Finally! A post about actually accomplishing things in our master bathroom! There will be lots of these I suspect, because I don’t think we’re going to be finished with this room for about a hundred years. Or a few months anyway.

Sometimes I think I should rename this blog, “The Nasty Carpet in Our Master Bathroom,” because I feel like I mostly just talk about it and how we need to get rid of it.

But then we DID get rid of it! It’s all gone!

I was determined to get the carpet up before 2013 was over, so we went ahead and did that even though we had no clear idea about what was coming next:

Back when I first wrote about our plans for the master bath, I confidently said that our plan was to paint the plywood subfloor  as a temporary fix until we were ready to tackle a bigger renovation. Only it turns out we don’t HAVE a plywood subfloor.

I assumed that what we’d find under the carpet would be either plywood or particle board. I was hoping for plywood, because, I hear tell, you can’t tile over particle board, and I was pretty sure we’d want to tile eventually. But I figured if it was particle board we could go ahead and paint it for now and worry about replacing it later. Because they just did that on Young House Love, and it looked awesome.

But our subfloors are neither plywood NOR particle board. They are OSB:

I had never heard of OSB (aka “oriented strand board”) before. I had seen it plenty of times, but I referred to it as, “you know–that really gross looking particle board stuff?” And when we pulled up the carpet and saw it, I assumed all hope was lost because it was particle board that was too ugly to paint but that couldn’t be tiled over.

But then my friend Kristi clued me in to this mysterious third category of subflooring that we happen to have. And, furthermore, she told me that we CAN tile over it!

Some will recall that the primary reason we were planning to paint the subfloor instead of tiling right away is that our bathroom is over the garage and is really, really cold in winter. Tile is also cold. I know, because part of our bathroom is already tiled, and that’s the very coldest part of the whole room. The idea was we’d paint for now and figure out a way to insulate or install under floor heating or….something before we got to the tiling phase of things a few years down the road.

But we can’t paint that ugly ass subfloor! Did you see that thing?!

So now we were sitting there with no carpet and an ugly subfloor and no idea what to do next.

We considered pretty much every flooring option there is.

Maybe vinyl plank?

 

This was a big contender at some point in our bathroom thought process, but once we started coming up with a plan for the rest of the room, it didn’t really feel right any more. And it’s not much of a step down in price versus tile, either, so it didn’t make sense to do it if we’d want to tile eventually.

We briefly considered hardwood, too, but we rejected it for some of the same reasons, plus not necessarily wanting to deal with wood in a bathroom.

I had like a 90 minute window one evening when I was absolutely obsessed with putting down VCT like Manhattan Nest just did in a kitchen:

 

Manhattan Nest’s kitchen floor

But I couldn’t get anyone else to be excited about it, so I was pretty much over it by the next morning. What it came down to, as with many of these potential choices, was that it didn’t make sense to put much effort or money (even if it was only 60 cents/square foot!) into something that was destined to be a short term solution.

So we kept coming back to tile. Lovely, cold tile. Dave wanted to look into the under floor heating. So he did, and it was crazy expensive (“your dogs will love you, though” said the guy at the tile store).

Our bathroom floor is going to be cold. But we’ll make do with the help of the some throw rugs and, eventually, insulation in the ceiling of the garage, under the bathroom floor.

So, then, WHAT tile? It seemed like we should probably spend months fretting over which tile to go with, but we didn’t have that kind of time since we already had a bathroom with no flooring.

I spent a lot of time looking around online and then Dave and I went to Floor and Decor and walked around there, snapping iphone pics of anything that caught our eyes. We spent some time considering this pinwheel tile:

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I love it, and it would fit in really well with the other stuff we’re planning to do in the bathroom right now….but I was worried it would lock it into a specific aesthetic too much if we wanted to do something different in the future (and I definitely didn’t want to be in a situation in the future where I contemplated ripping up perfectly good tile just to get a different look (which is what I would like to do with my kitchen backsplash)).

We came very close to buying some dark gray porcelain….so close, in fact, that Dave had already loaded a couple of boxes of it onto the cart at the store when I said, “let’s go look at the slate one more time.”

I had really wanted slate from the beginning. I’m pretty sure, in fact, that I was already thinking about slate for that bathroom before we even moved in. I love slate. I like the idea of doing real stone instead of porcelain, even though I know there’s plenty of nice porcelain out there. My grandparents’ house had slate in one of the bathrooms (and the foyer), so I kind of have a sentimental attachment to it. And, umm, I figured if you’re going to make your bathroom floor cold, why not make it REALLY cold? Yes, well. Throw rugs! Insulation! Slippers!

The slate was more expensive than the porcelain we were considering, but, at $2.99 a square foot, it came in just under our somewhat arbitrary budget. Here it is:

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It’s 12 by 24 rectangles. They call the color black, but I think it’s really more of a deep charcoal gray. I’m pretty in love with it. I love the slight variations in the tiles because it’s real stone. And I’m glad we went with rectangles instead of squares (the porcelain we were looking at didn’t come in rectangles).

So, as tends to happen, this bathroom renovation just got a lot more expensive than it was supposed to be. But it was spend the money now or spend the money later, since painted subfloors was never going to be a forever thing. And we have some Christmas gift money from family right now, so we can do it. And, have I mentioned how much I love my slate? It’s so pretty. I could gaze at it all day (I would say I could sit and pet it all day, too, except it’s way too cold for that. Brr!)

You’ll notice this is a very long post about picking out tile and not at all a post about actually putting the tile down in the bathroom. That part is slow going. We’ve never tiled anything before. But I am at peace with the fact that it’s going to be one million years before we have a bathroom floor again. Or, you know, a month? Who knows. Dave is almost finished cutting out the backer board. We have borrowed a tile saw from a friend. So there is some forward motion happening.

So there you have it! We’re off and running with bathroom stuff! I have another post in a day or two about stuff that’s going on in there.