The guest bathroom was in extra rough shape when my husband, Austin, and I moved into our fixer-upper last year. There was a hole in the ceiling above the sink, buckets under the pipes, a section of the plaster that was covered with wooden boards and the wall behind the tub was basically high-quality cardboard. […]

The guest bathroom was in extra rough shape when my husband, Austin, and I moved into our fixer-upper last year. There was a hole in the ceiling above the sink, buckets under the pipes, a section of the plaster that was covered with wooden boards and the wall behind the tub was basically high-quality cardboard. It needed help and potentially had some scary stuff hiding out in the walls, floors and ceiling.
We didn’t want to completely do the remodel ourselves — switching out century-old plumbing and electrical wasn’t something we felt brave enough to do — but we did want to do it as inexpensively as possible. We did the demo for the plumber and electricians to save money and once they were done, Austin drywalled where we had opened up the plaster on the ceiling and walls. But then things sat. We got distracted by other projects in the house and worked on the bathroom in short spurts. When we were finally sick of not having a full bathroom (the bathroom off of our bedroom is another scary story we’re not even thinking about yet), we got to work last month installing fixtures, tiling the tub surround and making the space functio...