Bathroom Renovation Project Finished

The long renovation project is completed.  Demolition began on July 28th, and the final touches were completed on September 17th.  There was some idle time in between because it took longer than anticipated to receive the tile, the vanity, the shower door, and other items.  Some of that was supple chain issues.  Some of it was our own, sitting on our butt instead of making a decision.

Nightingale basically let me manage this project though I did consult her for most of the aesthetics.  I wanted a kick ass shower with a pleasing bathroom attached to it and I believe we achieved that.  We scoped two extra items:  first, we moved the toilet to where the old shower was and made it a de facto water closet (no door, but still).  And I had them install some updated lighting in the living room.  All in this project came to about $25K.

The hardest part of this, besides the money, was the decision-making.  Moving the shower to the old tub and the toilet to the old shower was easy.  But where do you want towel racks?  Where do you want new outlets?  Where do you want shower heads?  It can be nerve-racking because some of these decisions are irreversible.  

As far as contractors go, the crew at All Around Renovation were great.  They cleaned up every day (as best one can during demo and construction) and they did their best to keep me apprised of things like when they were turning off the water.  The fact that my frady cat Elsa didn't shy away from them tells you that they are good people.  

That's not to say things were flawless.  my contractor was rather annoyed that we didn't have our tile and everything else picked out when the project began.  Not the worst scenario by far.  You can see the before pictures here.

This crate literally arrived via a slow boat from China

This crate looks like one of those crates you see in old Mummy movies, filled with Egyptian artifacts.  This one contains our new bathroom vanity.  I ordered it on July 28, 2025, and it took until Sept 2nd to arrive.  

Better not be any mummies in here

We ordered it through Amazon, but it was via a 3rd party vendor.  On August 25th, I got the following message from the seller via the Amazon portal:

"Dear customer, your goods have arrived in the western port of the United States, is arranging for the driver delivery, the driver will complete the distribution will communicate with you by phone time to sign for, please pay attention to answer the call, thank you!"

So it took a month to get here from China and then another week to get to my house.  It was delivered in a semi-truck, which creates its own issues.

The road that runs parallel to my subdivision prohibits trucks.  I'm not sure about the one on the other side but the truck driver who called me probably didn't want to chance it.  he called the local police and got permission to ignore the sign.

This is a case of the Spirit of the Law overriding the Letter of the Law.  You don't want trucks driving on certain roads because of long term damage.  But you need to be able to transport things to homes without having to offload to a smaller vehicle.

Technically, the delivery guy was supposed to leave it at the curb but he was nice enough to bring it up the hill (with my help) to our detached garage.  My contractor and his crew got to work on it the next day and it mostly went off without a hitch.  There are some issues and we are working on them.

Begin Rant: so while in hindsight I know there were things we could have done better and faster and maybe even cheaper, I refuse to let this damage my already life-long beaten confidence.  The learning curve is high and I did not get a lot of help from my contractor.  For something like this you need input from a designer and the only contractor to offer that was the guy who quoted twice what our contractor quoted.  I'm not saying Obi-wan wasn't helpful, he's been terrific, but I feel like he could have helped us more with the tile selection.

End Rant.