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.

Flexible Furniture

As our family grows older, our needs change. I try to buy very sturdy furniture that I can imagine multiple uses for and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. This white bookcase from Ikea has been moved three times and as you can see, it is no small piece.

On the left, you can see how it was originally used to fill a great multipurpose need in my kitchen/livingroom/diningroom/daycare space.

A couple years later, my home daycare closed and we rearranged the house and moved hubby's office out of the basement. The basement became the kids' primary domain. We turned his former office into a play space.

I was desperate for toy storage.  I took apart the giant shelf and brought it down stairs to our play room and its primary purpose was toy storage.

Now we have moved to a completely new house. Some of my kids are still into small toys, so bins on the bottom work great for all those legos, cars, trains and dollies! My older child is into gaming consoles and so now it the bookshelf sports all the games, cords, gadgets and related gaming paraphernalia.

Faux Fireplace

These crazy double arches are what drew me to the new house initially. But I could never really bear the white of one and the wood of the other with that crazy faux fireplace in between.

I painted the wooden arch white to match the smaller arch. I took some old recycled gray paint added some water and softly painted that orange faux brick. I thought it turned out ok.

But I still wasn't happy with the fake wood. My youngest mentioned he wanted a fishtank for his birthday and I wanted it down low enough he could help take care of the fish without risk of tipping the tank over. The cats are delighted and love to lay in front of the tank and watch the fish!

Touch of Teal

The old house I've been working on for nearly a year is almost done. It is a small bungalow but the livingroom and kitchen are in this open concept style so there is a large continuous space I have been trying to figure out how to tie together to stage for sale. I just needed a pop of teal in the kitchen so I printed the little Mary Poppins quote from my computer and the rest is materials from a scrap book making kit.

To update the kitchen, we did many very simple little things. We added a sticker tile metal back splash from Home Depot. One cupboard door was in really bad shape, so I just took it off and hung wine glass holders in the top shelf.  There was a funny looking gap between the corner cupboard and the window, so I put in two corner shelves in to round out the space.

The range hood exhaust pipe was quite ugly above the cupboards. So I got some tin from Home Depot, bent it to shape, spray-painted it with white appliance enamel paint to match the appliances and it is just sitting up there looking like its attached to the range hood through the cupboard.  A little hard to see in the picture because I placed some silver metal tins up there for decoration.

Then I painted the kitchen cupboards grey and the pots are hanging from a bathroom shelf I found at Ikea. Very simple little changes, but it all came together well for a clean aesthetic and functional look.

Place of Peace

I always try to find a little place of peace in my life. With 3 kids, I struggled with finding a spot of my own- NO PLACE is sacred to little kids! This spot is an area where I demolished a rotten old shed. I made a chalkboard using chalk board paint from Home Depot.

By the way, that beehive under Buddha only seems to work on hornets/wasps. A regular hive of bumblebees took up immediate residence in the pavers.