Today I have some updates at the rental cottage to share.

We've taken a break from the kitchen projects and are working in the bathroom and laundry room. I'm sharing what we've done so far in the bathroom in this post.

I would call most of these updates renter-friendly... if you've got a pretty lenient landlord 😉

Since I'm the landlord and my daughter is the tenant, we have been working together to update the little cottage she rents from me to be something she loves AND something that will easily transition to a new renter or can be easily undone if she moves out. 

If you are new, you can read the story of how this came to be and see the empty house tour here: New Rental House Tour.

Inexpensive Bathroom Updates - Part One

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Let me remind you what this bathroom looked like when I bought the house.

It doesn't look too bad it's just pretty boring right?

When I had the new floor put in the kitchen, dining, and laundry rooms, I opted not to have it installed in the bathroom because I knew we wanted to do something different in the bathroom.

We did some basic updates first and took care of things that needed replacement. We painted the walls with white from the Habitat Restore for $17 for a gallon and I installed some new shower fixtures and recaulked the tub and shower.

Here is what the old shower fixtures looked like. I don't know why the previous renter removed the old overflow cover and thought duct tape was an appropriate replacement. I mean, why wouldn't you just call your landlord to fix it? 🤔

And here are the new fixtures I chose. This is Pfister Rancho in Matte Black and the overflow cover is Westbrass. Since I took this picture, my daughter has worked really hard to get that hard water stain out of the bottom of the tub and it looks even better now!

I also had to leave the old white gasket thing... #oldhouseproblems, *sigh* 😒

I replaced the toilet because the tank on the old one cracked while I was trying to figure out why the flusher wasn't working correctly. My boyfriend and I replaced it and found that it wasn't installed correctly (even before my parents owned it).

I replaced the old shower curtain rod with a new curved rod. I swear by a curved shower curtain rod, it makes the shower feel so much larger!

I added some hooks for towels or robes (I don't like bars) since there wasn't any place to hang up towels except over the rod.

Next, we tackled the door situation. There was no door in the bathroom. I was standing in the dining room, looking through the laundry room when I took this picture of my daughter... you can see the problem here right?!

A regular swinging door would not be ideal because it would open right up against the tub which would be awkward and clumsy... most likely why it was removed in the first place.

I want to add some pieces on both sides to widen it a little bit and I need to get a handle. We will also be sprucing it up in a future post.

It's the Bits of Stars design from Love vs. Design. If you haven't seen their wallpapers yet, they are so cool, you can make them any color you want! You can read more about them in the kitchen post that I shared above.

You can see from this drawer that there were a lot of scratches and worn finish.

The color is not the same as the bathroom trim but dang close!

Two coats later and with "new" knobs and hinges spray painted black, we have what feels like a brand-new vanity!

The rug is a Goodwill find (still new with the tags) for $6.99.

Once that was finished, we moved on to the floor. My daughter wanted Saltillo tiles but I wasn't willing to go with actual tiles. It would have been a lot more expensive and labor-intensive, we would have had to rent a tile saw too.


So we hunted for peel-and-stick Saltillo tiles but we had a really hard time finding any. We finally found some she liked on the Shien website and while I really didn't want to order from them considering all the bad stuff I've heard about them, we did it anyway and crossed our fingers. It's their Hexagon Floor Stickers if you are looking for something like this.

As you can see, they come in packages of several different shades of pink. Here we were just laying them out to see how best to install them.

Here's a shot of that shiny new toilet with the wallpaper accent wall and new floor 😁

The peel-and-stick floor tiles were surprisingly nice and easy to install, no tile saw required.

When we received the tiles in the mail, my daughter was a little hesitant about them but once we got them installed, she loved them.

Now we are focusing on extra storage. There isn't any in this bathroom except the vanity which has four small drawers and the medicine cabinet. There also isn't a linen closet anywhere in the house.

Luckily they agreed to sell it to us for $40! It makes perfect use of an otherwise wasted space.

Once we got it in there though, it was such a tight fit that now I can't get it back out without removing the window trim (you can see where we still have to touch up the paint on the window trim that got scuffed up) so this it where it permanently lives now 😂