01 · Before and after
The room was small. The fixtures made it smaller.
The corner shower ate up the left side of the room. The pedestal sink gave us nowhere to put anything, and the chrome shower frame and cool gray floor broke the room into even smaller pieces. None of it was terrible on its own. Together, it felt cramped and temporary.
Before
After
The new layout did not add an inch to the room. Clear glass, pale tile, closed vanity storage, and a warmer mix of wood and brass simply stopped every fixture from fighting for attention.
Before
After
02 · The layout
How we fit a 48″ × 42″ shower into a tiny bathroom
We did not want a tiny shower just because the bathroom is tiny. Before anything was installed, we measured, drew it out, and taped different configurations directly onto the new subfloor. There was not enough room to be casual about an inch.
The frameless glass keeps the enclosure from visually cutting the room in half, and the 30-inch vanity finally gives us closed storage. A normal swing door on the shower would have collided with the toilet, so the glass became its own little design problem. We ended up using a barn-door-style panel that slides instead of swinging into the only open patch of floor.
The other space-saving door
The original bathroom door also swung into the room. We replaced it with an 80-inch solid-core pine door on a concealed barn-door track. The hardware disappears above the opening, so it reads like an old paneled door instead of farmhouse barn-door hardware. A flush pull on the bathroom side lets the door slide fully out of the way.
03 · What we used
Every finish and fixture we used
I included prices where I still have them. A few of the Amazon pieces were open-box finds, so our price may not be available again.
About the links: These are ordinary product links right now. If any becomes an affiliate link, it will be labeled here beside the link. Read the full disclosure.
Prices are what we paid at the time, not promises about what they cost today. The Vasari order left us with roughly half the product for another project.
04 · The walls
The Vasari paint was scary at first
We used Vasari Mineral Primer and Paint in Fossile No. 15, flat. I started by hand-brushing the walls and very quickly wondered what I had gotten myself into. It was slow, patchy, and honestly looked a little terrifying while it was wet.
The trick was rolling it on in a small patch and immediately swiping over it with the brush before moving to the next section. That made the application much faster while keeping the brushed movement in the finish. The wet area is fully tiled, the room has ventilation, and the mineral finish stays outside the shower. I will update this once it has had enough daily use to say something useful about wear.
05 · The floor and labor
The step was hiding a much bigger problem
We are not tilers, and I wanted the waterproofing and tile installation done correctly. We also used a plumber for the rough-in and had the shower glass made for the room. We handled the plumbing trim-out, staining and installing the sliding door, and the rest of the finish work.
The old bathroom was built up, which meant stepping into it from the brick hallway. Once demolition started, we found that the cracked fiberglass shower base had been leaking for years. The floor beneath it was not just damaged. It was completely rotted out.
The floor was lowered roughly two inches into Richmond’s hard red clay so the new tile could sit level with the hallway. I am sharing fixture and finish prices because those are useful if you like something in the room, but I am not publishing one dramatic grand total. The excavation and water-damage repair were specific to this basement. Rolling that into the price of a vanity and calling it the “cost of a small bathroom” would not tell anyone much.