Introduction: Complete Bathroom Overhaul

About: I love designing things and then building them. For me just making a design on a CAD software is half the fun. I love motorcycles, cars, trucks, tractors, anything that moves and that I can work on, modify, …

This one's been a long time in the making. This is the bathroom in my church. A little background, my parents are the pastors here, and we started this bathroom remodel over 15 years ago. The building was built in the mid 30's. We got started, knocked out the stalls, took out the old in the ground urinals, and then got stuck on how to redo the plumbing and just didn't really have much help to get it done. Fast forward 15 years, and I got the chance to work with some really good people and learned a lot, then moved back home to Utah and decided to go ahead and tackle this bathroom.

Step 1: The Most Difficult Part

The hardest part of this entire project had to be changing the plumbing from the old urinals, All of this tile and concrete has been in the building since the mid 30's, so its all gotten very hard, as you'll see in later pictures I actually chose to frame out stub walls to hide all the plumbing and electrical because the walls are concrete.

The old plumbing for the in ground urinals was completely plugged up, I brought out roto-rooter and they couldn't snake it, and when they tried to run a camera through it it just would pop up out of the other drain. So rather than continue to pay by the hour we just decided to go ahead and bust out the concrete and replace the old fittings with some new ones, and install a new floor drain since the old urinals acted like floor drains.

Step 2: More Old Plumbing

When you deal with old buildings you're going to run into some weird stupid setups. In this building at some point the building froze, and it caused the hot water lines to crack. Since all the walls in the building are 20" thick concrete slabs rather than running external lines since there's only 4 locations that need water in the building we just ran with either small 3 gallon tanks, or instant point of use hot water heaters.

The faucet we used in the bathroom is a wall mount rather than sink mount. It looks really cool, but was an absolute pain to install. If you do decide to install it be careful how you run your lines and be sure to put the metal plates on your studs where the water lines run through so you don't accidentally hit your lines with a screw or nail. I was honestly pretty nervous about putting the pallet wood up even though I both knew exactly where the lines where and knew I had put the nail blocks up.

Step 3: Electrical and Sheet Rock

Step 4: Concrete Leveling and Tile

Since the floorings been in for so long, there was just no easy way to tear out the old tile. I decided to go ahead and rather than just tiling over the old stuff and leaving a big tripping hazard from the tile, I used some self leveling concrete and made a transition from the bathroom to the walkway.

Step 5: Drop Ceiling

Step 6: The Sink Hole

This was a really frustrating one, I pulled the sink out, which was not cheap, and was putting it in a stainless steel counter top. cut the template out and then cut out the hole for the sink. Didn't fit! Turns out they printed the template to the wrong scale. Make sure you double check your template, don't waste a bunch of money.