If you own a home built before 1960, there's a good chance you've met the pink bathroom. Maybe it's pink tile halfway up the wall. Maybe it's a pink tub, a pink sink, and a pink toilet, all perfectly coordinated in a shade that was the height of style in 1952. Maybe it's mint green or seafoam blue or that unmistakable butter yellow. Whatever the color, the story is almost always the same: the rest of the house has been slowly updated over the years, and the bathroom is the last room standing.
That's exactly the situation a couple named Kait and Patrick found themselves in with their 1,400-square-foot row house in Philadelphia. They'd already tackled much of the home, but the bathroom — small, pink-tiled, full of mismatched finishes, and still working off a layout drawn up around 1920 — hadn't been touched. It was also the only full bathroom in the house, which is exactly why they kept putting it off. Renovating the single bathroom in a home isn't just a design project. It's a logistics problem.
We see this story constantly across the Chicagoland area. Swap the Philadelphia row house for a Berwyn bungalow, an Oak Park foursquare, a Cicero two-flat, or a mid-century ranch in Arlington Heights, and the details are nearly identical. Here's what that kind of project actually looks like, and what we'd tell you if you brought your own pink bathroom to us at Century City Baths.
Why the Original Bathroom Was the Last Room to Go
There's a reason the bathroom waits. In a home with one full bath, every day of construction is a day your household has to figure out something else. That pressure causes a lot of homeowners to either delay indefinitely or rush into a cosmetic patch job that doesn't solve the underlying problems.
But delay has its own cost. A bathroom from the 1920s or 1950s is usually hiding more than dated tile:
- Original galvanized or cast iron plumbing that's narrowing with corrosion and slowing your water pressure to a trickle
- Knob-and-tube or ungrounded wiring with no GFCI protection anywhere near water
- Zero ventilation, or a fan that vents into the attic instead of outside, quietly feeding moisture into your framing
- Subfloor damage around the toilet and tub from decades of small leaks nobody noticed
- A layout designed for a different era — tiny vanities, no storage, doors that swing into the only usable floor space
The pink tile is the thing you see. It's rarely the thing that matters most.
The Problem with "Mismatched Finishes"
One detail from the Philadelphia project that resonates with almost every homeowner we talk to: mismatched finishes. This is what happens when a bathroom gets patched over decades instead of renovated once. A chrome faucet from 1985. A brushed nickel towel bar from 2004. An oil-rubbed bronze light fixture someone grabbed on sale. A toilet replaced in a hurry when the old one cracked.
Individually, every one of those decisions made sense. Together, they make a small room feel chaotic and unfinished. One of the fastest ways to make a compact bathroom feel intentional is simply committing to a single finish family and carrying it through every element — faucet, shower trim, lighting, hardware, drain, even the hinges.
Working Within a Small Footprint
Row houses and Chicago bungalows share a design challenge: narrow lots mean narrow rooms. The original bathroom in these homes often lands somewhere between 35 and 50 square feet. You're not knocking down walls without serious structural and plumbing consequences, so the win comes from working smarter inside the existing footprint.
Strategies that genuinely move the needle in a small bath:
Go vertical with tile. Running tile to the ceiling, or at minimum well above the standard 4-foot height, draws the eye up and makes a compact room read as taller.
Rethink the vanity. A wall-mounted or floating vanity exposes floor underneath, which visually expands the room. If you need storage more than you need open floor, a full-depth vanity with drawers instead of a cabinet door will hold dramatically more.
Swap the tub-shower combo thoughtfully. If this is your only bathroom and you have young kids or plan to sell someday, keep a tub. If not, a curbless or low-threshold walk-in shower with a glass panel instead of a curtain can transform how large the room feels.
Choose a larger tile format. Fewer grout lines in a small space means less visual noise. Counterintuitively, big tile often makes small rooms feel bigger.
Steal space from the depth, not the width. Recessed medicine cabinets, in-shower niches, and shallow built-ins tucked between studs give you storage without consuming an inch of floor.
Upgrade the lighting plan. A single ceiling fixture is a holdover from the original build. Layered lighting — overhead, vanity-level, and a dimmable accent — changes the entire feel of a room without changing its size.
A Word About Keeping the Pink
We'll say this honestly: not every vintage bathroom should be gutted. There's a real preservation movement around mid-century colored tile, and in a home where the original bath is intact, well-installed, and in genuinely good condition, restoring it can be the more interesting choice. Regrouting, reglazing, replacing just the fixtures and lighting, and leaning into the retro character can produce a bathroom with far more personality than anything from a showroom.
The question to ask isn't "is pink in style." It's: is this tile sound, is the plumbing behind it functional, and do I actually like it? If the answer to all three is yes, a restoration is worth pricing out. If the tile is cracked, the substrate is failing, the layout fights you every morning, and you've never once walked in and thought "I love this room" — then it's time for a full renovation, and you shouldn't feel guilty about it.
Kait and Patrick's answer was a full update. For most of the single-bath homes we work on in the Chicago suburbs, it is too.
Planning a Single-Bathroom Renovation Without Losing Your Mind
If this is the only bathroom in your house, the plan matters as much as the design.
Get a realistic timeline before demo day. A straightforward full bath renovation typically runs three to five weeks from demo to final punch list, depending on tile complexity, plumbing relocation, and material lead times. Anyone promising you a week is either skipping steps or hasn't opened the walls yet.
Order materials before you start. Specialty tile, custom vanities, and certain fixtures can carry lead times of six to twelve weeks. The single biggest cause of a bathroom sitting half-finished is a back-ordered item. We don't start demo until the critical path materials are physically on site.
Set up a temporary plan. A basement utility sink, a powder room, a nearby family member, a gym membership, or a short-term rental for the roughest week. Talk through this with your contractor up front — we can often sequence the work so the toilet goes back in service earlier than everything else.
Decide on layout changes early. Moving a toilet or relocating a drain line means opening the floor and, in a Chicago bungalow or two-flat, often working around joists running an inconvenient direction. It's absolutely doable. It just needs to be decided before demo, not during.
Budget for the unknown. On a home built before 1960, assume you'll find something. Rotted subfloor, a leak that was "fixed" with duct tape in 1974, a vent stack that doesn't meet current code. A 10 to 15 percent contingency isn't pessimism, it's experience.
Chicagoland-Specific Considerations
A few things that come up constantly in our market and rarely in articles written for other parts of the country:
Permits vary dramatically by municipality. The City of Chicago, Naperville, Evanston, Schaumburg, and unincorporated Cook County all have their own requirements and inspection schedules. Work that requires a permit and doesn't have one becomes a problem at resale. We handle this as part of the project, but know that it affects timeline.
Cast iron waste lines are common and not automatically a problem. Plenty of them have decades of life left. But if we open a wall and find one that's scaling badly, replacing a section while it's accessible is far cheaper than doing it after you've finished the tile.
Our winters are hard on exterior-wall plumbing. If your bathroom sits on an exterior wall — very common in bungalows and two-flats — renovation is the ideal moment to add proper insulation and, where appropriate, reroute supply lines inward to prevent freeze risk.
Ventilation matters more here than people think. Between humid summers and sealed-up winters, a properly sized exhaust fan vented to the exterior is one of the highest-value, lowest-cost upgrades in the entire project. It protects everything else you just paid for.
The Result Is Bigger Than the Room
What makes the Philadelphia project satisfying isn't just the before-and-after photos. It's that the last unfinished room in the house finally matched the rest of it. There's a particular relief in that — the project list is done, the house feels whole, and you stop apologizing for one room every time someone visits.
That's the real return on a bathroom renovation. Yes, it adds value at resale. Yes, it fixes plumbing and electrical issues you'd otherwise inherit as emergencies later. But mostly, it's the room you use first thing every morning and last thing every night, and it should be a room you actually like being in.
Ready to Talk About Your Pink Bathroom?
Century City Baths has been renovating bathrooms across the Chicagoland area for homeowners dealing with exactly this — vintage tile, aging plumbing, cramped layouts, and the particular challenge of a one-bathroom house. We handle design, materials, permitting, demo, plumbing, electrical, tile, and finish work, and we do it on a schedule we commit to in writing.
If your bathroom is still wearing the color it was born with, reach out for a consultation. We'll walk the space, tell you honestly whether you're looking at a restoration or a renovation, and give you a real number and a real timeline before you commit to anything.
Your house is probably already updated. Let's finish the last room.
