Tuesday, 29 March 2016


Re-purposing old Valentine's chocolate tins with craft paint. The kids loved this project!

Saturday, 26 March 2016

Main floor bath update

Before/After

<><><> MINOR COSMETIC BATHROOM UPDATE <><><>

Hubby is away for a week. Since he works from home, any kind of re-modeling is very disruptive to him. This bathroom is in the worst spot for distraction- right across the hall from his home office. I thought this would be the perfect time to do a quick update.

I was expecting to do just a quick paint job, but this bathroom has some quirks. The kids' bathroom is right above it, resulting in a ceiling that has suffered an occasional flood from overflowing and splashing in the tub. And until I moved to this house, I had no idea there were so many kinds of "almond" colors for the bathroom. None of these almonds match: the sink is just off-white, the toilet is bone and tub surround is tan and the tub has a salmon-orange tone to its "almond."

The previous owner tried to address these problems by picking an almond-patterned linoleum (that is now all scratched and worn out) and painting the walls yellow. They obviously had splash damage from their kids too, and they addressed this with a wall border. There are a couple places where the top of the wall is so damaged that removing the wall border would have taken half the drywall with it.

Our house is a fixer-upper with a to do list about 5 years long. Seriously. We have plans to completely demolish this bathroom down to the wall studs and combine it with the not-functioning master bath next door for a large grand soaker tub, separate shower. It will basically be a complete replacement of the plumbing, electrical, drywall and fixtures. I'm also hoping to squeeze in a 1/4 bath in part of the space in a tiny closet off the mudroom with a sink in toilet combo like this. (Check out this awesome video of someone who made their own.)

That is all pipe-dreams and smoke and a very long time from now. This is our primary main floor bathroom for ourselves and guests and kids when they are on the main floor.  I found myself not wanting to clean this bathroom. It felt old and grungy, so why bother!

Once I got into it, I thought I might be in over my head, but I managed to keep
the entire project cosmetic:

  • Patched water damaged ceiling & primed ceiling & walls with Kilz primer
  • Added a splash guard in corner of tub 
  • Painted over wall border, changing walls from yellow to grey & painted ceiling white.
  • Replaced damaged & poorly cut glass shelves with black wooden shelves & stencilled on mirror.
  • New fluorescent full spectrum light bulbs (although I might switch to LED as these have a slow warm-up time.)
  • New floor tile in a marble pattern that has all the "almond" colors in it, grey and white
  • New shower curtain
  • Removed towel bar from shower wall


Still to do:
  • touch-up trim paint
  • better shelf organization
  • maybe paint vanity cupboard
  • paint fan cover & heater vent
  • may want to do ceiling panels if this turns out to be a longer term solution.
If I do paint the base cabinet of the vanity, what is the best color? Grey like the walls? I actually held up a garbage sack to get an idea of what it would look like but maybe black would be too stark.