more remodeling - master bath pics

OK, here's the shower BEFORE and AFTER
and close ups of one of the sinks BEFORE and AFTER...

























After the fire I discovered some old carpenter ant damage in the wet wall in the master bath. The damage was fairly extensive and required replacement of a number of studs, floor to ceiling.
It would have been one thing if I'd discovered this at the time of the fire, when the whole house was a wreck, but I discovered the damage after the fact. The carpenter I'd hired to do various repairs had seen the damage but decided not to tell me about it, and had simply sheetrocked over it. I made the discovery when I was painting baseboards and I reached a section where the paint wouldn't adhere. I ran a finger along the baseboard to try to determine what the problem was. To my amazement, I managed to poke my finger right through the baseboard, because the back of the baseboard, as well as the studs, had been eaten by the ants. There was brand new sheetrock attached to the intact studs, hiding the damage. When I discovered this, I was furious, but I was also overwhelmed. I immediately tore out the sheetrock and removed the studs, but then I sort of hit a wall (no pun intended), emotionally, and for longer than I care to remember, I had exposed studs in the wet wall in the master bath.

Then, about a year ago, my friend Paul, who happens to be an engineer, came over for dinner one night. "Jude, what's up with that bath?" he asked. A couple of weekends later, he helped me out tremendously by coming over and replacing the studs, after which it was a piece of cake for me to replace the sheetrock. As much as I loathe taping, bedding and sanding, I can do it fairly well, and getting those basics out of the way really kicked this project off. Bathroom remodeling is notoriously expensive, but in addition to keeping costs down by doing a lot of the work myself, I got a lot of bang for the buck by keeping the existing cabinets, which are solid wood and in fairly good shape, and just replacing the countertop, sinks, and faucets. I replaced the 30 year old cracked, cultured marble countertop (nothing cultured about it) with brown marble with undermounted porcelain sinks and Hansgrohe brushed nickel faucets. Before the plumbers mounted the new countertop, I made a frame out of 1 x 4's (a much more difficult task than I'd anticipated). After truing it up (that was the hard part) I mounted the frame with wood screws to the existing cabinet, thereby raising the height of the countertop. To avoid having to resurface the front of the old cabinets, I simply put a trim piece over the joint. The trim piece is visible in the last pic. Voila! Decent bath at long last!