Your bathroom is more than twenty years old, and you are looking to renovate it. You ask around, and you’ll find out that contractors are not afraid to ask exuberant prices for this renovation – up to $ 10,000. Now, that is not what you can afford! So, what’s to be done?

Well, you can try to do your bathroom ‘on the cheap’ without it looking that way. The first principle here is to avoid major costs, which has some restrictions but these can be dealt with.

First of all, you should avoid moving anything connected to pipes, because moving fixtures like bath, shower, etc. will cost a lot and you probably need a plumber to do it. So unless you are totally dissatisfied with the placement of the fixtures, stick to renovation them as they are.

There are certainly a lot of things you can do. Nowadays, there are great products around to freshen up your tiles and bath tub. Of course, before you can start you must thoroughly clean your bathroom first. You have to remove each trace of build-up from the walls, which is quite a tedious job. The best product here is the old fashioned bleach, which you use not mingled with water on very dirty spots (best wear gloves, otherwise your hands will carry the smell for days to go). Also cover up taps, pipes and cornices with easy to remove tape, unless you want paint splashed all over them
Paint for tiles (wall and floor) comes in different shades and it doesn’t need the hand of a painter (which you probably are already, because you have done several other renovation jobs). There is also a product that renovates the porcelain of your bath tub and is quite resistant. I’ve done my old tub with it, and it looks like one newly placed!

When you start painting, commence with the ceiling and then come down on the walls and lastly the floor. You’ll need at least two coats of paint. The Tub ‘n Tile product for the bath tub will need to dry for some time, but the result is worth it.

So now you have already changed the color scheme of your bathroom. Now we need to look at the decorations. This includes placing new cabinets, towel rails, soap holders and taps.

If you think that removing a tap is a job for a plumber, you are wrong. You only need a good wrench (the kind that plumbers use, but you can buy them in any tool shop) and a bit of strength – not that much, as both my sister and I can do it. We’ve put in new taps in both our bathroom and kitchen.
What you should take care of, when you replaces a soap holder, for instance, is that you can fit the new fixture on the boring holes from the previous one. If that doesn’t work (and it often doesn’t), then you need to bore new holes. If you still have some old tiles left, you can replace the one with a hole by a new one, but otherwise, I can advise you to cover up the hole with some cement and then paint over it. If you can mix a color close to the color of the tiles, you won’t see it was repared.