Planing a New Bathroom

This past week, Roge and I gave ourselves the green light to start planning the renovation of our downstairs area on our retro family home. We are doing a second bathroom-laundry, another bedroom, a new exit, a huge deck, a large workshop and some lined out storage in some of the pokey "waste of space" areas. It's a huge job and we need to do it on a small budget (compared to the upstairs "main living areas" which we let ourselves spend money on good quality finishes.

That's not to say that downstairs will not be good quality finishes. I still want the house to flow well, so we plan on using similar products/look to upstairs but we will have to be more clever about how we spend our money.

I've been labouring over the bathroom-laundry conversion these past few days in particular. I'd planned on doing a smaller, almost identical version of our upstairs (main) bathroom. HOWEVER, I didn't anticipate that a huge majority of the original products would be discontinued. Majorly annoying and there was a lot of swearing when I realised. Yet somehow it was a blessing in disguise. It's given me the chance to create a new bathroom that still has similarities to the original one but allowed me to make everything a whole lot cheaper (and probably realise that I needed to make it a lot cheaper in order to keep to a budget). It's going to be "it's own" bathroom, not just a copy.

The main bathroom

I've bought some discontinued products that I've found at the local Bunnings warehouse that are almost exactly the same ones as I would have bought from Reece plumbing except I saved myself $600+. Winner. Additionally, I've found a second hand light to use instead of buying the same one as I used in the main bathroom, saving myself a further $110.

I can't wait to start putting it all together. I dare say it will be a few months still before we start but I'm off to the plumbing shop on Monday to get the plans drawn up (a free service that they offer) and I think that once it's on paper, it will allow me to start sleeping properly again! I have an over active, easily excited by design brain that doesn't sleep until everything is settled. It can be very tiresome!