House Reveal: Beautiful Basement Bathroom

By Dutch Norwegian CoupleRenovation

Second house reveal on the blog! The first one was our living room in the basement apartment. And today we’ll show you our beautiful basement bathroom. We’ll show you how to make a bathroom from basically nothing. Continue reading to see how we did it and learn how you can do this too!

What We Started Out With

As we mentioned in our first reveal of our living room, we started out with basically nothing. The whole basement had previously only been used as storage. And had brick walls and concrete floors. The room where we made the bathroom originally stored a washing machine. And a strange brick wall was placed in the middle of the window. This is where the first toilet that ever was in this house used to be. When we bought the house, there was a staircase from the 1st floor going through this room and into the hallway. The photos above show what we first started out with.

The Building

To read more about the whole building process, check out what we wrote about it in our first house reveal post. That includes ; Taking up concrete floors, replacing windows, pouring new concrete floors, building wooden frames, isolate, electrical work, making a floating ceiling, placing drywall, plastering, painting, adding mouldings and installing electrical.

There were some specific tasks that only needed to be done in the bathroom. We needed to remove the brick wall in the middle of the room. Above you can see how much more open it became once the wall was gone. At this point, drywall was installed, just waiting for plastering and some paint. We also needed to remove the old and install all new pipes for drainage and water in the floor before we poured in the new concrete. In the walls we needed to prepare not only the electrical work, but also the piping. Remember that some things you are required to hire in professionals to do.

Laying Tiles

Once all the walls were done, we started on the floor. First of all membrane had to be in place. In Norway at least you are required to hire in professionals, check out you local requirements before you start on big projects like this. With membrane in place, we could start on the tiles.

What is important when you lay tiles is to make a good plan before you start. You need to measure the room and find out where the middle of it is. Depending on what type of tiles you have, you need to check how many whole tiles will fit. And make sure that you have nice symmetrical tiles on all ends. Decide beforehand what distance you want to have between your tiles. And choose the colour of your grout. A smart thing to do is to put all tiles (dry!) on the floor, cut the ones for the edges and lay them down as well. Then you can see before you start that it all works out.

Are you ready to start? Start in the corner furthest away from the door, that way you don’t have to step on your tiles to get out. This is very important, as stepping on the tiles before they are dry will make them sink in and squeeze the adhesive out on the sides. You don’t want to have tiles more sunk in than the rest now do you? Use a thick, but not too thick, layer of tile adhesive on a piece of the floor. The area shouldn’t be bigger than 2 tiles at the time. The adhesive dries fast, so make sure you’ve got everything prepared beforehand. Make sure you press and “shake/move” every tile a bit to make sure the adhesive stick to the tile. Also make sure you get even tiles and edges. Tile by tile, make your way to the door.

After the floor tiles has dried a day, you can do the walls as well. That’s more difficult, but for sure doable!

Installing Bathroom Furniture

Once the floor is done you can start installing your toilet. The shower/shower walls. Ventilation. The vanity. And the sinks. We used beautiful black details in our bathroom, and are really happy with the result. Also here you must keep in mind regulations that might have to be followed when connecting up water. Because this is the bath room in the basement apartment, we also had to use it as a combined laundry room. That meant that we had to connect up the washing machine and the dryer as well.

We kept the door leading outside from the bathroom. There were two reasons for that. One, we thought about fire safety. With this door you’ll have one more way to get out in case of a fire. Second, on the outside there’s a small concrete porch where you could enjoy the sun on a summer day. So, we thought it would come in handy that you could enter and exit directly from the bathroom. Since the door already was there, why remove it!?

Bathroom Décor

The dream bathroom for most of you would be a place that gave you a spa feeling. Are we correct? Anyway, that is what we wanted as well. So, we tried to do that. We’re also really happy with the fact that we decided to not have tiles on all walls. (Only floor and in the shower area). With painted walls we feel that it gave us a much more modern and fresh look. And you’re flexible to change the colour of your bathroom walls SO much more easily! Our main colours in the bathroom was green (Jotun, Balanse), black, white and gray. In addition we added wood elements to soften it all up. The vanity is by the way self made! (We’ll show you how to make it in a later post). And what do you think of our big round mirror? We’re so, so happy that we choose to go for this one and not the “normal” square ones. Making a nice atmosphere in the bathroom makes so much difference. We love to spend time in this bathroom!

End Result

Tadaaa! This is our beautiful basement bathroom all finished. Do you like it? It turned out exactly like we wanted. And we couldn’t be more happy with the result. The feeling of having done this (almost) all by our selves is amazing! The first time we could take a shower and brush our teeth here was so cool. Almost mind blowing when you know how it looked before we started.

We can’t wait to show you guys the next bathroom renovation! In our house we’ll make in total 2 new bathrooms, all the way from scratch. Plus we’ll renovate the existing bathroom. That’s what we’re busy with right now, so it wont be long before you get to see it.

Anyhow, thanks for reading! We love you for it!