How We Broke Our Bathroom Budget

First and foremost, before any purchasing, you should ALWAYS have a budget- duh! Though that was the first thing we did, we still ran into way too many unexpected costs along the way.

As someone who has never been “budget” savvy, I can’t tell you how to cut costs or anything. But as someone who has a bit more “trigger happy” when it comes to “add to cart” I can tell you each mistake and unfortunate event there is.

For bathroom, we knew we wanted some sort of paneling. We considered everything and it’s pricing.

1. Board and batten. A really pretty method but a little too “farm house” for our taste.
2. Shiplap. Can be super pretty but wood prices are absolutely insane right now as well as we had so many friends who were currently doing a shiplap project right now!
3. Bead-board. This turned out to be the favorite between us! Not only was it cost friendly but very traditional and gave the opportunity to have a gorgeous vintage looking moulding to the finish!

Since we have a small master bathroom, we didn’t need a big budget for the walls. For the bathroom’s light fixture, sink, shower hardware and then some, those were sponsored by our favorite company Signature Hardware. Already a huge fan of their products, I wanted to shoot my shot and see if there was any chance they’d like to partner. When I heard back, I literally screamed with excitement as it was our first home brand ever to work with us.

TLDR: To wrap up the details, we thought we would spend roughly $550 since the large bulk of the project was sponsored. What broke the budget was lack of tools, professional experience, misc materials, and our indecisiveness towards picking the perfect paint color. This resulted in at least $2011 at the end of the day.

What we had budgeted for:

This came to a whopping total of $410 so we crazily enough budgeted for maybe $550! SIIIIKE.

What we did not budget for:

Paint $110+ Because we had 5 color paint samples. Landed on a color that ultimately did not look good so we purchased another gallon of paint!

Power sander and sanding discs $115. After 20 minutes of trying to hand sand, I cursed the idea and bought my first power tool.

Pressure tank and nail gun $200. Gabe refused to just rent one and wanted to buy one himself.

Professionally rewiring the light fixture $750+. When Gabe originally wired it, we found out the originally light had bulbs facing up rather than the one we purchased which was facing down. When we called and hired an electrician, they had to do much more as the previous owners DIY’ed themselves and installed dangerous wiring!

At one point, we spent $200 on a plumber just to find out we couldn’t install the shower kit system we purchased without destroying our bathroom and adding an extra $2000 to the project so we cut our losses and bought a gold Delta Trim kit ($130) so we could still keep the gold theme in the bathroom.

Mounting materials $100. Gabe was hesitant to install a wall mounted sink. To add a little enforcement to the sink studs, wall, you name it- we added a metal bar behind the drywall for the sink to use as support.

Drywall, joint compound, wall texture spray, and materials $150. Taking out our original tile over the sink DESTROYED our wall which we were able to fix ourselves!

So how much did we actually spend? A rough estimate of $2011. (And we received maybe $2500+ in sponsored products)

If you plan on remodeling, please consider using your budget towards tools you don’t have and to look closely at what type of piping or electrical that is already installed in our home. Those were our most expensive fixes.

But last, the most sneakiest of them all, was the random materials we had to keeping running back and forth to home depot! Not only did this slowly add up, it burned a ton of gas and ate up hours of our time!

At the end of the day, do I regret it? Absolutely not! We learned so much and now we have such a beautiful bathroom to use everyday!

Follow along for when I post all of my links to our bathroom!

-Nicole