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Before & After: This budget bathroom makeover nails vintage style with salvaged tiles and a DIY sink skirt

The before reveals just how clever this transformation really is

By Rachel EdwardsPublished: 26 April 2026

Jessie Cutts

For someone in the midst of restoring a wonky, 200-year-old house that 'sags in the middle,' artist Jessie Cutts of Cutts & Sons (cuttsandsons.com) is refreshingly accepting of its challenges. 'With an old house, you have to be ok with adapting your ideas to accommodate its quirks,' she says. 'We've been renovating for 7 years now, so it's just life.'

Jessie documents the Ramsgate renovation on her Instagram page @townley_terrace, which has become a palate cleanser amongst a sea of lightning-quick makeovers. She has shown her bathroom in its many stages – with the original yellowed wallpaper and leftover bathtub, later tidied up with makeshift curtains and a rug covering its chilly floors. 'We lived with the original bathroom for 4 or 5 years, making a few quick fixes to sustain us in the interim. That gave us a lot of time to consider what we wanted long term.'

In her professional life, Jessie makes patchwork textiles from upcycled clothes and dressmaking offcuts, a practice that has honed her gift for giving old things new life.

In her bathroom, it is everywhere you look – the frothy sink skirt that started life as an old quilt, the tiles unearthed at an antiques market, and even the feature red bathtub, once little more than simple white acrylic.

Jessie Cutts

The before

'When we moved in, the bathroom had half-removed yellow wallpaper, an old acrylic bath and planks of wood holding up a slightly precarious sink.'

Jessie Cutts

The bathroom before

The after

'I absolutely love the space – it's functional but has so many elements that I find so pleasing to look at every day.'

The inspiration

'I had seen an image of a red bath that I fell in love with. I wanted to try something similar and make it the focal point of the whole room.'

Jessie Cutts

The plan

Jessie’s aim was to safeguard the character and quirks of the original bathroom but make it more functional for her young family.

'My partner and I did a load of drawings and moving things around, using boards and boxes to prototype the space to see how it would feel,' she says. They decided to sacrifice the original loo to make space for a walk-in shower but kept the existing bath and floorboards – 'it's a cold room, so we ruled out a tiled floor.'

Some of Jessie's earlier quick fixes made their way into her permanent plans, too. 'We had installed a pretty rough and ready sink curtain before any proper renovations began, but I just loved the softness that it brought to the bathroom, so I started hunting for an antique quilt to use as a curtain. It ended up becoming the starting point for all colours.'

Jessie Cutts

The process

The bathroom needed extensive plumbing and electrical work before Jessie could make any changes. 'It was actually not too painful as builds go,' she recalls, 'we left the important work like the plumbing and tiling to the professionals but chipped in elsewhere.'

To avoid re-plastering, Jessie installed an MDF beadboard up to picture rail height and had the rest of the walls painted in Portland by Edward Bulmer. She scrubbed the wooden floors clean instead of having them sanded.

One of the cheapest but most impactful transformations was Jessie's DIY bathtub. She covered the original acrylic bath in a couple of coats of Zinsser primer, followed by Farrow & Ball’s Bamboozle. 'I didn’t think that painting the bath would actually make that much of a difference. How wrong I was.'

'We try and source as much as possible second-hand and did really well with this space,' she adds. 'The little antique shelf was picked up during a holiday in France.'

Jessie Cutts

Biggest splurge

'The sink was the biggest splurge, although it was still cheaper than buying new. I spent about six months searching for something online and found the perfect double sink that came out of an old factory.'

Best bargain

'The best bargain was the second-hand brass bath taps from eBay. They were the perfect finishing touch for the upcycled tub.'

Jessie Cutts

Biggest challenge

'We had worked on the layout so carefully, but later found that the pipework prohibited a lot of it, and we had to reconfigure our original plans on the spot. My advice to other renovators is to check the plumbing situation thoroughly before you start!'