California Cottage Guest Bathroom Reveal

I’m so excited to share detailed pictures of our finished DIY guest bathroom, I like to call this my magical and whimsical little spa!

Before I share more pictures of the finished space, let’s start from the beginning and take a quick look at what this guest bathroom looked like before.

This is a picture of our bathroom that I took the evening we got the keys to our house back in 2017. We ripped out the old linoleum flooring and a bulky cabinet first:

Then, we switched out the toilet, painted the walls and installed new flooring. It definitely helped freshen up the space and it remained like this for about three years:

In 2020, we decided to finally tackle this project and do a full remodel!

Bathroom remodel process

We started by removing the old fiberglass shower surround and vanity. We also removed the toilet to lay flooring where the old vanity used to be:

Next, we installed the new bathtub:

Then, we prepped the area to install the tile!

Once the area was prepped, it was time to install the tile. I have a detailed blog post with more pictures about the tiling process saved here!

After the shower was done, we moved on to the easier parts of the project like installing the scalloped shiplap paneling, building floating shelves, installing the new bathroom vanity and turning the medicine cabinet into open shelves!

Finished bathroom remodel

Here is the finished guest bathroom!

The design inspiration for the remodel started with the light blue flower tile, I just knew I had to use it somewhere in our house!

From there, the mirror (Pottery Barn Teen – sold out), vanity light, towels and the rest of the details kept finding me vs. me looking for them. They would either pop up randomly on my feed as suggestions or I would run into them at different stores.

I really feels like like the design for this bathroom was just meant to be!

I used IKEA’s HEMNES bathroom vanity (discontinued, similar linked here) with their TÖRNVIKEN sink and the HAMNSKÄR faucet.

I also decided to transform our old medicine cabinet and it ended up being one of my first viral reels on Instagram. You can find the step-by-step tutorial for the medicine cabinet makeover here.

One of my favorite features in this bathroom is the scalloped trim combined with the vertical shiplap, you can find the tutorial here.

I decided to use these fun wooden pegs instead of traditional towel holders.

I think they look great with the rest of wood accents in this bathroom!

I’m so excited about how this first bathroom remodel turned out!