We’re back with an update on the big hall bathroom renovation (do you remember what it looked like before?). This past week the toilet, vanity hardware, counter top and sinks were all installed! Cue Hallelujah Chorus!

We talked a little bit last week about how we picked out our new toilets. Overall, the decision was pretty easy. And we love how they look in the bathrooms. However, when it came to deciding on the counter top for the hall bathroom, the decision unfortunately wasn’t so easy.

There are SO many options when it comes to counter top material these days. Granite, Avonite, Corian, Silestone, soapstone, glass, quartz, marble — just to name a few. And all of those materials have their own wide array of styles, finishes and colors. You also have to take into account each material’s maintenance procedures and durability. Needless to say, it was kind of overwhelming.

After much deliberation, hours of research and lots of samples, we finally decided to use quatrz. Silestone, specifically. Though the price tag for Silestone is a bit steeper than glass or some types of granite, we couldn’t find anything in granite or glass that tickled our fancy as much as Silestone’s Yukon. We also felt it would be a wise investment in the long run. After all, kitchens and bathrooms are really what sell a house, and quartz is a great balance between low maintenance and great looks.

We were also able to score a major deal. We began our price search at one of our favorite nationwide chains. They quoted us $1,800 for the single counter top, including a $600 charge to cut the holes for the sinks and mount them! That was more than we wanted to spend, so we decided to shop around some more. A few days later, a friend of my dad’s referred us to a good “counter top guy”. Eager and excited to find what we were looking for (at a comfortable price) we gave him a call. He ended up quoting us $1,700 (including cutting and mounting both sinks). You might be thinking, “That’s only a hundred bucks difference!” But he included a little something extra: a matching counter top for the master bathroom. As if that wasn’t awesome enough, he said our counter top for the hall bathroom would be ready only one week after they came to measure. A week! That’s less than half the amount of time the “other guys” told us. Score! (We’re still working on getting the vanity for the master bathroom in place, but they’ll be out to measure for that as soon as we’re done!)

A week later, as promised, two guys came to install the countertop. While they were doing their thing, we were in the other room, biting our nails and hoping it would look as good as we imagined it would. After weeks of imagining what it would look like, we hoped we made the right decision.

Once the installers were finished, we tiptoed down the hallway to check out their handy work, and luckily… we loved it!

The Silestone has more of a stone look and feel to it than we thought it would, and we are loving it! It’s kind of like a combination of marble and poured concrete, if that makes sense.

Oh!  Before we close this entry out, we can’t forget our vanity hardware! We found these little puppies at Home Depot (on sale!). We wanted hardware that wasn’t too modern, but not too traditional. We decided to keep it simple and sleek:

Now that all of these installations are complete, it’s time to install the faucets. We’ll be very happy when we can wash our hands and brush our teeth at a sink, rather than in the shower!

For more about the hall bathroom renovation, check out Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

…is the average amount of time a person spends in the bathroom during their lifetime.

As I type, our plumber is installing three brand new toilets in our almost-ready-to-live-in house. Is it weird that I’m excited about toilets? Probably, but I’m guessing you would be, too, if it meant you were going to be in your house soon. Toilet shopping isn’t as glamorous or exciting as picking out tile or cabinetry, but everybody has to do it at some point. You’re going to spend thousands of hours using this fixture in your lifetime. Therefore, make sure you get one that not only looks great, but functions well.

With that said, when deciding on our toilet of choice, we didn’t really have that many requirements. We wanted our toilet fit in well with the overall feel of the house, so bright white was a necessity. We also prefer an elongated seat as opposed to the “standard” circular toilets that were in the house when we purchased it. The process was far from simply walking in and back out with a toilet 10 minutes later, but it’s nothing to be scared of.

Like I said, we wanted something that would contribute to the overall feel and design of the bathrooms and house as a whole. We went to several places looking for the perfect toilet. While we were shopping around, we stumbled upon one that really fit well with our bathroom, Kohler’s Memoirs Two-Piece, elongated, comfort height toilet in white:

Another thing we like about this particular toilet is that it matches the under-mount sinks we purchased for the master bathroom and hall bathroom. We normally don’t like things all “matchy-matchy” (as Ashley says), but we thought this subtle similarity would be a nice cohesive touch.

When we first decided on this toilet, like any responsible, budget-conscious homeowner, we searched for a better price online. Our initial find was listed at $365. After some Googling, we found listings for the same toilet from $1,303 down to $255. So we marched back up to Home Depot with a printout of our $255 listing in hand, and just as we were hoping, they gladly sold us three toilets for our newly found price of $255 – no questions asked.

One thing we love about this toilet is that it comes as a complete kit in the box. We highly recommend this because it puts everything you need for a clean, tight install right in the box. If you decide to get a plumber like we did, he might use some of his own materials, but it’s nice to know he won’t end up having to stop because he ran out of something or didn’t have a part that fit.

On he plate for this weekend: moving our stuff from Ashley’s parents’ house (where we’ve been living while the renovations have been underway) to our house. We couldn’t be more excited to spend the first night in our new (to us) home! And now we even have new toilets! Woo Hoo!

Toilet shopping photo found here.

This past week, a lot of changes have been going on in the hall bathroom and they have happened SO fast! What once was an empty shell of what’s supposed to be a bathroom is no longer! After what seems like a few, short days… voila! The tile is done, the bathtub is installed and so is the vanity. It’s beginning to look more like an actual, functioning bathroom. Oh how I love progress!

Some of you may be wondering why we didn’t decide to tackle the tile installation ourselves. Though we are anxious to get our hands dirty DIYing, neither of us had ever installed tile before, and since this is our first major renovation project, we decided it would be best to call in the professionals. Plus, when we chose to also tile the walls, the decision to hire a contractor seemed pretty obvious. In just three short days, the amazing team at MB Tile had the job done and done beautifully.

Another star of this hall bathroom renovation is the sparkling new bath tub! After we gutted the bathroom, we called in yet another professional to rough in the new fixtures which included the addition of the second sink. This made installing the new tub super easy.

We milled over a few different options when it came to the vanity: ordering it from one of the online vanity megastores, having one custom built by a local cabinet maker and we even toyed with the idea of building it ourselves (we were crazy). Ultimately, we decided to design one on paper and take it to our local Home Depot. Call us “newbies”, but we actually didn’t know we could do that until my dad mentioned it. So to the drawing table I went. This is what we came up with…

We thought it would be a fun change in pace to have some open shelving instead of ordinary drawers between the two sinks. We plan on finding a decorative basket of some sort to stash toiletries and using the bottom shelf for folded towels. If we get tired of it down the road, we can always order a couple of drawers.

A little under three weeks after taking our drawing to Home Depot, our custom vanity was ready to be picked up. The installation process was really easy. It came in three separate peaces and was installed with just a few screws here and there to hold it in place.

As you can see, at the moment the vanity isn’t 100% complete. There is a piece that goes on the very bottom (I’m not sure what it’s actually called, but I keep calling it a “kick plate”). We also need to add the hardware. Then comes the countertop, sinks, fixtures, etc. One day at a time, folks. One day at a time.

Last time, we mentioned that we removed one of the hall linen closets to make room for more vanity space and a wider doorway. We were happy about the decision then, but now that everything is coming together, we are absolutely ecstatic about the outcome. Cue happy dance.

What once seemed like a small, narrow bathroom is now shaping up to be more spacious and modern.

Btw, if you missed it, check out part one and part two of the big hall bathroom renovation project. Want to stay updated with the home renovation progress on Facebook? “Like” the 7th House on the Left Facebook page.