Master Bathroom: Garden Tub

             

Have you ever started a projected that should have taken a long weekend but it ended up taking you oh I don’t know…2 months?!?

Sheesh.

Well that’s exactly what happened with our master bathroom renovation. It’s still not complete but the major stuff is done.

We started out with a basic builders grade bathroom with ugly brown walls. (There was a giant mirror there above the sinks, but I only remember to grab my camera after I’ve already started to tear things apart.)


Yawn.

Not quite how I picture a “Spa” bathroom.

One of my biggest issues with this room was that the garden tub looks like it was just plopped in there. I wanted it to have a “built in” look.


Since completely tearing out the bathtub and putting in tile was not in the budget (this is a thrifty home after all) I decided to work with it.

We decided on putting up a board and batten around the tub surround area. We used 2 1/2 inch MDF for the horizontal pieces and 1 1/2 inch MDF for the vertical pieces. We smoothed out the lovely orange peel texture and then primed and painted the wall before we put the the MDF up using liquid nails. You can find some great tutorials on how to put up board and batten on the cheap here and here.


The next step was to build a panel for the front of the tub to cover the faux tiles and give it more of a built in look.


This was a little bit tricky. At first we were just going to use a large piece of plywood, glue the MDF to the plywood and then use silicone to attach it to the front of the tub. We quickly realized that this would show a seam at the top of the tub that would show where the two materials were put together.

Enter my handy dandy hubby! He used his router on each of the pieces so that they looked like this:


And then routered the center piece to look like this:


We used silicone to attach the MDF “frame” directly to the front of the tub and then let it sit for 24 hours so that it wouldn’t slide around when we put the plywood panels in.


After we impatiently waited for the silicone to set we slid in the two pieces of plywood that we cut to fit into the frame. (Center piece shown)


And finally we put the top piece on.


















Puzzle complete!


And here is the finished look:


You can see how I made the shutters above the bathtub here.


This entire project including all of the accessories cost me less than $100. Not bad eh?

My dreams of having a Spa bathroom are slowly becoming a reality....

I would like to change the faucet on the bathtub but I'm not sure if it can be removed without tearing things apart. Has anybody ever done this before?

{{{Check out my Rate My Space for a sneak peek of the rest of our bathroom makeover.}}}

Linking up with:

Blackberry Vine

Making the World Cuter