Vintage Victorian Bathroom Renovation

See what this vintage Victorian bathroom renovation looks like now including the restoration of the original claw foot tub!

Let’s take a trip down memory lane. Here is the hallway at the top of the stairs pre-renovations. At the end of the hall you can see the bathroom.

Vintage Victorian Bathroom Renovation

The walls

It appeared that the previous owners had recently redone the bathroom as the tile on the floor and the walls appeared new.

The vanity was also very recently replaced. The medicine cabinet above the vanity was original and would just need light sanding and repainting.

The vanity was not a difficult thing to replace, but for those of you who have done house renovations, you know the great pain that can come with tile removal.

Here is the tile up close. Not my color selection or preference at all, but it was brand new, and I couldn’t justify taking it all down for this investment house.

The easier thing would be to change the walls instead of the tile.

Those of you who have been following along know that I like wallpaper in bathrooms, so my goal was to find a wallpaper that we could use to help soften the tile and still bring that Victorian charm to the room.

My mom had to perform several near Jedi-like maneuvers in order to hang the wallpaper in this room. You can see the Pepto-Bismol pink ceilings.

My sister modeling the end product (Don’t let this picture fool you. She is actually gorgeous).

You can see to the right, if you can stop staring at that super creepy face, that the original window was replaced with a casement window.

This was to enable ventilation as this house did not have central air and this room seemed too small to put any window units in.

Vintage Victorian Bathroom Renovation

The ceiling

The other problem I faced in here was the ceiling which you can see in this picture. It was also sloped downward toward the outer wall, and there was not much room to work with between the ceiling and the window trim.

As I mentioned there was no ventilation installed in this bathroom although there were two windows.

Putting drywall on this ceiling would mean redoing your seams every year or so due to the moisture.

We did replace the window to the right to allow for some ventilation, and then I did some research and decided to install foam ceiling tiles that were pressed with a design.

Armstrong sells a lot of these ceiling tiles. These were not the tiles I ultimately went with but here you can see the specs and how they can be used.

They are very easy to install.

They cut with a sharp razor blade to fit, and then you use liquid nails to adhere them to the ceiling. You butt them up to each other and then run a line of caulk along all the seams to make it look like grout.

This also seals the seams to protect from moisture.

Vintage Victorian Bathroom Renovation

The vanity

We replaced the vanity with a double vanity and restored the original medicine cabinet.

Vintage Victorian Bathroom Renovation

The tub

And then there was that wonderful, gorgeous clawfoot tub.

First I took a wire brush around the peeling paint along the sides.

I taped off the floor and used a satin nickel spray paint on the pipes as well as the claw feet.

To refinish the tub I used Rustoleum’s Tub and Tile Refinishing Kit.

I love Rustoleum’s products and have used many of their refinishing kits with great success. The Rustoleum Tub and Tile refinishing kit is basically an epoxy acrylic that you paint on following the detailed instructions.

The epoxy settled beautifully, and I was amazed at how smooth the inside ended up. You would not know at a quick glance that it wasn’t new porcelain.