Archives December 24, 2016

A year ago, I did a full remodel of the bathroom off of our kitchen, on the middle floor of our house. It went from looking like this:

To this:

This year, I wanted to improve and modernize the look of our four other bathrooms, without doing a full remodel. These bathrooms had been repainted already, and had vanities and wood that I still liked. Their biggest issue was that they had a lot of very 90’s clear plastic and white fixtures on the sinks, as well as in the showers. Simply upgrading the figures and replacing the shower hardware to match the bronze that is used throughout the rest of our house’s cabinetry would be a huge improvement. This is the type of fixtures that were in place before:

In order to match the bronze used in other fixtures throughout the house, I selected this faucet from Kohler for the sinks:

I purchased six of these, and was able install each one in about 30 minutes (including removing the old fixtures). Here was the end result, which was a massive improvement!

After that, it was time to move on to dealing with the showers. I didn’t want to redo the plumbing (which would have involved either ripping out drywall to get at the pipes from the back, or ripping out and replacing the shower walls. Therefore, I purchased four of the following DANCO trim kit to replace the chrome Moen fixtures:

To go with that, I also purchased three of these shower heads (leaving the master shower head alone for now):

Installing all of these, the showers started to look a lot better:

Lastly, I purchased a kit to replace the handles of the toilets in all of the bathrooms to again match the bronze style of the other fixtures:

However, there were still some issues. The necks for the shower heads had been sweated onto the pipes when the showers were initially installed (instead of screwed in), so there was no easy way to replace them without getting into more plumbing than I wanted to do for this project. Also, the Jack-and-Jill bathroom in between our guest bedroom and my wife’s office had a bathtub with fixtures that were not easy to remove or replace without breaking them and potentially damaging the tub. Therefore, I picked a simple solution: using matte-bronze metallic spray paint, which did a fantastic job of matching the finish of the existing fixtures to the bronze of the newly installed fixtures:

All of the above work was completed in a couple of casual weekends, which is a lot of bang for my buck in terms of time. Perhaps I will do a more complete remodel of some of the bathrooms in the future, but for now I have four much better looking bathrooms that don’t feel like they are straight out of the 90’s.