Room by Room: Kid’s Bathroom

The plumbers and electricians were busy at the house this week. Most of the plumbing that is required before the plumbing inspection is complete (once the sheetrock has been put up and the tiles have been installed, they’ll come back to install the finishes (toilets, faucets etc.)). The electricians have finished all the outlets and most of the boxes for the lights. We are looking forward to when they will install the lights since we have about 10 big boxes from lighting stores stuffed into a corner of our son’s room.

Next week the heating and cooling guys are coming to start putting in the ductwork, and the data guy is coming in to run the computer cables through the house.

We are also bracing for the biggest task of the project: removing most of the back wall in the house which we are opening up.

Since a bunch of wires and pipes aren’t that much fun to take pictures of we’d thought we return to look at the design of another room in the house.

The kids’ bathroom is pretty small but we are squeezing in a shower/tub combo, a double sink and a toilet. We spent some time looking for tile inspiration and finally settled on a high border pattern like the one shown below.

We like the penny tile combination where the floor is white with a colored grout (which doesn’t show dirt as much) and there’s a colored penny on the border with white grout. We are doing a light blue for the border instead of the color shown in this picture. We also think the owls are cute but not sure if we’ll go that far. What do you think?

We have about 42″ to fit in the vanity and we’ve found one that we think will work. There aren’t many options when you want a double sink for that small a space but we’ve found this option from Lacava. They can run a little expense so we are searching for a cheaper version.

Over Thanksgiving, we were able to grab some great deals on Toto toilets and a tub. Researching toilets deserves a post on its own since the forum discussions around this topic are so interesting (no really, I mean it!). It was helpful to read about the difference between round and elongated toilet bowls, eco versus non-eco toilets, two piece versus one piece models, etc. There was clear agreement that kids are much more comfortable with round bowls, so we’ll be doing that in the kids bathroom.

The final thing to note about this bathroom is that there’s a shared wall between the bathroom and the master bedroom. In our old apartment we installed sound insulation bats between walls and they hardly made a difference. This time we are going with quiet rock which people much prefer. Here’s a quick video that demonstrates how well it works.