Modern Victorian Bathroom Makeover on a Shoestring

Ever since we moved into this house, the bathroom has been on the list of things to redo. The layout isn’t bad, but the actual bath tub had seen better days and those awful turd brown tiles… The tub itself was enamelled steel and the enamel had chipped off in parts. The coating to the bath as well always looked grubby. Nothing seemed to make it clean, and it had got to the point where I was ever so slightly ashamed if guests needed to use the bathroom! It was time to create the modern Victorian bathroom I’d – er I mean we’d – always wanted! Here’s our modern Victorian bathroom makeover on a shoestring – get ready for the bargains!

As we are always keen to do these renovations on a tiny budget, the ideal would have been just to replace the tub like for like. Unfortunately, the bath had been tiled in so to change the bath would mean changing the tiles to the wall and floor. Oh dear.

My plan was to buy the materials for the job as and when we could with a view to starting later on in the year. I bought the tiles from Walls and Floors in January in the sale. I bought the bath on Ebay (absolute bargain at £50!) and thought we’d store it in the cellar until we had everything else we needed. It arrived and we had the delivery guy leave it in our dining room and we were going to shift it the next day. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t fit though the cellar door!

Unsurprisingly, we don’t have a lot of space to store a roll top bath tub, so we were forced to start the bathroom renovations a lot earlier than planned! It lived in Holly’s room for a couple of days – she loved having another reading nook!

It took about a week for the renovations, starting on Wednesday with the ripping up of floor tiles and bath panel.

Thursday was spent taking off the wall tiles. On Friday the plumber came to rip out the bath and disconnect the sink, leaving us with only a toilet!

Saturday and Sunday were spent tiling the floor and installing the wood panelling to the walls (and washing in the kitchen sink) and on Monday the plumber came to install the bath and reconnect the sink and shower for us. Monday was such a happy day!

Our major expenditure was the plumber. We had looked on YouTube and although plumbing in a bath seemed relatively straight forward, we were moving taps and it was a bit more complicated than a like for like swap, so we felt it was better to get the professionals in!

Other than the plumbing, the tiles for the floor were bought on sale from Walls and Floors and were £181 and the bath was a £50 bargain from eBay. We spent approx £150 on the wood panelling and other materials such as grout and adhesive came in at approx £100.

For a relatively small outlay, we’ve transformed our bathroom from rank, covered with turd tiles, to something a bit more sleek and elegant. I have always wanted a more glamorous bathroom, and now we’ve got one.

I’ll do more detailed posts on how we did the tiling and the wall panelling x