Minimalist Bathroom - My Full Journey From Planning To Reveal

Planning a bathroom is a serious business and one you don’t have to think about very often. A bathroom refurb is usually done when you move into a new home, or part of a renovation project and sometimes the last room in the house to get a makeover, experts say a bathroom refurb is roughly every 10-20 years. Here I am talking about the full renovation process, not about space styling, this would be worth another blog post later.

Here you are in a good place to discover an example of the full process, I will describe our full bathroom makeover below.

Oh and, I have designed this bathroom myself with a 3D online planner!

Here is our bathroom renovation story.
Disclaimer: This article only reflect my experience, I am not a housebuilder or a professional plumber.
I know there are professionals offering bathrooms renovation services from start to finish but in order to keep some cost down, I created the design and project manage all aspects myself. I am quite a hands-on person, however I know it is not for everybody, the thing is when I was a child building a house was part of my daily life as my dad started to build our 5 bedroom family house from scratch when I was 5y old (He worked in construction leading civil engineering projects), I guess I developed a taste for Home renovation back then :D. Coming back to my bathroom, I managed the full project: inspiration/design/budgeting and dealing with supplier/installers. I honestly can say besides the expected “last minute panic moments” typical during this type of work, I loved doing it and using the new bathroom is a real daily treat compared to the old one. To kick off the project, my partner and I had a good chat to align what we wanted:

• A comfortable large shower with a ceiling shower head,
• A practical, no fuzz, Minimal and Mindful bathing experience - I develop this in another article - here-,
• A Tile collection we both like

Brace yourself, this article includes BEFORE pictures.

Background story - Why we needed a new bathroom :

When we visited the house for the first time, we knew straight away we wanted to renovate the Bathroom/Kitchen area which are in juxtaposed rooms. Reasons were :

• Outdated bathroom: vinyl flooring: old three pieces white ceramic suite
• Old boiler that needed replacing and was located in the bathroom
• Outdated kitchen: vinyl flooring, old cabinets, heavily used as a rental kitchen for decades
• and above all: The garden back door was IN the bathroom… yes you read correctly. We needed to enter the bathroom to then access the back door go to the backyard garden.

I started to write with a green marker on the wall the size of the tiles, shower tray, toilet, washbasin to visualize the 3D plan.

a BEFORE 360-degree view starring my partner

House6 - Spherical Image - RICOH THETA

 

Starting the planning phase:

• We took time to create a brief with our wishes. Read the article on how to do it yourself here

• Took the room and window dimensions THREE times of the Kitchen and the Bathroom.

• Got rid of a wall (non-structural), in order to give access to back door from the Kitchen.

• Evaluate cost of moving existing waste/pipes location to meet our dream new design and tweak design where possible to minimise changes (moving pipes is usually the expensive part from contractors).

• Start a Design for our dream kitchen because both rooms were ideally to be renovated around same time, check here for article on my kitchen.
• Start a Design/budget sheet for the project. It needed to include: Material 1/4 / Labour cost 3/4.

Click on below link to see the 360-degree view of my 3D design (check out my shop if you are interested in having a plan made for your bathroom)

Minimalist Final 3D Design 360 degree

Quoting phase :

My inspiration for my bathroom designs came from lifestyle magazines, a recent hotel experience, and online websites like pinterest. Once we were happy with the Bathroom Design. We proceeded in getting contractor quotes for fitting the material. Our project was quite technical and labor intensive. I posted my design on a few websites and contacted Bathroom fitters in my area so they could quote for us, here is an overview of what I asked them :

• • • Strip down and dispose to the local tip of all elements of the old bathroom.
    • Create new drain pipe for the toilet
    • Create new wall partition with light switch and control interface for the underfloor heating
    • Create recess ceiling for ceiling head shower, spotlights and electric fan
    • Create new drain pipe for wash basin
    • Install wall-hung toilet, shower tray, wash-basin, mirror cabinet
    • Install underfloor heating mat 2sqm
    • Tile about 25 tiles
    • Paint in white

I soon realised while getting a few quotes in that dealing with a single company who could deliver and manage sub-contractors for different aspect of the bathroom installation (electrician, tiler, plumber) was going to be more practical for me as I didn’t need to liaise all of them separately.

Tips : Even if I did the Design myself, I asked the contractor to verify technically the design and all items in my plan BEFORE I placed any orders. This took us a good 2 hours to do but eased my mind. I then proceeded in ordering what I needed.

We choose the construction company that I had a good feeling with, the one who was available to answer any questions, had a few positive online reviews and quick to come back with a quote. It didn’t only come down to price competitiveness for us. It reassured me that they were willing to spend time going through product list and design before I paid any money and was confident to go with this company. They warn me that there could be hiccups but that typically they handle this type of last-minute issue. Items were delivered in a few weeks,

That was perhaps the most exciting moment when we knew that our project was moving forward and that the next installation was about to start.

The complete installation took about 3 weeks ! (during the week only). Luckily the first week we went on holidays! YAY! I would really recommend that - especially if you only have only one bathroom in your home - you can manage to shower at the gym or at work, but everyone needs a loo access every few hours… and as per the bathroom fitter told us, the first week usually is when the works of stripping down and installing the toilet take place. During the installation things progressed smoothly, I decided on tile grout colour with a sample book option that the bathroom fitter showed me, I didn’t feel rush and I was happy with the end result.

To conclude, I can say that our bathroom is now definitely one of my favorite rooms, everything is working well and taking a shower is a bliss. The underfloor heating is one aspect I would highly recommend, it is very nice to feel warm tiles when stepping in/out of the shower.

Note: if you are interested to know what products are in my bathroom, I used Villeroy & Boch ceramics (Subway 2.0 collection and Metallic Illusion tiles collection in matt finish). Villeroy & Boch is a German brand of very good quality products. Their collections are also comprehensive with many sizes and colour options. The brassware is Villeroy&Boch (manufactured by Dornbracht). The shower tray is MX Elements slimline in 1500 x 800mm, it is made of stone resin. I bought the copper ceiling spotlight on ebay.co.uk

Please find a few pictures of the progress and final reveal below.

a AFTER 360-degree view - After tiles are installed

Bathroom process #theta360uk - Spherical Image - RICOH THETA

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REVEAL

Thank you for reading! Please share the article if you know someone redecorating their bathroom or pin-it for reading it later. 🙂

This post is not sponsored by brands.