We bought this house almost exactly two years ago, and at that time we knew that the biggest change we wanted to make was to redo the master bathroom/closet area. The original setup was a mini-hallway leading from the bedroom with a reach-in closet with sliding doors on the right and a doorway leading to the itty bitty bathroom on the left. After living in the house for a year our feelings on the matter were unchanged, so we started the demo. And then, as is our habit, we got distracted by other things and let the demolished bathroom sit for months… and months… and months. It helps that we have another, fully functional bathroom in the house, but eventually having our clothing piled in baskets all over the bedroom got the best of even clutter-happy people like us. Having a baby on the way may also have motivated us. So we got back to work.

The general plan is to create a new doorway to the bathroom leading directly from the bedroom and close off the “mini-hallway” to instead make a mini walk-in closet. We also plan to steal a bit of closet space for the shower so that we can have a shower bigger than a high school locker. 🙂 Here’s a post about the old shower before we destroyed it. Perhaps someday I’ll get organized and post some before and after floor plans, which will probably make more sense than my descriptions.

Anyway, all of the pictures I’ve taken of our progress are pretty bad, though I tried to improve them as best I could with post-processing. There really is not much lighting to be had and the spaces are all tiny. Ah well.

First up, we needed to frame the new closet doorway. Here’s a picture of the original “mini hallway” opening, taken from roughly the back wall of said hallway. The bedroom is hiding on the other side of the plastic  sheet. What used to be the closet is on the left, the bathroom is out of the picture on the right.

Step one involved cutting the hardwood (*gulp*) for the added bit of wall around the door:

And then nailing in the bottom plate with our swanky new nail gun:

And then the top plate:

After that I actually put the camera down and helped Dave put in the verticals. So here’s the finished shot:

We were able to salvage a fair amount of lumber when we first demoed the space, which is why the boards are different colors.

Next up was framing the new shower bump-out. Again this involved cutting some hardwood:

That picture was taken while I was standing in the middle of the bathroom looking out into the closet. The bedroom and the new closet doorway are out of the picture to the right. the studs and plumbing on the left side of the picture will eventually be removed and the empty space directly in front of me will become a wall. Anyway, a whole lot of ceiling drywall had to come down, since this was all we had removed thus far:

And here’s the first wall starting to be built:

The horizontal board is for the top of the built-in shelf that will reside along that wall.

Coming soon… framing the rest of the bathroom! Mostly that will entail closing up the original doorway and framing out the new doorway. We are also planning a pony wall between the toilet and the shower, so there will be a little more building going on there. And then we have to get the plumber in to move the pipes for the shower. After that it’s building the shower pan and then on to tiling the shower!

The baby is due at the end of March… what are the chances that we’ll be even close to done at that point? 🙂