Here is my lovely bathroom. Don't you just love the green walls. I always joke and say my bathroom looks like a man's library with the forest green walls and dark paneling. When we bought this house we noticed a big crack in the floor of the shower.
Can you see the big crack? We told them we wanted the shower fixed. Of course they came back and told us that the floor cracked when it was installed when the house was built seven years ago. They sealed the crack and had never had any problems with it. They refused to do anything about it and we were in a hurry to find a house so we wouldn't have to live in the tiny apartment (that only had two beds in it with all six of us) for too long.
The home inspector said that everything looked fine so we dropped the issue. The shower is all solid pieces of cultured marble. It isn't what I would have picked out for a shower but I loved it once we moved in because it was so easy to keep clean. Anyway, one day I noticed that there was water damage to the baseboards in the water closet next to the shower. Big surprise, the shower leaks.
We brought in a contractor who spent 5 seconds looking at the shower and pointed out the rotten wood behind the baseboards on the half walls of the shower. Now why didn't the home inspector see that when we specifically asked him about the shower? It was obvious when the contractor pointed it out to us. Well, we had to redo the shower. This bathroom is not my style at all but I didn't want to have to change everything so we found something that would go with what we already have.
The tile mosaic at the top of the shower is glass and marble. It is really pretty. The picture doesn't do it justice. We had to replace all the paneling on the front of the shower. Again, I was just trying to match what we already have to keep costs down. We talked to our friend from church who is a wood working guy to take a look at it. Turns out that paneling that I don't even like in the first place is mahogany paneling that was $200 a sheet (plus the cost of labor to duplicate the look of the existing paneling). No way was I paying that much. He ended up experimenting with other woods and stains to find something that would look similar. He also custom made the top rail piece because we couldn't find that piece anywhere either. The baseboards were another issue. Nobody sells wood baseboards and if they did, they were nowhere near a match. Our friend ended up finding another wood guy who gave us a good deal on wood baseboards if we bought what he had in stock. That meant replacing all the baseboards in the bathroom instead of just around the shower. What a joke.
We also had to replace the glass shower door because the old ones didn't fit. I didn't mind that though because the old ones were brass. It turned out nice in the end but so much work, money and worry over a stupid shower. The paneling and baseboards look so good you would never know that it wasn't original. As you can see, we still have the lovely green walls. That is our next project. I finally decided on a color so hopefully it will get painted soon. I'll post a picture when we finish.
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