, or separately -> this took us forever to figure out when choosing the valves. Plumbing is complicated.

We added the 'shower tower', which we designed & laid out in illustrator before building it. We needed storage that was mostly out of sight - for shampoo, towels, toilet paper etc. So we designed it with 3 niches on each side. The front is a towel niche, the left for shampoos, and the right, by the toilet, for toilet paper, a bin, cleaning supplies, swiffer and more.

The 'shower tower' also had to function as a water barrier since we did not want to add a shower curtain or glass door.

We wanted to make the most of the penny tile, and use it to curve the edges.

Grouting.

Curving the tile.

Without the grout, the tile could make you kind of dizzy, but never delusional.

The floor and the walls had to be floated. And the bench re-done because there wasn't enough of a grade for water to run down.  

THE RE-DO : Bad tile job. We had to tear out. It really hurts re-doing things and really sets you back timewise & moneywise, but now we're so happy we did. What a difference. But it still hurts in some places.

It's green.

Sheetrockin' it!

Like a sauna. Kinda.

Double thick firewall + insulation + plywood + sound board + OSB + sheetrock =
Never having to hear any Mission 'hood gunshots while in the shower!

Plumbing.

The diagonal bathroom wall. This was also a re-do. First we used metal studs because
we wanted to build the wall out of a translucent material to let as much light in since we have no window in the bathroom. First glass, but that was tooooo expensive, then acrylic but that was toooo expensive too, and then polycarbonate panels [used in greenhouses] but that for some reason didn't work out either, so we just built a regular wall, which made us very sad at the time.

Soffit in back housing ALL plumbing.

From garage looking into bathroom.

We got our plumbing fixtures & we're really really really excited about it. Can you tell?

Bathroom fixtures, are like jewellery for the house. 
[I think Americans spell it Jewelry, but that feels so cheap]

Oh look, it's the in-wall toilet tank!

Since the bathroom is situated right behind our tenants garage, we added some cast iron pipes, dug them into the ground, aded rebarm and filled them with concrete. This barrier is in case they do hit the wall, they would hit the pipe first, instead of the wall, which would break all the tile. I'm tired.

Here's the BEFORE :

Lovely lil' sewer pipe in the middle of the room.

Here's the toilet. Even though technically it's not really a BEFORE pic of the bathroom,

since the toilet used to be where the Office Space/Desk Cabinet is now. 

But I'll let it slide.

And that was the story of the penny tile bathroom. Backwards.