How Did My Pandemic-Era DIY Bathroom Renovation Hold Up?

By March 2021, one year into the pandemic, I had painted, re-styled, and DIY-ed my way from one end of my New York City apartment to the other. After countless YouTube videos, I can now swap out a faucet and install peel-and stick tiles, but I wanted to see how much farther I could go. Could I gut a bathroom for real? Stir crazy but not yet ready to rejoin society, I thought I’d find out.

To test myself and my new skills, I headed north to my parent’s home in the Hudson Valley. Here I would join the ranks of so many other Americans who contributed to the 44 percent increase in DIY home improvement spending through this period of the pandemic. My project was ambitious—a tiny four-by-eight-foot bathroom in their 1850s Victorian house. Modernizing a commode that was this old was a baptism by fire and made this project more difficult than it would have been in a more modern build. It took 10 times as long as anticipated but the result is both fresh and timeless enough that if you didn’t know, maybe it always looked like this. So how did my first major renovation go, and how has it held up through the first four years? 

 The vision 

The design for the space was predominantly inspired by Sarah Sherman Samuel’s overhaul of Vanessa Carlton's loft bathroom: walls with brick up top and marble below, checkered floors, and black framed glass accents. I love how running the wall materials around the room, floor to ceiling, helped the room look much larger. I wanted to use zellige tiles for the top half but they were far too expensive for the volume of tile we needed, so we opted for a zellige-look ceramic tile made in Spain. 

For the bottom half of the wall, I got an excellent deal on 12-by-24-inch real marble tiles from what would come to be my favorite source, Floor & Decor. I then laid them out to try and connect veins across the various pieces. This helped to create the feel of a large slab without the cost. My mom didn’t want a checkered floor, so I found a square mosaic made of the same marble as the lower walls in a smaller scale square, like the zellige-look tiles, in order to create a cohesive materiality for the room. Once I picked up two different widths of marble pencil trim to run between each tile transition, it was set!

The process

This, of course, is where the hard part began. First I had to rip out the floated laminate wood flooring, which revealed the original tile floor, horrifically damaged and covered in blackened adhesive from some past mini renovation gone wrong. At this point I also realized the floor was not level and would have to be fixed before I could tile. I cleaned it up as much as possible, rolled on some surface prep primer, and poured a thin coat of self-leveling cement right over the old floor into the sunken areas to even everything out. Turns out that stuff does exactly what the name says and was much easier to use than I anticipated. 

A note about the walls: Original porcelain tile is so cool and beautiful and if I could have saved it I would have. But the existing tile was not in good shape up close. It was riddled with hairline cracks, and had chunks missing that had been back-filled with cement. As much as I loved the look, I knew it had to go.