Making a 50-square-foot full bathroom work

Our second-floor, 50-square-foot full bathroom provides the only bathing in this 100-year-old house, so we had to make it work. We wanted to make the room feel bigger and deal with what we were sure was structural damage around the toilet. Underneath several layers of failing linoleum, we found the original beautiful yellow birch flooring, but also floor framing so compromised that the toilet waste line was "structural."

How the kitchen ceiling assembly saved us

The water damage extended to the kitchen ceiling below, so we could combine replacing the kitchen ceiling with the bath remodel. The bad news was that opening up the kitchen ceiling revealed three 4-plus-inch notches in three consecutive floor joists in the bathroom; there was a sag of at least 5 inches.

The good news was that the kitchen ceiling was a dropped ceiling, providing enough room to "stack" new floor framing underneath the three failing floor joists. OSB gussets were extensively screwed to both the new (bottom) and old (top) two-bys after we had jacked out as much of the floor's sag as we felt we safely could.

Dealing with the hand you are dealt

We really did not like the baby-blue tub, but it was cast iron and in perfect shape. We spent a lot of time looking through tile samples before coming across an accent tile that worked well with the tub color.

We also struggled with the existing sink; it was small, but even so, it jutted out more than 16 inches into the 35-inch space between the tub and the opposite wall on which the sink was hung. We finally found a wall-mounted sink just 13 inches deep that does the job.

Would we like a bathroom double the size with decent counter space? Yes, we would, but the new bathroom is attractive and functional, and we were simply unwilling to reduce the adjacent bedroom size to create a bigger bath. After all, which room do you spend more time in?

Looking ahead as we focused near-term

Not only was the 50-square-foot upstairs bath the only full bath in the house when we moved in in 2000, it was the only bathroom in the house. And there was no laundry room (or even a laundry hookup).

The remodel of the upstairs bath occurred at the same time as a remodel of the large (7' x 10') kitchen pantry, which was truncated to create a half bath plus stacked laundry. Again, the space was tight but perfectly functional.

Those two projects anticipated another plan: to eventually move the stacked washer and dryer to the basement and build a shower stall in the downstairs bathroom laundry space, gaining a 3/4 bath just as the girls turn into teenagers.