Bathroom Remodel - Vinyl to Travertine

When our daughter bought this 1997 house four years ago, there were two layers of flooring in the bathrooms. Houses in this development have quarter-round "trimming" every piece of baseboard. This is commonly called "shoe molding" - possibly intended to protect walls from dings made by shoe soles, but it seems also commonly exploited to permit "quick & dirty" flooring installation. In this house, below the quarter-round, there are large gaps between the edges of the flooring and the walls. Unfortunately, whenever water spills onto a bathroom floor, the water collects in these gaps, and over the years, it has seeped into both the quarter-round and also into the layer of adhesive that attached the flooring to the concrete beneath it. With three young children in the family, there have been lots of water spills in all the bathrooms; the quarter-round has swollen, distorted, and discolored. Our daughter had come to hate her bathrooms. She wanted to love them again - so she asked her dad to make them beautiful.

To replace the original floor, she bought mixed-size travertine which she found on Craigslist for $25 - cutoffs and odd-size extras from another remodeler's project. The challenge was to make this bundle of stone cover her entire bathroom floor. There were enough square feet, but the mix of sizes didn't work as it was (too many large rectantles and squares, not enough small ones). She's a graphic artist, so it was only a small challenge to design a seemingly-random pattern of small, medium and large tiles to use up all the material she had bought, and to cover the entire floor. She cut the larger scraps into medium and small pieces, and used a hammer to chip the cut edges so that the edges would all have the rustic look of the original pieces.

Other components of the project included replacing the 2-bay vanity & cantilevered 3-bay-sized top with a 3-bay vanity (which she found on CL) and top; repairing the walls outside the shower (the builder hadn't sealed the seam between the shower pan and the shower walls - capillary action took the water along the seam into the walls, seriously damaging them); and removing two of the thresholds the builder had installed (her 3-year-old drags things over them, destroying the thresholds; removal required carefully fitting the tile floor to the wood floor leaving only a small gap, which could be filled neatly with silicone).

She worked with her dad on this project; she cut all the tile, and did all the painting; Ed did all the tile marking and setting (with a little help from the 3-year-old, who loved telling Grandpa where the giant puzzle pieces belonged). By the time the vanity was installed, our daughter was doing a happy dance. This was Ed's Christmas present to her (what a nice dad!). We had to return home before the vanity top was permanently installed, so the final piece of baseboard is waiting for her next vacation.

Click any photo below to get a higher-resolution view.

Here are shots showing the vanity, and the water damage to the walls and floor

Work in progress