Window Frosting

As part of the lake house bathroom remodel, I had a window conundrum to solve: the bathroom had a window in the middle of the shower, which was cool from a natural light perspective but made the shower kind of awkward and required a curtain which made the shower feel more cramped. I wanted to eliminate the window from the shower, but I also didn’t want to completely remove the window and have to do a ton of exterior brick work which would have been almost impossible to make look natural with the 40+ year old brick on the exterior of the house.

My solution was to remove the interior frame of the window, and to put plywood over it that can then be covered by the walls of the new shower, like this:

This solved the interior portion of the problem, but presented another obvious problem that now when you looked in the window from outside, you could tell that there was a big piece of plywood in the window. I solved this by first painting the plywood black, and then frosting the inside of the window using a spray-paint-based window frosting product.

With all of this in place, when you look in the window from outside it has the effect of making it looks like you are simply looking into a dark room with the lights off. The window is completely indistinguishable from the other windows, and preserves the look of the outside of the house while also allowing me to have a normal shower in the bathroom.

I was pleasantly surprised with how amazingly well this technique worked!

In addition to dealing with the window, I also had to drywall over where the original mirror and behind-the-mirror shelves had been. In the new bathroom, we’re just going to have a standard hanging vanity mirror, and have storage build into the vanity which had not been there in the original bathroom.

Now that this is done, I’m ready to move forward with sanding all the drywall mud and starting to get ready to finish those walls, and to finish demo work on the original shower and get ready to put the new shower in.